July 2011

Saturday the 9th of July saw the arrival of the EDL (English Defence
League) to the centre of Cambridge to protest against the proposal to
build a new mosque on Mill Road, a vibrant and multi-cultural part of
the city. The events in Cambridge were part of a national day of action
by the EDL that saw around 150 members of the EDL march through Plymouth
only to find them met by around 300 anti-fascist demonstrators,
alongside a demonstration in Middlesbrough that saw around 200 EDL
protestors met by 400 anti-fascists and a demonstration in Halifax that
numbered around 450 EDL demonstrators and 200 anti-fascists. Various
other EDL divisions were also planning on marching through Liverpool,
Dagenham and Derby however these marches were cancelled due to the high
level of opposition by the local community.

The phone-hacking scandal that has led to the closure of the News of the
World newspaper has brought to the surface the real state of things
within the British         establishment. The rottenness of a regime,
that prides  itself at being a model of “democracy,” is now out in the
open for all to see. What has now been revealed is that a powerful media
empire that for years has played a key role in British politics, making
and unmaking political leaders, has been buying police officers, using
influence with politicians, and all this peppered with out and out
criminal activity.

For all of us working at Lloyds, the announcement that the bosses would
be throwing 15,000 (or 14% of the 104,000 strong work force) people onto
the street came not from our employer but from the press release that
was made to appease the stock markets – they were only too happy to hear
we’d be bearing the brunt of the effort, as ever, to drag Lloyds out of
the mess the bosses got it into in the first place.

The phone-hacking scandal that has rocked the British establishment in the past week is not only bad news for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and its parents NewsCorp and News International,
who have now had to sacrifice their main paper, it is bad news for the
politicians, the police and the capitalist class as a whole.

Over
the recent period, splits and divisions have opened up within sections of the
ruling class, which reflect a deepening unease over the crisis and the effects it
is having on British society. The
outspoken attack in the New Statesmen on the Coalition government by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan
Williams, was an indication in some quarters of the effects of the austerity
programme.