Category: Uncategorized

Well done to Sol Fed (Solidarity Federation http://www.solfed.org.uk/ ) who organised the lobby of customers going to the Poundland shop in New Street this afternoon. While it is not yet clear whether this particular store is using Workfare, nationally Poundland are. People under the age of 25 who are on JSA receive only £56.25 per week, yet are then sent on a Workfare scheme to work for their benefits. So that works out as free labour for Poundland, and £1.41 per hour for the young people concerned. So much for the “minimum” wage. And so much for providing young people with a future; this scheme has been shown to actually reduce your chance of getting a “proper” job.

This shameful exploitation of vulnerable young people must be brought to and end. It is to the credit of groups like UK Uncut and Boycott Workfare, that many users of Workfare have pulled out, but there is…

The UK government has forecast that the policy of ‘Austerity’ will last until 2018. Children born at the crash of Lehman Brothers, signalling the Financial Crisis in 2008, will spend the first decade of their lives in Austerity Britain. Today we look at the real cost of this decade on our young people.

Trouble at Home

 

When we talk about the impact of benefit cuts, we often look at things from the adult’s point of view.  But forget that children live in the households suffering the cuts to social security made by UK and European governments, and they will feel the pain too.  There are currently 3.6m children living in poverty in the UK, and a lot more are about to join them.

In the Autumn Statement last year, the government took a step to deliberately make the poorest poorer.  Jobseekers Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance and Income…

(not satire – it’s the Daily Mail)

Here’s a sad reminder of why we need press regulation in this country.

Transgender primary school teacher Lucy Meadows – who was mercilessly bullied by jumped-up Daily Mail bully-boy Richard Littlejohn – has been found dead:

Teacher due to begin new term at school as a woman is found dead

Littlejohn – who makes a habit of attacking normal hard-working people like teachers while relying on the impressive legal resources of his employer Lord Rothermere to protect him from any threat of libel from people without the financial means to challenge him in court – recently attacked Ms Meadows in this now-deleted disgusting Mail article (beware – Daily Mail bile):

He’s not only in the wrong body… he’s in the wrong job

This is a good reminder why we urgently needed press regulation.

To protect normal, hard-working people like Lucy Meadows from being…

UK Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget yesterday informed the nation that by 2018 national debt will have doubled since 2010, whilst the welfare state and living standards have been crushed.  If debt is going up, and services are being cut, where is the money actually going?

 Short History of UK National Debt

 

National Debt was a facility created by the development of bills and bonds on the 17^th century.  It provided a way for governments to finance wars. It is recorded in £’s but it is also important to see it as a percentage of GDP.  This is important because debt is not significant without understanding how it relates to our income.

Funding World War I meant the debt shooting up to £7.4bn (127% of GDP) between 1914 and 1919. The following two decades saw the Wall Street crash in the 20’s, followed by the recession…

At its AGM last night, CATC discussed the decisions made at the anti-cuts conference last Saturday and how to implement them. It agreed to set a date of Saturday 11th May for the first meeting of the new cross-city Federation. All anti-austerity groups, and trade union branches, will be invited to send up to three delegates each. A formal letter of invite will go out shortly.

The conference will be based on a firm no-cuts position. It will also set up a working party to organise a serious local electoral challenge in May of 2014, but delegates turning up do not have to commit themselves to that in advance in order to attend.

Groups around the city are invited to use our “Housing Monster” pamphlet in their area. A local meeting could be planned and advertised on the back page. We could do this for you. We are planning estate leafletting in…

UK Chancellor George Osborne took today waved a red box full of broken promises at the country’s 99%.   Here are some key points of the budget and the litany of failures to date which have made the rich richer by making the poor poorer.

Cleaning up the Mess Left by Labour

 

There was a mess left by Labour; but it wasn’t too many nurses and teachers, decent pensions and pay for public sector workers or a welfare state that took care of those in need.  The mess left by Labour was a deregulated financial market, a bloated banking sector, an unprecedented erosion of our civil liberties, illegal foreign invasions, and costly privatisations of our public services to profit making private providers.

This was the mess that led us to a crisis of the banking sector, and an over indebted public purse which snapped with the Bankers Bailout.  The…