Osborne declares class war

On the eve of today’s historic strike by public sector workers in defence of hard-won pensions, the unelected coalition ConDem government yesterday delivered a new, more vicious, sustained assault on living standards.

What chancellor George Osborne announced in his autumn statement was a blatant transfer of wealth from working people to the corporations and bankers who are responsible for the accelerating crisis of capitalism. In doing so, he effectively ushered in an unprecedented period of social conflict.

With imagined growth failing to materialise, the global economic crisis deteriorating rapidly, government borrowing soaring by a shock £111bn, and the credit rating agencies looking over his shoulders, breathing heavily, chancellor Osborne slashed his way through public spending.

Before the statement, ratings agency Fitch threatened that Britain's ability to absorb further economic shocks while keeping its top triple-A credit rating was "largely exhausted" unless the government took further steps to cut its deficit.

And so it has.

Public sector job losses will rise to 710,000 from an original estimate of around 400,000. Government spending will fall by 0.9 per cent in real terms for the period 2015-17. That is a bigger cut than in the period from 2011 to 2015. Public sector pay will be held well below the rate of inflation - a pay cut by another name.

The new, much bigger attack is certain to intensify the slow-burning anger over pensions that built over months into today’s strike by as many as two million trades unionists.

According to RMT transport union leader Bob Crow:

"George Osborne has ratcheted up the class war and has made it clear through his attack on pay and employment rights that he wants the workers to keep taking the hit while the rich get richer. After two years of a freeze, pay for millions of key workers will go up by 1 percent in the next two years.

With inflation over 5 percent, and the increase in pension contributions, that means nurses and the others we rely on will be around 25 percent worse off after four years of this ConDem government while top bosses pay goes up by 12 percent a year. That's a scandal."

After the statement, Fitch patted Osborne on the back, but warned further steps will be needed.

Former Conservative minister Michael Portillo also says it won’t be enough. Foreshadowing a much more brutal style of bankers’ government, like those recently installed in Greece and Italy he says:

“Britain will have to reduce welfare and public sector employment dramatically. The state will need to step back from education and health where it simply doesn’t do a good enough job. Such changes may be too draconian for a coalition, yet the public may find them too radical to accept from a single-party government. The only question, however, is whether we will tackle those big issues soon, or merely ensure prolonged stagnation by postponing the inevitable.”

The stark reality is that capitalist society can no longer sustain the public sector no matter how loud the protest. A series of general strikes in Greece have failed to stop repeated attacks on living standards demanded by the ratings agencies and imposed by the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The conflict moved to a new stage with the sweeping away of the elected PASOK government and its replacing by a coalition (including an ultra-right party) led by an advisor to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

With the eurozone careering towards an apocalyptic collapse, the ramifications are being felt throughout the world. Late last night, ratings agency Standard and Poor downgraded the biggest banks in the US, including the Bank of America which is heavily exposed to euro loans.

The response to Osborne and the ConDems from rallies in towns and cities throughout Britain should be to support the worldwide occupy movement and form People’s Assemblies. These can become the power which will lead and shape a new democratically-owned and controlled, sustainable economic, social and political system. As someone once said, there is no alternative.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

No going back to Bedlam

Grace, a 92-year-old lady chained herself to the railings in Llandeilo, a small West Wales town, last Friday in protest at the closure of her lifeline day club – one of five shut down by Carmarthenshire County Council.

“For some of the members, it may be the only time they see or talk to anyone, a place where they can be cared for, for the day,” she said, in her impassioned message to the assembled demonstration. ‘It may also be the only time they get a hot meal, tending not to bother when they are on their own. Isolation can have devastating consequences.’

Councils are closing services across the board, abandoning their users to the already overstretched voluntary sector, and to the private sector. Many more fragile and elderly people can expect the kind of vicious abuse meted out to adults with autism and learning disabilities at a home run by Castlebeck, which has a £90 million turnover and runs more than 50 other care homes.

Arrests have followed the BBC Panorama investigation but that is of little consolation to those who have already suffered at the hands of the company’s staff.

Castlebeck charges the NHS and local authorities up to £3,500 a week to take responsibility – care is too strong a word – for residents. Tory MP Stephen Dorrell, health select committee chair, has the gall to blame public sector staff for failing to supervise the contract properly!

