The annual conference of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) opens in Brighton tomorrow. Delegates will be asked to endorse a ballot for a national strike over jobs, pensions and pay. Mark Serwotka was a surprise victor as PCS general secretary almost a decade ago, and his victory was bitterly contested by the right-wing establishment […]
Posts under ‘Public services’
March for the Alternative – The Movie Sequel
Apr 6th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.Video shot by Consequential Films on the evening of 26 March at the Big Night Out organised by Philosophy Football for the TUC. Starring spoken word electronica pioneers Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, comic Josie Long, Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, TUC Deputy General-Secretary Frances O’Grady and others contribute their views of the protest and […]
Share:
Government U-turn on the NHS? Don’t count on it
Apr 5th, 2011 by Owen Jones.One of Tony Blair’s greatest regrets was a belief that he’d failed to use his first term in office to aggressively push forward what his key supporters labelled “public sector reform”, but should more accurately be described as “marketisation”. As the twilight of his premiership approached, Blair more than compensated with a near-obsessive drive to introduce […]
Share:
YouGov poll says the public support UK Uncut tactics
Apr 4th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.A YouGov poll out today reveals that about three-quarters of the public support the tactics of civil disobedience adopted by UK Uncut. In answer to the question of whether “peaceful civil disobedience (such as people staging sit-ins or occupying shops)… was an acceptable or unacceptable way of protesting,” 73% of people said it was acceptable and […]
Share:
UK Uncut goes global
Apr 4th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.UK Uncut may be targetted for politically-motivated arrests in the UK but it hasn’t stopped the movement going global. US Uncut has also become well-established very quickly, coast-to-coast, picking up a constituency keen to counter the Tea Party brigade. Canada Uncut is also now established in cities across Canada. However, there are now also groups […]
Share:
Support UK Uncut and those arrested at Fortnum & Mason – “non-violent and sensible,” innocent and victimised
Mar 31st, 2011 by Jon Lansman.In a few short months, UK Uncut has reshaped public opinion on tax avoidance. Its peaceful actions, light-hearted and engaging people never previously involved in political activity, have left corporate Britain running scared, forced the Treasury to run training sessions in response and thrown the right-wing anti-tax Tax Payers Alliance onto the defensive. In a […]
Share:
Cuts are not the cure
Mar 31st, 2011 by Jon Lansman.A brilliant animation based on the arguments in False Economy’s “Cuts are the wrong cure” section.
Share:
Labour must get back in touch
Mar 24th, 2011 by Mark Seddon.I have a photograph back home taken in 1978. It is of a demonstration organised by local trade unions in the town of Trowbridge in Wiltshire. I was barely seventeen years old at the time, but there we are marching underneath a banner that reads ‘Wiltshire Against the Cuts’, Tony Benn, the then local Swindon […]
Share:
What the budget should have done for Londoners
Mar 24th, 2011 by Ken Livingstone.It is clear that the economic policies being pursued by the Conservatives under George Osborne and Boris Johnson are not working. Unemployment is rising and millions of Londoners are feeling squeezed by rising costs. London needed a budget that delivers economic growth and invests in the future of London. That means lower taxes for the majority, […]
Share:
The Budget: a vehicle for growth with the engine missing
Mar 24th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.As is usually the case, this was a very political Budget. It will change the economic future of this country hardly at all. The purpose of this Budget was camouflage to distract attention from the Great Axe that is about to fall within the next two weeks and to give the impression that Britain has […]
