Surely in the 21st century Parliament needs to be reformed. After all how many of our MPs went to private school and university? It doesn’t sound like our Parliament is full of commoners. A Parlia-ment full of commoners will mean more varied debate and not for self-interest.
Yours faithfully, SH.
Dear Comrades,
We are feminists who have come together from a number of groups to organise an event on Saturday 14 February 2009. We are excited and energised by the current resurgence in feminist activism in the UK, but we think that the kind of feminist movement we build and the kind of politics it has, matter.
We are committed to an anti-capitalist feminism which sees the interconnections between all struggles against oppressions and against capitalism, and we want to build an event that creates an open space to discuss this and develop our ideas. But we don’t want to just talk about our politics – we want to fight to actually change the material conditions of women’s lives, to fight misogyny and our own exploitation, and to involve as many women and men as possible in the campaigns that will be at the centre of this event.
Tremough Campus occupation report (university of exeter)
30 of us are currently in the busy lower stannary building occupying and sitting in against the education cuts. We are refusing by direct action to pay for the crisis of the bankers and greedy politicians who are ruthlessly putting profits before people. Students in the occupation understand that this action must be followed by a wider workers movement against education cuts and the public sector massacre in general. Falmouth is already one of the poorest cities in the European Union, and this university is at the heart of its local economy and culture, brutal cut backs now will throw back all the progress made in the area back into a bleak era of thatcherism.
On November 22nd, thirteen British National Party members were arrested in Liverpool city centre for distributing racist material. The pamphlet in question was a BNP “report”, purporting to be about “hate crimes against white people”. It begins with a nauseating denunciation of racism by BNP chair and Holocaust denier, Nick Griffin, which is followed by a welter of lies and scare stories about foreign workers, asylum seekers and Black and Asian communities in this country. It is designed to produce fear and hatred amongst white voters, and to drive them into the arms of the BNP.
The world’s political elites are looking just a little jaundiced now that the free market god is proving to be a touch fallible. The days of free market triumphalism are long gone as our shell shocked leaders try to prevent the world economy sliding into prolonged depression. With free market solutions now dead, the big question is whether or not massive government action will be enough to avoid an economic meltdown.
My, my…how times have changed. For thirty years the free market could do no wrong, then suddenly all change and it’s state intervention that’s now the one true faith. Even our own steadfast leader, Mr Brown, has undergone a St Paul-like conversion. Now Mr Prudence is to be found strutting his Keynesian stuff all over the world stage, championing the idea of state intervention on a grand scale. How easy our politicians glide from one set of principles to another, hardly pausing to adjust their moral compasses.
The current economic crisis is entirely a product of capitalism itself, spawned by the inherent instability of “boom and bust”, the signature of an insane and immoral system of organising society. But even in the best of the boom times crisis has never been too far removed from the relentless exploitation of resources, both human and natural, in the mad pursuit of profit for the rich and powerful. That this system has brought us to the brink of disastrous climate change is now beyond doubt.
On the 29th November, Lewisham held its full council meeting to agree its first tranche of cuts, involving over 400 job losses, cuts to services and the closure of a children's centre. Not yet agreed were proposals to close five libraries.
According to the Independent, Aaron Porter, NUS president is reported to have said "Despite repeated dismissals by Nick Clegg that these are uninformed protesters, students are intelligent, articulate people who are not being listened to by those in whom they placed their hope for a different politics."
But we say...
What the students... should learn is that if they really want a new politics, they need to look further than voting Lib Dem, a party which, unsurprisingly, has demonstrated that it is, when all is said and done, just more of the same old.
The need to look to a truly new politics: not the capitalist joke of a 'democratic' system we live under now.