ConDem Chancellor Osborne’s proposed changes to the benefits system imposing an overall cap on payments, and restricting housing benefit, will plunge big families into penury. Poor parents could soon be asked to raise each child on just £3 a day.

The government's changes to the welfare system are already having a "devastating" impact on hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems and have driven some of the most vulnerable to try to take their own lives, according to charities and medical experts.

A letter published in the Guardian signed by leading mental health charities and a senior consultant from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, states.

We've found that the prospect of incapacity benefit reassessment is causing huge amounts of distress and tragically there have already been cases where people have taken their own life following problems with changes to their benefits.

The word bedlam, meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from the name of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Now at the forefront of humane psychiatric treatment, for much of its history it was notorious for cruelty and heartless treatment – the epitome of what the term "madhouse" means. We’re not going back to Victorian days, even if that is what the Coalition intends.

To those assembled in Llandeilo, speeches from Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards and others sounded like an epitaph for the day clubs and other services. But opposition to the cuts in public sector services privatisation and so-called welfare “reform” – read £18 billion reduction in spending – is mounting as the knock-on effects on childcare, housing and local government finance emerge.

Councillors in Wales and the rest of the UK, who falsely claim that their hands are tied by the grants allocated to them, are busy implementing cuts imposed by the ConDem government as it acts to fulfil the needs of a system in crisis, jettisoning everything that stands in the way of profit. As Greece, Ireland, Spain and many other countries head into state bankruptcy, no amount of these or any other destructive “reforms” to social care will be enough to extract the capitalist system from its own programme of intensive treatment.

The costs of fixing the system are beyond endurance. It’s time to move beyond protest, beyond resistance, and bring the whole community together in a network of People’s Assemblies. From Cairo to Madrid and Lambeth in London, these broad-based democratic structures are already beginning the task of constructing a new not-for-profit system that begins and ends with meeting peoples’ needs.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

The break-up of old politics

The long-term break up of traditional party allegiances is confirmed by yesterday’s national and council elections. Last year’s general election stalemate may well prove the rule not the exception.

Neither the Tories nor Labour can command overwhelming support, especially as turn-out remains stuck in the low 60% range at general elections and much lower in other polls.

Labour’s loss of key seats to the right-wing populist Scottish National Party is indicative of the trend. Who would have thought that Lanarkshire, home of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader, would go over to the SNP? Once Labour could put up a donkey (and often did) and it would win in Scotland, enabling it to win at Westminster elections.

No longer. Labour’s bankrupt politics of embracing market capitalism has less and less appeal to working people in Scotland and elsewhere. New leader Ed Miliband’s appeal is so diffuse and undifferentiated from the Tories that he makes little impact. His support for the AV on the basis that it would force parties to broaden their appeal went down like a lead balloon.

The SNP’s demagogic populism even attracted the support of trade union leaders, according to party leader Alex Salmond. With half of Scots entitled to vote staying at home, it was hardly a resounding victory for the parliamentary democratic process or a vote for independence, which Salmond is now promising.

Political fragmentation brought the Lib Dems into a coalition with the Tories – and they took on the role of human shield for David Cameron and his “deficit reduction” plan – aka as massive public spending cuts. As a result, Nick Clegg’s party took a massive hit at the local elections and in Scotland while the Tories escaped relatively scot free.

This can only intensify tensions and contradictions at the top of the government, and even threaten Clegg’s position as leader. It is surely no more than 50-50 whether the coalition is able to stagger on for more than a year or so. Only a lack of organised opposition to its policies from Labour and the Trades Union Congress allows it to remain in office in any case.

The cuts in services and jobs at town hall level have been implemented by Labour, Tory and Lib Dem councils alike. Nothing will change as a result of yesterday’s elections, except that more Labour councils are ready to do the government’s bidding.

As they take control of town halls around the country, they will inherit cuts budgets and carry on with their implementation. Later this year, the new Labour councils will start work on budgets for 2012-13 which will involve further reductions in spending. Anyone who thought a vote for Labour was a vote against the cuts is sorely mistaken.

