TUC calls for mass demonstration – Saturday 18 October
The TUC has called a mass demonstration on Saturday 18 October in London.
A successor to the great marches on 26 March 2011 and 20 October 2012, it will see tens of thousands of trade unionists, anti-cuts campaigners, student activists and many more take to the streets under the slogan “Britain Needs A Pay Rise” and hold a rally in Hyde Park.
The TUC points out that despite the government crowing about economic recovery, workers’ wages have fallen every year since 2010 in real terms, leaving us racking up credit card debts just to keep our heads above water. The protest will be a day for us to send a message that enough is enough.
Left Unity branches will be there too. It will be a huge opportunity to get the message out far and wide about our new party – with banners, broadsheets, postcards and other materials putting the case for an alternative to the Labour Party.
After all, we’re not going to get anywhere until we shatter the politicians’ consensus that austerity is the only way. Britain needs a pay rise – and it needs a new party of the left!
7 comments
7 responses to “TUC calls for mass demonstration – Saturday 18 October”
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We all need to get making big beautifully designed, attractive branch banners – not all the same, but all benefitting from some input from people good at artwork, with ideas for this called for on these pages.
The Grand Old Duke of York? This must not be that repeat – again and again and again…
Pity about the pay rise slogan, which sounds as if it is straight out of the Thatcherite ‘greed is OK’ mould – even though that is not the intention at all. Perhaps we can come up with something more in tune with the social justice theme before the time comes to make the banners and print the placards.
Stuart Hall seems to have been spot on about Thatcherism defining the ‘politically possible’ for a long time after she was gone. We still need a new vision for the left as well as a new party.
18th October? What a sell out…. Here we are in the throes of the most vicious attacks upon the weakest in society and all that the TUC can come up with is a “mass demonstration” eight months hence. It seems to me, despite all of the hardship for the masses and the massive increases in wealth for the already obscenely wealthy, that the TUC is hell bent upon making demonstration impotent by institutionalising the whole concept. An annual parade of the big beautifully designed banners held aloft as the bearers troop through the streets of London and other cities to the beat of the various drum corps that appear to me to beat surrender. At Hyde Park this year, are we going to assuaged by the Milliband-ettes into not doing anything “radical” until next October, are we going to sit and eat our packed lunches and quaff our thermos coffee/tea or even that purchased from our class enemies such as Starbucks and Costa whilst listening (with one or two notable exceptions who seem to be forced to the bottom of the list and thus be not heard) to the drone of the “don’t panic, leave it to us, we won’t restore everything (or even anything) you’ve already lost but we will be gentler with you.”
Of course I’m not saying don’t go to this annual carnival, because as Rosa Luxemburg commented, “those who do not move, do not notice their chains”. Certainly though, once a year, it is dangerously close to becoming institutionalised and making impotence appear as a surge for power.
Why is it that the TUC thinks that it can get away with this piecemeal offering every year – well this is the third such event? They keep taking our money every month, – even that has been automated thus taking branches even further away from members. I am a member of Unite, my branch meeting place is eleven miles away from where I live and, as a consequence I can only occasionally get there on a Wednesday evening at 6 o’clock, for a variety of reasons not least being work commitments and so I am effectively out of contact with my branch, indeed my Union. Much different to the days of yore when I was a TGWU steward/collector, meaning that I had to see all of my members at least once a month outside of branch meetings. The Unions are in my view retreating from their membership.
So I say, support the demonstration in October but let’s not see it as a ‘be all and end all’. There is much to do between now and then. Perhaps we could lobby our respective Unions for more contact outside of branch meetings and I mean face to face contact. Perhaps we can lobby TU members to force the TU leadership to remove their heads from the sand and actively support the anti austerity /privatisation campaigns that are going on all around the country at the present moment.
Stuart Hall was correct about Thatcherism defining the “politically possible” but only because we, through our lack of instruction to our leadership, allow it to be so.
Ally MacGregor
Leamington Spa
Ally, Absolutely spot on. We have to get away from these dreary parades, especially those that require eight months to
“organise”. Can those of us who want effective opposition do all we can to make the demands more pertinent and relevant for the unorganised mass of people. The temporary worker, zero hours slaves, no hope youth and those with no prospect of an independent life.
Determine the aims and make them known.
Comrades
The politics of the TUC and the Labour Party are the politics of austerity and the belief that the working class must be forced to pay for the crisis of capitalism. This demonstration will be run as a rally for the Labour Party despite the fact that Miliband and Balls have pledged to continue the effort to crush workers’ living standards and reduce the unemployed and disabled to destitution. We have to participate on the basis that workers should refuse to pay for the crisis of capital and no one should vote for “reformists” who only promise further misery. On this basis also we have to oppose the actions of the Trade Union bureaucracy in doing a vital job for capital by their effort to prevent struggle, destroy union democracy etc. This includes large sectioons of what was the left which is now being heavily incorporated into union structures.
These protest marches will achieve nothing. The capitalist system must be overthrown, we cant allow a few to continue to dominate the many. T he poll tax riots proved our rulers are terrified of mass violence, there is no other way, i wish there was.