Britain

The protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of
the City of London has had one unexpected side effect. It has revealed the
usually hidden fissures  inside the
Church of England.

Socialist Appeal member Adam Booth spoke against Vince
Cable, the Secretary of State for Business in the Coalition government, in the
Cambridge Union on Thursday 27^th October, in a debate that
highlighted the two starkly contrasting choices facing society as a result of
the crisis of capitalism: austerity or socialism.

As the Coalition intensifies its attacks on working people, it
clearly reveals itself as a government completely in the pockets of big
business. In fact it is a government of the stinking rich, for the
stinking rich, by the stinking rich.

The Tory Party conference is the place where leading Conservatives get
to "let their hair down" and head off into flights of fancy about giving
the working class/young people/foreigners (delete as applicable) a good
hammering. This is not just to cuddle up to the Torygraph and the Daily
Mail but to square things with the assembled Tory ranks in case they
are needed for election purposes.

It was billed as a "March and Rally for the Alternative: Jobs,
Growth and Justice". On Sunday, September 18th, over two thousand trade unionists and political activists descended on Birmingham
to march and rally with the aim of trying to bring pressure on the Lib
Dems at their conference in the city to break with the Tory policies of
the Condem government.

It’s official. November 30^th is the agreed date
for a national “day of strike action” by public sector unions and others
against the government’s plans over pensions. It is expected that three million
workers could strike in what has been called the “biggest mobilisation in a
generation.” Unison, Unite and the GMB have given notice that they will ballot
their members, joining other public sector unions in what is intended to be the
start of a rolling campaign of action, which will go through the winter and into
2012.

Barnet Council workers are taking action on Tuesday – however the bosses
are attempting to impose a ‘lock out’ to pressurize  Unison members
into backing out. This is just the latest in a series of attacks
initiated by Tory-led  councils against workers resisting the cuts.
Plymouth has ‘derecognised’ Unison and Soujthampton workers have been
taking action for some weeks now.

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee have issued a report which comes as close as they dare to damning the
Private Finance Initiative (PFI) approach used over the last decade or so to
fund public projects.

The Tories are on the rampage. Their response to the worst riots in
living memory is more state repression. The blame for the riots,
according to David Cameron, lies with the “criminal disease” sweeping
our neighbourhoods.Cameron also attacked the “moral collapse,” the breakdown of “family
values,” poor standards in schools, and a welfare system that rewards
the idle.The Tories’ answer, as always, is tougher rules on benefits claims, the
introduction of National Service, more discipline in schools, ending the
human rights culture, and the introduction of “family tests.”

As Britain prepares for the possibility of new outbreaks of rioting this
weekend, the courts have been hard at work dispensing bosses’ justice
to those unfortunates picked up by the police in the wake of the
disturbances over the last few days.

As expected the state is warming to the task of cracking down hard, as they like to put it, on looters/rioters past, present and future. Cameron and May have been strutting around talking tough about what they are going to do.