The elections solve nothing in that respect. Economic conditions continue to deteriorate, as the National Institute of Economic and Social Research pointed out this week. Its briefing said:

The weak recovery will feed through to lower tax revenues. That will mean that even if the spending plans are met over the next four years, public sector net borrowing will fall only to 3.6 per cent of GDP in 2015–16 rather than the 1.5 per cent projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility.



In plain language, it means that the government’s deficit is out of control and that deeper and deeper cuts are on the cards. The market capitalist economy has failed. Replacing it with a sustainable, not-for-profit economy is a political task that of necessity means going beyond the existing system and creating a real democracy.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The time to move beyond resistance is now!

The right-wing leadership of the TUC sees tomorrow’s anti-cuts march as a one-off protest that merely “sends a message” to a government which has launched the most comprehensive attack on living standards, jobs and services since the 1930s. March 26 is, however, where the fight to bring down the Coalition gets under way in earnest.

TUC leaders have sat on their hands since the ConDem government took office and immediately went on the offensive. Local councils were allowed to implement cuts without any serious union-led opposition. General secretary Brendan Barber is desperate to find a compromise with the government where none exists.

He is also anxious to keep tomorrow’s turn-out under control, working closely with the police and hiring professional stewards to get people to march from A to B, listen to demagogic speeches and then go home. But this will not simply not do. The economic and political situation is far too grave for marches by themselves to have any significant impact.

That is why A World to Win supports the plans that activists have announced for, amongst other things, staying behind in Hyde Park for a day, holding a Constituent Assembly on Sunday, occupying Trafalgar Square in an echo of the take-over of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and for protests in Oxford Street against tax-dodging corporations.

Their merit is that they recognise in one way or another that challenging the authority of the government and the corporations they rule on behalf of, is necessary, even if the objectives are as yet unclear or not agreed upon.

If anyone doubts that the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne government is gripped by crisis, the budget revealed all. Their so-called Plan A of cutting the deficit to revive the economy can’t and won’t work. Ministers can’t even get fuel prices down by 1p a litre and the oil corporations have threatened to sack thousands in response to plans for a tax levy. Growth targets, which measure the health of the capitalist economy and nothing else, are looking decidedly terminal.

Inflation means the cuts will have to be larger than forecast to meet the aim of eliminating a budget deficit that arises out of the global crisis of capitalism, which is far from over (even if the TUC denies there is such a thing). Portugal’s Socialist Party-led government has collapsed over austerity measures and now faces paying 8.4% for loans (Ireland is paying 10% plus). Spain, also led by the “Socialists”, is where the next domino is scheduled to fall. As prices rise, interest rates on UK government borrowing (now 3.57%) will rise too, adding to the debt.

So the Coalition is not for turning, not least because the financial markets and the impact of the global recession say so. It is doing what capitalism demands in times of need – drive down living standards, put people out of work and declare that there is no alternative. There is certainly no alternative in Labour, which, as Ed Miliband says openly, favours a “more prosperous capitalism”, presumably achieved by cutting more slowly than the Tories.

We say “No” to the British, French and American attacks on Libya for many reasons. But an important one is the fact that the government wants to divert attention away from what’s going on in Britain. And of course, Miliband is helping out on that one too, wrapping himself and his party in the Union Jack to back the government’s illegal onslaught.

Let’s take our inspiration, instead, from the uprisings and revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, that began in Tunisia, swept through Egypt and found their way to Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and now Syria. We have to build a movement that stretches across every sector of the community to challenge the government, to bring it down and to build a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. After March 26, the movement has to organise itself in People’s Assemblies for this purpose. The planning event on April 9 is crucial in moving beyond resistance to liberation through self-determination.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Revolt heading your way sometime soon

When the wave of revolutions and resistance reaches Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, as it surely will, what happens in Britain depends on how we prepare for the eventuality.

The Coalition government is clearly in some disarray and its longevity is unpredictable. A crisis government from the off, and one without a mandate for most of its policies, it is even incapable of organising the repatriation of its citizens from Libya in a timely fashion.

