Not what we voted for

It started on May 9 in London, less than 48 hours after the election. Hundreds marched in an impromptu protest outside Downing Street, voicing their frustration with a government they did not vote for – and one that hardly anyone did.

In a matter of days, a burgeoning movement, which cut its teeth opposing the Tories’ first raft of austerity cuts in 2010 and is now more confident than ever before, is quickly spreading everywhere – in Bristol, in Sheffield, in Cardiff. Not hundreds, but thousands – and growing.

The mainstream media is downplaying the magnitude of it all, but no one can ignore the fact that, as the Tories are emboldened by rule without coalition, so too have the people become emboldened to fight back.

It will all come to a head next month, when, on June 20, hundreds of thousands up and down the country will join together in what’s set to be the biggest anti-austerity protest in a generation.

Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner spoke with UniteLive about the gravity of the situation ordinary people are facing in the shadow of an austerity-enthralled Tory government.

Even worse

“The coming Tory austerity cuts will no longer only be about those who are in receipt of out-of-work benefits,” he said, arguing that what we thought was bad is set to get even worse.

“This will more and more be an attack on those who are in work. These cuts will be sanctioning those who, through no fault of their own, cannot work hours long enough to earn enough.”

Indeed, the massive scale of the Tories’ proposed cuts could see the slashing of many of the benefits and services we take for granted, from statutory maternity pay to public health provisions such as school nursing.

This, Turner said, is what the mobilising movement of ordinary working people is up against, and why continued and sustained organising at all levels is now more critical than ever.

“One of the things that the Tories want to do is debilitate ordinary people, to make people feel that you can protest as much as you like, you can demonstrate, you can get thousands on the streets but it won’t make a difference,” he explained. “But this simply isn’t true.

“The Tories say they’re an elected government, that they’re going to drive home ‘our’ agenda based on the supposed mandate they have. But this is in spite of receiving only 24 per cent of the electorate’s vote. And only 36 per cent of those who actually voted, voted for the Tories.

“They may have won an election, but they have absolutely no mandate from the British people to carry out the cuts that they’re now planning.”

Turner hailed the People’s Assembly, an organising force that’s linking together the growing anti-austerity movement and making the case against the Tories’ cuts agenda.

“The People’s Assembly  is an alliance that brings together all the different anti-austerity groups across the country,” he said. “And there are now some 90 groups in towns and cities and even villages across the whole of the UK and even in Ireland. They’re all organising various protests, mobilisations, demonstrations – street activity to essentially raise the issue of the damaging effect of ideological austerity on our communities.”

“And that’s where we need to go,” he added. “We need to build community resistance groups that are going to organise local people standing up and fighting back against, say, evictions. We’ve already seen 11,000 evictions in the first three months of this year. And that’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen in the next five years.”

Turner said the argument against austerity will not be won by politicians juggling numbers and statistics.

Humanise

“We’ve got to humanise the impact of these attacks,” he said. “We can’t just talk about the big figures. We’ve got to talk about what this actually means to people – to your neighbour, your kids, your friends, your communities.”

Turner explained Unite’s strategy to help fight austerity, employing a multi-planked approach that includes an industrial, community and political strategy, all of which are linked together.

“Politically,” he said, “we’ll continue to argue the alternative to ideological austerity. We’ll do it within the labour movement and the Labour party, but we’ll do it outside the Labour party as well. Our politics is not defined as only being an affiliate of the Labour party. Our politics is much more than that.”

Turner noted that Unite will be taking a leading role in the People’s Assembly protest on June 20 and explained the impact it could potentially have.

“As the national chair of the People’s Assembly, I’ll be chairing the event,” he said.

“We’re going to have well over 100,000 people out marching on the 20^th, from the heart of British capitalism in the city of London, at the Bank of England. We will take 100,000 plus people on a journey and at the end of it we will have a festival against austerity.

“We’ll have bands playing, we’ll have comedians, we’ll have speakers, all of which will instil confidence in people that we can stand up; we can fight back. That’s exactly the point of these national and local demonstrations – it’s about convincing people that they can do something about the situation they’ve found themselves in.”

Turner highlighted that, although Unite as an organisation will support local and national anti-austerity campaigns, the movement is only as strong as its participants – from union members to community activists to ordinary people, some of whom may have never been politically active until now.

“If you don’t stand up as organised workers, who’s going to do it for you?  Nobody,” Turner argued. “It’s our duty and it’s our responsibility to stand up on June 20 and to stand up on June 21 and 22and 23 – week in and week out – until we deal with this government and get a truly progressive government elected that’s going to look after the interests of ordinary people.

“We encourage all Unite members to not only attend on the 20^th, but to get involved in their local People’s Assemblies, to affiliate their branches, to go along to local meetings and to be part of a movement,” Turner added.

“We don’t stand in isolation as a union, and we don’t stand in isolation as a union movement. We link up with all of those organisations outside of the official union movement to build an alliance against an ideological attack on everything we hold so dear.”

Find out more about the June 20 protest here and the People’s Assembly here.