Virtual Lancaster

‘Bring down this unelected coalition government’, was the message repeated again and again at a packed meeting on Thursday evening organised by Lancaster & Morecambe Against the Cuts. www.lmatc.org.uk/.

Union members, public sector workers, community organisations and students demonstrated a level of agreement which began by being surprising and ended by being inspiring as one person after another got up to describe their experiences. Working people losing both their livelihoods and their pensions; the poorest teenagers losing the Education Maintenance Allowances that make it possible for them to stay on in education after 16; essential public services such as midwifery being cut; the resource – grabbing that was being encouraged in the privatisation of education and of the government and its attendant media’s attempts to divide different groups against each other.

One man spoke of the fear in his workplace of reprisals for being involved in union activity when jobs were being cut. But he believed it would be too late for people who were compliant now to get angry later when their jobs were gone and their sacrifices exploited.

The fact that that no-one had voted for this coalition government meant it had no authority or mandate to attack every part of society and dismantle within months an infrastructure that had taken generations of struggle to establish. It had become clear to many that the government acted for a rich multinational elite whose sole interest was to strip every asset from this country on a pretext of debt that they themselves had amassed.

A common thread was anger against companies such as Vodaphone which owes around £6 billion in unpaid taxes, which, to the disgust of the Inland Revenue, the government simply wrote off, preferring to cut services and keep low income families from education instead. And then they made the Vodaphone finance officer Andy Halford a government advisor on Business Tax Rates.

Many people spoke in favour of direct action and mass protest, and were positively received by the 250-strong audience in a way that is unprecedented in any public meeting that anyone present could recollect. There was a strong consensus against passively waiting for the axe to fall.

A number of events are planned and all are invited.
Friday 20 November: Students picket University Council Meeting on campus.

Wednesday 24 November: BBC presenter David Malone gives two talks in Lancaster on how the National Debt came about and exactly how the government let the financiers walk away with all the money and started forcing the people to take on their debt. 1pm at Lancaster Library, 7.30pm at the Gregson Centre.

Saturday 4 December. 12 noon. Mass Protest Rally in Market Square, Lancaster, which, coincidentally, happens to be where Vodaphone have a shop.