Okay, so my daughter’s wedding is all done and dusted and went off without a hitch on Saturday – even the weather stayed nice! All of which means I can hopefully now clear some space in my head for thinking about other things like writing and campaigning and marching and protesting…..
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Which reminds me. There are only five days to go until the March for a Future that Works, or #Oct20 as it’s otherwise known. Look, even the giant ugly countdown clock thingy in the sidebar has finally managed to get its numbers right.
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I’m not going to repeat everything I said in my Guardian piece last year about the importance of marching against the Government’s austerity measures – I already know what I’m fighting for on 26 March – everything I said then still stands. What I will say is that when I wrote that piece last year, even I, hard-bitten leftie cynic that I am, hadn’t anticipated the extremes to which this Government would go, or the depths to which it would sink, in its ideological campaign to destroy everything all decent minded people hold dear, purely so they can further concentrate the nation’s remaining wealth in the hands of the few.
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The attacks on trade union rights, the attacks on workers’ rights, the dismantling of the welfare state, the selling off of the NHS and other public services, these are things even Thatcher couldn’t manage. And yet somehow, in the space of only two years, the Coalition has all but achieved not just these but much much more.
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Well it’s time for a fight back. It’s time the ConDems got the message that they do not have a mandate to sell this country’s assets off to the highest bidder; time they learned that we will not sit idly by and allow this smash and grab raid to go unchallenged.
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It’s time to grab the flags and whistles and vuvuzelas again. To sum up: it’s time to get a bit bloody shouty.
Excellent, and I see you scrubbed up for the wedding too, well done
Hope the march went off well, as well as your daughter’s wedding.
The question now, of course, is where next from the march? When Serwotka came and spoke at a local public meeting in Stoke (here) he talked about a programme of rolling strikes. Fair enough, but is the wider labour movement up to that, including his own union?