BY MYA POPE-WEIDEMANN

On 20th October, thousands of people from across the country will march together in defence of public services and the welfare state, whose very survival is threatened by austerity.

In response to pressure from workers and campaign groups like Coalition of Resis-tance (CoR), the Trade Union Congress (TUC) has at last taken the lead in calling for a national demonstration against the cuts.

The TUC march is a great opportunity for the movement to create what we need to win: the broadest possible united front. Already community and anti-cuts groups are joining unions in calling for nationwide mobilisation.

This cannot be left to unionists and activists alone. For many of us – students, the unemployed, the sick, the elderly – these cuts threaten rights on which we rely. And all these elements must be represented on the demonstration.

But in reality, we all have cause to resist. Profit and power they will privatise, and the only thing they want to socialise is mountainous debt they cre-ated. Far from saving the economy, austerity is strangling it and fatally weakening the democracy in which we are all stakeholders.

Education is being corporatised, the NHS dismantled and law en-forcement privatised. With 90 per cent of promised cuts still to come, Britain will be unrecognisable in ten years’ time unless these reforms are met with uncompromising popular opposition.

But the government finds itself in a weak position. It may not survive its full term and recent polls suggest the ma-jority of the public are disappointed with its perfor-mance.

A million-strong march could tip the balance. It will strengthen the unions and the move-ment as a whole, shoring up our struggle for a future that works not for the City, but for the people.

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SEIZE THE DAYTUC PROTEST 20 OCTOBER:

BUILD THE MOVEMENT AGAINST CUTSgo to: coalitionofresistance.org.uk

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BY RICHARD ALLDAY

For 4 years we have been fed a diet of austerity by a millionaire Coalition that tells us, straight-faced, that ‘we are all in this together.’ Fuel duty hits the hospital porter and the banker. Indeed the porter’s Astra is probably cheaper on fuel than the banker’s Porsche. So that’s alright then!

First under Labour and accelerated by the Con-artist Coalition, we have had our belts tightened, our benefits cut, our services slashed, libraries shut, banks ailing and hospitals bank-rupt. This benefits only the rich and powerful.

But this is just half the story. The other half is the story of the 99 per cent; of the refusal to swallow auster-ity in Greece; the movement of the In-dignados in Spain, and in Britain, the Occupy activists and UK Uncut.

Alongside have come the first stir-rings of revolt amongst organised la-bour. Electricians are resisting wage cuts. Tanker drivers have struck to defend working conditions. Tube, rail and now bus drivers have demanded a share of the bosses’ windfall Olympic profits. This is the voice of a popula-tion proclaiming enough is enough.

Our power is greatest when we organise collectively, and most con-centrated when we do so in the work-place. But there is a reason that Tahrir Square became the defining symbol of the Arab Revolutions and why the an-ti-austerity movement in Greece was epitomised by the mass demonstra-tions outside the Greek parliament.

Where activism in the workplace has been weakened by attacks on trade unions and our forces are thinly scattered, confidence must be built

by protest movements which call for solidarity with other strands of dis-sent. That was the pre-eminent les-son of the electricians’ fight. Activists must understand they are not alone to realise the possibility of effective resistance.

At last this movement has mobil-ised the TUC to respond to calls for a national march against the Coalition government on 20th October.

Every trade unionist needs to build for this demonstration but it cannot be left to trades unions alone. Exploi-tation by austerity is a class issue and resistance must be class-wide.

This is the great opportunity on offer. We must encourage anti-cuts activists, fair tax campaigners, stu-dents and the unemployed youth to lay claim to 20.10 as their day of rage. Rather than submitting to calls for slower and slyer austerity, such a co-alition of resistance would unite these struggles and stop the cuts.

Every trade unionist on that demo will get a boost from seeing they are not alone; this is not just their fight, in isolation from the rest of society. They have allies in the hundreds of thou-sands. It will boost the confidence of trade unions and the wider campaign against austerity.

If we succeed in making 20th Oc-tober a success, we will owe a debt to

BY PETER STAUBER

The dynamics of the conflict in Syria have changed significantly over the past eighteen months. The Arab revo-lutions reached Syria in March 2011, when large popular demonstrations demanded an end to Bashar al-Assad’s rule. As the regime cracked down on the protest movement with fierce bru-tality, the conflict turned into a civil war, with the military opponents of Assad rallying behind the Free Syrian Army.

But the conflict is not a clear-cut struggle between Assad support-ers and proponents of democratic change. As in other Middle Eastern countries that have experienced pop-ular uprisings against autocratic re-gimes, most notably Libya, the strug-gle has become heavily influenced by Western imperialism. In Syria, this interference takes the form of indi-rect support for the Syrian opposi-tion – the imposition of sanctions, the deployment of “special forces” on the ground, and the supply of weapons by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the West’s al-lies in the region.

The aim of this interference is clear: The West seeks to replace the Assad regime with a government more sympathetic to their interests. Even if direct military intervention has so far been thwarted by disagreements between the main actors in the UN Security Council, it remains a distinct possibility – especially considering that Syria is, at least partly, a proxy for Iran. Since Assad is an important ally of the regime in Tehran, it poses an obstacle to an Israeli-American attack on Iran.

BY FADUMA HASSAN

The Israeli government and the neo-conservatives in the US and the UK are loudly campaigning in favour of an attack on Iran.