Prime minister Cameron was too busy boosting arms sales to sheikdoms while foreign secretary Hague was preening himself for his trip to Washington (now cancelled). They are self-evidently political lightweights in an increasingly heavy situation, with Nick Clegg more like a tailor’s dummy than a deputy prime minister.

Now the economic crisis has taken a turn for the worse, with the release of figures today showing that the contraction in the economy in the fourth quarter of 2010 was sharper than at first thought.

It can only get worse as public spending cuts made in a desperate attempt deal with the gargantuan budget deficit take their toll. Councils all over Britain are reducing their workforces and services, led in the cities by Labour-controlled authorities.

Households are on living on a knife edge. Families' disposable income dived by a record £9 a week during January as inflation continued to outstrip wage growth, research by supermarket giant Asda shows.

The average family had £174 a week left to spend after meeting all of their essential outgoings, down from £183 a week in January last year. It was the 13th consecutive month during which people suffered a year-on-year fall in their disposable income, well before the last election.

Rising prices outstripped wage increases and it’s only the start. The research does not take account of last month’s VAT rise, while gas, electricity and petrol prices will continue to rise, driven in part by the revolts in the Middle East. The Bank of England is considering interest rate rises that could prove the final straw for people with mortgages.

With a million young people are out of work, record numbers of people working part-time and, according to the TUC, doing unpaid overtime to keep their jobs – 5.26 million workers are missing out on almost £5,500 a year – the conditions for a social explosion are rapidly maturing.

At that point, the obvious political options are extremely limited (and even dangerous).

Labour is committed to the same market capitalism that led to the present crisis, while its own policies on tuition fees, business involvement in the NHS and academy schools led to a Cameron-Clegg government. Green MP Caroline Lucas today described Coalition policies are the “logical conclusion” of Labour’s. It’s hard to disagree with her.

Add in a parliamentary system which is a sham and a façade behind which corporate power is exercised, you can see there is a problem. It’s not free speech or the right to vote that is the issue, either in Britain (and now not in countries like Egypt either). It’s about who owns and controls the country’s resources and for what purpose.

The global economic crisis is so deep that one-off taxes on the banks and attacks on corporate tax-dodgers, the TUC’s policies for the March 26 anti-government demonstration, come nowhere near a solution.

Capitalism isn’t working and it isn’t sustainable. Trying to fix it or make the banks and corporations change their spots is futile. The preparation we need to make can be not limited to simply challenging existing economic and political power but directed towards actually taking it out of their hands altogether. And that will require leadership, organisation and a revolutionary strategy.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Workers must sacrifice so capitalists can profit

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King has assured us that unemployment will rise and the value of wages will fall as inflation lets rip, leading to the most dramatic assault on living standards since the 1920s.

What’s more, you’ll be pleased to know, it’s absolutely necessary. This is the price we are obliged to pay, says King, to smooth the path to growth and economic recovery.

In actuality, it’s the consequence of failed to attempts to stave off the deepening recession and confirms that they don’t have a clue what to do, apart from the usual capitalist remedy of increasing exploitation and the share of national wealth that goes to the ruling classes.

It’s a similar story across the Atlantic as the rate of repossessions accelerates, driving millions of families from their homes and unemployment touches 10%. President Obama used his annual State of the Union address to warn that the US must mobilise to meet the “mortal threat of foreign competition from China and India”.

He is proposing to reduce government spending to the lowest share of the US economy since the1950s. Despite renewed attempts to rehabilitate the policies of Keynes – who favoured higher spending in a recession – the crash of 2007-8 means that, for capitalism, the era of high levels of government spending is over.

Are these programmes of slashing cuts “ideological”? Yes indeed, they manifest the ideology of those whose job it is to sustain a society devoted to profit at the expense of the majority of people on the planet, and the planet itself.

Throughout the relatively short period in which capitalist production spread across the world, its inner dynamic forced its human agents to find ways to counteract the relentless tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Investing in technology to increase productivity is one. Forcing wages down another. Together they lead to increases in productive capacity and the volume of goods and services. They call it “growth”.

Pretty soon production expands beyond the available marketplace of consumers. And then credit comes into play, stretching things beyond their “natural” limits - for a while. Then comes the crash. Surplus productive capacity is eliminated, and the process starts up, once again.

This time there’s a difference.

