Workshops at Left Unity’s National Conference

Felicity Dowling summarises:

On Sunday 30th October, we held a set of workshops on key issues facing working people in Britain.

  • Defending the National Health Service.
  • Organising against the benefits cap, and to defend tenants, organising to defend women’s refuges, and to understand the impact of austerity on women.
  • The campaign for the planet and to stop fracking.
  • How to organise in the communities.
  • How to improve our understanding on how capitalism disables people who have impairments.
  • Our links with the European Left, how to defend free movement, how to stop Brexit being a bonfire of all our rights as workers and how to oppose the rise in xenophobia and racism.
  • Democracy and the British constitution.

Each workshop was 90 minutes long and allowed us to develop a skeleton of proposals for action that will be added to over the year both from experience in the campaigns and from discussion online and on paper. We are committed to working with non-LU activists who are campaigning for the same or similar ideas like stopping kids being evicted from their homes because of the benefit cap.

We had spent Saturday on discussions, and policy votes on how we work with the Corbyn campaign and on key political policies. Sunday was intended to be about preparation for our work in important campaigns. It was open to activists who are not members of Left Unity

We split into workshops. Two workshops were postponed, one on using social media and one on education.

Each workshop will report back on the website within the month and will try to keep participants involved. Guest speaker Joe Halewood described the horrific effect of the current benefit cap in London, and of its impact on the new lower limits introduced this week beginning between now and Christmas. He spoke of how it would damage lives, including children’s lives and actually cost more than the current system by for example having evicted families in bed and breakfast rooms costing multiples of the cost of housing benefit per week. Corbyn has spoken against it but Owen Smith was in support and there has been no concerted campaign from Labour against this. Labour councils are going to have appalling situations on their hands, but nothing like as appalling as the impact on families. Full details in another article.

There was a determination to organise and campaign against this and against the destruction of the NHS, against fracking and on each of the other issues. Our forces are limited, but we can produce good quality leaflets and more of us now know how and why we should work. Our work should be everything from talking to friends, workmates and family or in organising big campaigns, as people have time and opportunity. In the networks coming out from the workshops each campaigner can access support locally and nationally, even internationally.

We need many more people involved but this was a productive day.


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