The sanctions in place against Iran are already some of the most draco-nian ever imposed. They are causing widespread hardship amomg ordinary Iranians, many of whom are critical of their government.

The current Western hostility to Iran is a result of its increased influ-ence in the Middle East. This is itself a result of the catastrpohic Western failure in Iraq.

Such hostility has to be justified, of course. And the old stereotypical an-tagonism to Islam is being wheeled out once more, just as it was used to sustain the argument in favour of the Afghan and Iraq wars.

This normalisation of Islamophobia in Britain, instigated by both the gov-ernment and mainstream media, is a growing threat to the peace, security and civil liberties of British citizens.

The language used to talk about Muslims are at best negative and at worst vile racism.

For example, the reporting on Iran is shot through with long-standing colonial caricatures on the relative ir-rationality, barbarity and fanaticism of ‘the foreigner’ which have no place in a our society.

And if you demonise Muslims in other countries you end up doing the same to Muslims who live here.

A Channel 4 survey of 974 Brit-ish press articles from 2000 to 2008 found two thirds of them portrayed British Muslims as a ‘threat’ and a ‘problem’. Additionally, according to the Crown Persecution Service, Mus-lims account for more than 54% of re-ligiously aggravated offences.

Cameron’s government has clearly been complicit in heightening anti-immigrant prejudice. His speech on the failure of multiculturalism indi-cated the government’s willingness to divert attention from their own poli-cies and turn the spotlight on minor-ity groups.

Racial scapegoating is also a useful tool to redirect the public gaze away from the systemic causes of the reces-sion.

Far-right groups like the British National Party and English Defence

In order to further its goals, the West has been promoting a sectarian agenda, with its Sunni allies the main beneficiaries of its support. While there are progressive forces within the anti-Assad opposition, the threat of religious sectarianism, once un-leashed, is extremely hard to contain.

The links with imperialist powers have changed the character of the Syr-ian opposition. Support for the revo-lution must now mean combining op-position to Assad with sharp criticism of those who would compromise the revolution for the benefit of the West-ern powers.

No to imperialist intervention in Syria

Image by FreedomHouse

all those who supported the march. And the first repayment of that debt should be to support and build for the students’ demonstration 21st Novem-ber. The TUC and its member unions must turn out in force for this to show Cameron, Clegg and all – they will not divide us.

More: counterfire.org/syria

Islamophobia: child of warLeague are a symptom of this mis-placed aggression that they work so hard to exploit. They present them-selves as crusaders against the so-called ‘Islamification’ of Britain.

They have hijacked economic in-securities, which are blamed on im-migrants and asylum seekers, mis-represented as receiving unjustly preferential treatment.

The demonisation of Muslims is not just a British problem. It has in-fected mainstream European politics with the rise of many anti-Muslim groups such as the Swiss and Danish People’s Parties both outwardly reject-ing multiculturalism.

In projecting Islamophobic ideolo-gies, politicians and journalists mould public opinion. But they do not mo-nopolise it. The impresive recent pro-tests against the EDL have shown that many working people are willing to stand up against Islamophobia and racism. Uncompromising opposi-tion, counter-protest and solidarity amongst British workers of all racial and religious backgrounds can work to re-write our political history.

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This is a movement for all of us...

4

BY JAMES MEADWAY

It is now over five years since the “credit crunch” slammed the brakes on the world economy. This was the week, back in summer 2007, when it became clear that the mountainous piles of debts the world’s banks had built up over the last decade were turning sour. As those high-risk debts turned bad, the banks began to panic. They stopped lending to each other, and the system began to freeze.

The first major casualty in Brit-ain was Northern Rock, a mouse of a bank that pretended it was a tiger, borrowing at ludicrously low rates from the major banks and then offer-ing too-good-to-be-true mortgages to its customers. When the major banks panicked and stopped their lending, Northern Rock went under. Terrified savers rushed to withdraw their de-posits. Gordon Brown’s administra-tion stepped in with an emergency nationalisation. They hoped to con-tain the crisis.

They were wrong. A year later, gi-ant investment bank Lehman Broth-ers collapsed. A new period of history had opened. The decade before had promised “no return to boom and bust” (in Brown’s infamous words), but it was built on sand – growth driven by debt, which masked, for a time, the world economy’s rotten foundations. The flood of cheap credit into the system – encouraged by gov-ernments from Thatcher’s to Brown’s - helped support apparent prosperity.

As the flood-tide of debt has re-ceded, all the real failures of the sys-tem have become exposed. For most workers, their real incomes have been falling sharply over the last year, af-ter a decade of stagnation. The City

of London reeks of corruption. The Libor scandal , in which major banks (seemingly with the Bank of Eng-land’s knowledge) rigged their own interest rates, is just one element in a stinking whole. Now buoyed up by the bailouts, totalling £1,300bn of public support in the UK, the bankers think they are untouchable. Auster-

The City is running out of credit with us

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own. It will not shift without a mass movement. Syriza in Greece and the epic struggle of the miners in Spain have shown the way. Stopping the cuts would break the decline. Government investment in new, green industries can create jobs. And the banks can be placed under public control, lending for the public good, not private profit.

ity – vicious cuts to public spending - impoverishes most of us, but keeps the bankers rich. Cuts wreck the economy and have helped cause the “double-dip” recession, but they mean the banks can carry on sitting pretty on our support.

But a government of millionaires, like the Coalition, looks to help its

Photo by Pete Riches