The period of growth called “globalisation” consumed the world’s natural resources at an exponential rate. Corporations spread production throughout the world by recklessly burning fossil fuels, unlocking energy and releasing it into the atmosphere and so intensifying weather patterns.

Early snow in Britain helped to reduce national output by an estimated 0.5% in the last three months of 2010. Floods in Pakistan and Queensland, Australia wiped out crops. Nature mocked capital as the floodwaters wrecked the extraction of coal.

But capital’s human agents are blind to these effects. They are tied into the historic logic of profit from which they cannot escape. Sir Richard Lambert, outgoing chief of the Confederation of British Industry accused the Coalition of having no strategy for growth.

But the Cameron-Clegg branch better reflects the needs of capital at this point in history. They are hell-bent on cutting the deficit, reducing capacity, shrinking incomes, eliminating jobs and services – every action aimed at facilitating the contraction without which “recovery” is impossible.

Rather than allow the destruction of the valuable results of a couple of centuries of human endeavour, it falls to the rest of us to bring the destructive system to an end before it threatens to end the conditions for life on the planet.

In the process of building a global network of people’s assemblies we can establish democratic stewardship of the world’s resources, utilising and advancing the science and technology for sustainable production, and setting ourselves the task of converting it to satisfy the needs of the majority.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Let the sleeping giant speak in 2011

The leaders of the Trades Union Congress are not noted for dramatic statements or exaggerated, let alone rapid, reactions to political change. The TUC’s current general secretary, Brendan Barber, has spent his time in office promoting harmony between social classes and compromise not confrontation.

Therefore alarm bells should ring when Barber warns that 2011 is going to be a “horrible” year, with cuts in benefits and public services, and an increase in unemployment. And that it “could well be the year when the country starts to say no to government”.

Barber is sitting on a ticking time-bomb consisting of more than six million trade unionists, mostly in the public sector, who are about to bear the brunt of the Coalition government’s massive assault on spending. These workers are waiting for some leadership to resist the cuts – and none is, as yet, forthcoming. When their anger explodes, it will threaten men like Barber as well as the government.

The level of suffering will be enormous. A report by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, predicts that unemployment will reach 2.7 million in the year to come, the highest leel in 17 years. The draconian cuts in public spending will push unemployment up rapidly, as the private sector fails to absorb the 330,000 public sector jobs due to disappear by 2015.

Job losses will coincide with rapidly rising prices of everything from basic foodstuffs to fuel and utility bills. Rail commuters in the south-east of England face fare rises of between 7.8% and 15% from Sunday for a second-rate service.

There is no question that last month’s unprecedented and militant action by school and university students and their families against soaring tuition fees foreshadows what is to come. Those cuts affected a relatively small section of the population – the middle classes and aspiring working class people. The next wave will touch almost everyone.

The most courageous amongst the union leaders, rail and tube workers’ leader Bob Crow has called for strikes: “We can expect to see workers in both public and private sectors out on the picket lines fighting for jobs and against savage attacks on pensions and standards of living. There is no reason for working people to pay the price for a crisis we didn’t create and which is wholly down to the banks, speculators and politicians.” Too right.

Barber and Labour leader Ed Miliband are fond of dismissing the government's deficit reduction plans as purely “ideological” or “politically motivated” and in so doing deliberately exempt the system known as capitalism. The Coalition’s cuts are, as we establish in our booklet Beyond Resistance, a desperate gamble to keep capitalism in Britain going under conditions of financial and economic crisis which threatens the break-up of the European Union itself.

No country, not even the much vaunted BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is exempt from the crisis. After the 2008 crash, China’s economic growth was artificially stimulated by what one globalisation analyst describes as a “violent domestic stimulus” of 4 trillion yuan ($580 billion) . . . about 13 per cent of gross domestic product in 2008 and constituted ‘probably the largest such programme in history, even including wars’.” (Charles Dumas, author of Globalization Fractures).

Those who have been studying the big global picture and the historic changes which are re-shaping our world are not mincing their words. Just listen to Jeffrey Garten, former US undersecretary of commerce under Bill Clinton. He warns of “exceptional turbulence as the waning days of the global economic order we have known plays out chaotically, possibly destructively.”

