Common cause

Ahead of what’s set to be the largest grassroots protest in a generation, Unite today (June 4) hosted a press conference for the People’s Assembly anti-austerity march to be held on June 20.

 
Hundreds of thousands are expected to attend the demonstration, which will kick off in the heart of the City of London, right on the doorstep of the very people who created the crisis in the first place – the banks and their friends in Westminster.

 
The press conference panel, which included singer and actress Charlotte Church, Rachael Maskell MP for York Central, Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner, and Green Party deputy leader Amelia Womack,was chaired by the People’s Assembly national secretary Sam Fairbairn.

They described the growing public momentum that’s building rapidly against the Tories’ latest attacks on public services, working people and society’s most vulnerable.

 
Largest possible coalition

 
The People’s Assembly, a group founded less than two years ago whose aim was to battle the previous government’s austerity agenda, has since swelled its ranks exponentially and represents a coalition of people up and down the country from all walks of life.

 
Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner explained just how diverse the People’s Assembly is – it has successfully gathered and mobilised all of Britain’s anti-cuts groups, as well as trade unions, political parties, faith groups, community and student activists and more, into a truly bottom-up movement.

 
“The People’s Assembly march will be formed by the largest possible coalition against some of the most vicious and destructive attacks that we’ll see against our communities and our wider economy,” Turner said.

 
Singer and actress Charlotte Church recalled the first People’s Assembly rally she attended last year, in which she was inspired by the broad range of people united in solidarity as one.

 
Church argued that the movement against austerity will continue to grow apace as the public begins to realise just how central the state is to all of our lives.

 
“When people think of the welfare state, many only think about those who are the most vulnerable in society, those who are on benefits,” she said. “But the welfare state is everything – it’s our fire service, it’s our NHS, it’s our education, it’s our transport system, it’s everything we have.

 
“We will all be affected by these cuts,” Church noted. “As soon as people realise the extent of it and how it’s going to impact pretty much all of us, people will be a lot angrier than they are now.”

 
Radical solutions are rational ones

 
The “common cause” that Turner said unites the People Assembly is not only attacking austerity itself, but attacking the ideology that underpins it – an ideology that directly contradicts what even economic experts have said is good for the health of society and a nation’s finances.

 
“Even the IMF has said that not only has austerity failed in the recent past, but will fail if we continue along with this neoliberal economic policy,” he said.

 
Turner, like the IMF and economists around the world, rejected the argument that austerity-crazed Tories have used to justify their agenda – that government debt is inherently undesirable and must be eliminated by slashing public spending.

 
“[Government] debt is not in itself a bad thing, if you’re investing the money that you borrow,” he explained. “It’s the deficit that’s the bad thing. If you’re spending more money each year than you’re getting in, then that’s a problem that you have to address. But how do you address it? You don’t cut the money that you’re spending.

 
“You invest – you take people out of the welfare state who are on benefits and into decent jobs. You build the infrastructure and the social housing we need in order to support the next generation.”

 
Green Party deputy leader Amelia Womack agreed.

 
“The biggest lie that we’re being sold is that these cuts are inevitable,” she said. “Yet here we stand as the People’s Assembly showing that there are big, radical solutions [to ideological austerity]. And right now, radical solutions are in fact rational ones.”

 
‘We will not be debilitated’

 
While the grassroots movement represented by the People’s Assembly continues to proliferate, Rachael Maskell, newly elected Labour MP for York Central, explained how an anti-austerity movement is growing within Westminster itself.
She told of a group of incoming Labour MPs who are standing on a new agenda.

 
“Our agenda is that we have to have an alternative to austerity going forward. We have a very strong voice now within Labour and we’ll make sure that voice is heard. We’ve already been really active in Parliament and have made clear that austerity isn’t working.

 
“We’re challenging the government every step of the way. And already a week in, we’ve held them to account and we will continue to do that.

 
“That’s because we believe there is a real alternative out there – one that wakes up and actually listens to the very real pain that people are experiencing.”

 
Turner argued that if there is one thing that the growing momentum of the People’s Assembly has shown, it’s that upcoming protests are only the beginning of a mass wave of civic mobilisation, with enough strength to take on a government elected without mandate.

 
“This is about building community resistance against some of the most vicious ideological attacks on our communities that we’ve seen for over a hundred years. This is about resisting evictions. This is about positive direct action. This is about civil disobedience.”

 
“The whole history of social progress and the defence of progress is about struggle,” Turner said. “And it is about people uniting. And it is about standing up and not just sitting back and taking it.”

 
Turner went on to say that the Tories’ fresh attack on trade unions as soon as they formed the new government last month is no coincidence.

 
“We shouldn’t be under any illusions why [the Tories] have come back again and again and again to try and debilitate and destabilise collective labour – the largest single voluntary organisation that we’ve got in our country with six and a half million workers.”

 
“They understand more than anyone the collective strength of organised labour. What they want to do is debilitate all of you. But we will not be debilitated.”

 
Interested in the People’s Assembly march? Come make history and join us on June 20. Find out more here.