Lancastrians packed into Lancaster Town Hall to hear RMT leader Bob Crow, Right to Work speaker Chris Banbury and Green Party member Gina Dowding speaking about the spending cuts on Wednesday 23 February at a meeting chaired by Lancaster & Morecambe Against the Cuts’ Audrey Glover.
The list of cuts to the most vulnerable, of efforts by the government to drive down wages by driving down benefits, the strengthening of barriers to social mobility by cuts to education funding at all ages goes on and on, as does the anomaly of allowing tax evasion by the wealthy while cutting jobs in essential services.
Crow showed the meeting the Employers’ Charter produced by the Cameron administration, removing employees’rights. There was no doubt in the mood of the meeting that the way the cuts are being implemented are ideologically based, designed to create division and resentment between sectors of the poor while the rich walk away to the east with everything they can milk dry from the UK.
Bob Crow pointed out that the Con-Dem strategy is to blame everything they did on the debts left by the Labour Government over-spending. He noted that until the banking crisis the UK economy was strong, and undamaged by public spending. The deficit was caused by the bail out. The strategy of using it as a rod to beat the lower income classes, and by putting the nations assets in a fire-sale, rather than by dealing with tax evasion and bank regulation, is the coalition’s own. However he doubted that Labour would have done more than spread out the same pain over a longer period.
Simon Rudd spoke movingly about his family’s desperate need for respite care for his daughter, who is disabled. Respite care that is being cut. As I also am a person who cannot ever spend a single night or day away from home without help from elderly respite care services I am losing, he has my complete support.
Helen Gallagher spoke about the effects of cuts on women, who face massive job losses, cuts to benefits, cuts to pensions, and increases in taxation. Indeed it begins to look as if the government sees no place for women in the paid workforce, the pensioned elderly, in care homes or even among the unemployed on benefits. No place but home, and that somebody else’s. The government’s vision for women is as an unpaid ‘Big Society’ labour force, cleaning up social messes and oozing social glue from the intrinsic generosity of our hearts, whilst nobly starving and being called workshy scroungers.
After the meeting she was greeted by a series of men keen to step up and make it clear that they had no intention of sitting like beggars chewing on crumbs wrenched from the vulnerable, while the bankers whose greed and amorality created the deficit still pocket millions in bonuses.
Every speaker emphasised the need to get as many people as possible to support the National March and Rally in London on Saturday 26 March. While people in other countries face bullets and tanks in their human struggle for democracy and fairness, our leaders tour the countries of despots selling them crowd-control weaponry (no it’s not ‘just’ the big stuff). Our country faces an ideological crisis that will completely change the future potential of our families, our streets, our country and the entire world and it’s time we faced up and dealt with it. One day out. Fortunately, my last respite care voucher is good til March 31.
Many trains and coaches have been organised. For help with transport go to the Lancaster & Morecambe Against the Cuts Facebook page for up to date info.
Visit the March for the Alternative website. http://marchforthealternative.org.uk/