The fact is that the kind of corporate-driven, credit-fuelled capitalism we have known it for the past three decades has come to a shuddering halt. The prospects for 2011 are a deepening recession and further financial collapse.

We should seek a rebirth of human culture – and a decent life for ordinary people on the planet – arising out of the ashes of global capitalism’s “bonfire of the vanities”.

But it will certainly not be achieved through the TUC’s call for everyone to huddle together on a demonstration at the end of March, by which time tens of thousands of council workers will have lost their jobs as local authorities – many of them Labour controlled – implement the Coalition’s spending cuts.

Nor will plans for protest strike action aimed at forcing the government to change course and stop the cuts be adequate to the task. That is a key lesson from the general strikes in Greece, Spain and Portugal during 2010 where “socialist” governments have smashed public services and pensions.

There is a sleeping giant at the base of our society who has yet to speak. That is the vast majority of people who have everything to gain by throwing off not only the bankers, speculators and politicians who serve them, but the system of private ownership for profit over which they preside.

Let’s make 2011 the year to begin the struggle for power against the ruling political, financial and economic elites, building a network People’s Assemblies to complete this absolutely necessary transformation.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Time to remove cuts councillors

Absolutely savage cuts in council spending announced by the Coalition yesterday will lead to tens of thousands of jobs losses and the devastation of essential local services. The question is: How can this be stopped?

The reduction in government grant will hit poorer inner-city areas hardest. Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Manchester, Rochdale, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Doncaster and South Tyneside face grant cuts of nearly 9% from next April.

With council tax frozen by Whitehall order, the only way these councils can balance their books is to sack workers and shut down services. And it will get worse, with similar sized cuts scheduled for the following three years.

A number of things are already clear. Many if not most city councils are Labour controlled – and they are without question going to make the cuts. This is already happening in places like Manchester, Doncaster, Lewisham and Lambeth.

The official leaders of council trade unions like the GMB, Unite and Unison, agree with Labour councillors. In fact, Unite is calling Labour councillors to meetings to tell them what they wanted to hear and were already planning – that they should not defy the government. Labour leader Ed Miliband is backing this message.

Unison yesterday came out with the obvious statement that “the scale of the cuts means that communities will be feeling the pain for years to come.” Its main campaign is get a million signatures for public services, as if that will make the slightest difference as far the Lib-Con government is concerned.

Unison is supporting the TUC’s call for a demonstration for public services on March 26 next year – by which time the cuts will have been made.

Britain’s record budget deficit – with interest payments on loans alone heading towards the £100 billion a year mark – is what lies behind the cuts. In turn, the deficit results from the global recession that followed the 2008 financial meltdown.

From a capitalist point of view, the Coalition has no choice but to slash and burn. And inevitably, the burden of the capitalist crisis falls on local communities, which will resemble wastelands if these cuts are allowed to stand.

As the students have discovered, the Coalition has no intention of yielding to protest. Nor will Labour councillors, who overwhelmingly are New Labour types without principle or backbone who would like to be allowed to get away with say "we are only carrying out government orders".

A broad strategy is required that goes beyond resistance.

Councillors that refuse to stand up for their communities have no right to continue to represent local voters. A campaign should begin immediately, organised by council trade unionists, to force them to step aside.

They could organise their own ballots on the cuts as a way of mobilising local communities against those planning to vote for job losses and shutting down services.

Trade unionists and communities have to be prepared to take over the town halls themselves and block all attempts to pass cuts budgets.

Local government democracy was wiped out a long time ago. Councils exist to carry out government orders and communities have to create their own local democratic process.

Council chambers should become a base for creating genuine People’s Assemblies in local areas. A network of People’s Assemblies emerging out of the fight against council cuts would be in a position to defy central government and challenge the authority of Whitehall.

Assemblies could begin to work on economic and financial alternatives to a capitalist system that has patently broken down.

A groundswell of resistance is building throughout Britain. Hundreds of council workers marched through Doncaster yesterday against the Labour council’s plans to slash £80 million off spending. They were joined by students from Sheffield University and applauded calls to strike and occupy council offices to fight the cuts. They are heading in the right direction.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor