So, 4000 people marched in Manchester on Saturday against the cuts to education with the TUC, the NUS, EAN, NCAF, Manchester Against Cuts and Fees, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other organisations as well that felt like telling people to go march on the 29th of January. Instead of covering that, or the police brutality that landed at least person in hospital that I know of, dozens more battered, and got 25 people arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong place, the media decided to go with “NUS President attacked by anti-semitic abuse”.
Tracking down this origins of this story leads to a Daily Mail article, in which an anonymous photographer heard the words “Tory Jew scum” being shouted at Aaron. That’s a pretty serious allegation. Unfortunately, people just repeating it over and over again on their Facebook statuses does not make it true.
Here is the footage of Aaron Porter at the time he was alleged to have been abused, as he walked (not particularly fast for a man being “hounded”) down to MMU away from the two hundred people telling him to go away:
Watch the video all the way through, then go back and listen hard at 5:39. The crowd, clearly still shouting the same chant, “Aaron Porter, we know you, you’re a fucking Tory too” as they have been in the previous five minutes, sounds very much like they are indeed shouting “You’re a fucking Tory Jew.”
Now, maybe I am mistaken, and many of my friends who were at that demonstration are actually virulently anti-semitic whenever I’m not around. Yes, that’s probably it. In fact, “you’re a Tory Jew” wasn’t the only slogan that these vicious, secret anti-Semites-dressed-up-as-students-bothered-by-their-crap-leadership come up with. Now listen to the video again:
* At 2:15, that person shouting “”sell-out”? Actually shouting the word “selah”, a term used in the Hebrew Bible to indicate a musical interlude. This is obviously a reference to Aaron’s Jewishness. Bastards.
* 2:50, the crowd stop shouting “scum” and are clearly bellowing “skunk”, a type of gas that the Israeli government have been known to use on Palestinian protestors. It’s just such a natural thing to come to mind on a protest about cuts to education.
* 3:35, a man calls Aaron Porter a “joke”. Really? “Joke”? Or… “Jew”? Oh, the humanity.
* At 4:05, “get out” is just obviously you missing hearing the German phrase “geht auf”, or “go on”. The context of such anti-semitic hatred and choice of tongue are intended to invoke the Holocaust. It just seems so obvious when you think about it and let go of all reason in the name of political point-scoring.
* Calling for Aaron Porter to be burned at 4:20, a cheap, childish offensive taunt? Or a deliberate identification with the Eastern Orthodox ritual of burning the Jewish Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus? Christ, I surprised this crowd didn’t just shout Jesus-killer at Aaron and be done with it.
* But even saying that, these nasty little racists offer hope at 6:05 that Aaron will one day be redeemed: you might think that the crowd are shouting, “Students and workers, unite and fight”, but does it not make more sense they are actually calling on Aaron to join them as they chant, “Judas and workers, unite and fight”?
So maybe, maybe someone actually did shout “Tory Jew scum” at Aaron Porter. And maybe there were some other protesters who shouted “no to racism, no to racism”, as the Telegraph reported. But they must have been doing it really, really quietly. Maybe it happened. Or maybe a miserable little right-wing hack sent to cover those damn trouble-making students heard what he wanted to hear. Make up your own mind.
The vast majority of people who were on the demo whom I have spoken to about this alleged anti-Semitic abuse have had the initial reaction “What?!”, followed by “I didn’t hear anything like that!”, and finally, “Aaron Porter’s Jewish? Who knew that?”. Shouting “Tory Jew scum” at someone because they happen to be a rubbish student leader seems rather inexplicable, especially as unlike his predecessor, Aaron hasn’t really done much for the Zionist cause, which is what usually prompts such attacks.
Was Aaron Porter racially abused on the 29th January? I have no idea. But I think we need a bit more evidence for such a serious allegation than an anonymous photographer claiming he heard a phrase that sounded remarkably similar to a non-racist chant. And I have yet to hear any.
we broke a record for the number of policies passed last week at General Meeting, and some say we should be proud. However, the endless procedural motions to block debate and pass policy without any debate or scrutiny should cause us to consider our first General Meeting in 18 months as a matter for shame as well.
Several procedural motions to go straight to a vote were spoken against by speakers saying “Look, I have an opposition speech here, please hear me out”, so this is not a matter of passing “uncontentious motions”, as has been claimed.
Students don’t come to university to learn facts, they come to be challenged. If General Meetings are simply events where anyone can get their motions through without scrutiny or debate because they aren’t about Palestine, then we may as well get rid of them completely (and we will never reach quorum online if people want to get stuff through sheer apathy). There was a speaker who wanted to speak in favour of cuts – that’s amazing! What did he think? What was his response to our arguments? How would this make me consider how I know what I know? I don’t know, because General Meeting cut him off because it wasn’t “contentious”. And our right to listen, to be challenged, to think through what we believe and why we believe it, was denied.
Several exec members are justifying the way General Meeting was handled by rightly claiming that all procedures were constitutional. But last week was a travesty of democracy, and the fact that it was constitutional doesn’t in any way change the fact that it was wrong.
This blogpost is the last part of a four part series.
Liberal Democrat polling is at its worst for 13 years.
I have now devoted some 4000 words to why I have left the Liberal Democrats and how the coalition government is literally a matter of life and death for some people. The response I have had from my decision has been massive, but a significant part of it has been suggestions of other parties that I might be interested in joining. So I thought I would write a little bit on why I don’t think that is a good idea.
For all that I have said previously, I’m not going to say that there aren’t things I do quite like about the Coalition over their predecessors. The scrapping of the National Identity Register (though not for foreign nationals…). The scrapping of ContactPoint. Supporting the autonomy of home educators. Not spending £800 on a Christmas tree. Telling the EU to get stuffed when it asks for more money. That’s cool.
But do you remember the part where people are going to die…? Is a higher personal tax threshold really worth the increased poverty of millions? Please, coalition supporters, tell me how you can live with yourselves, because I am stumped. Would I give up my £700 a year to keep my friends with mental health issues on community support programmes and out of psychiatric wards, hospitals and graveyards? I’d give it up in seconds.
Many people have suggested that I join the Labour Party. Several of my friends have now done so in the wake of the election and the black-haired Mr. Milband taking the leadership. However, to those who seem to think that the Labour Party will save us all from the clutches of the scissor-wielding George Osborne, I can say only one thing: have you forgotten?
A tank burns after a ambush in Iraq.
Have you forgotten Iraq, death of David Kelly, the millions of Iraqi dead, the protests of a million people ignored? Have you forgotten 90 day detention, 42 day detention, detention without trial, control orders, extraordinary rendition? The National Identity Register, the ContactPoint database, the Forward Intelligence Team, the Independant Safeguarding Authority, NHS spine? Tuition fees, academies, the slow but steady abolition of special schools? The expansion of prisons, prison sentences, and reactive legislation (Labour created one new offence a day, every day, for 13 years)? The privatisation of everything they could possibly justify, including health, transport, education, and the post office? The handover of sovereignty of Europe and refusal to hold a referendum that they promised us? The emphasis on political expediency over evidence-based policy (drug policy, introduction of “alternative therapies” on the NHS)? That whole deregulation of the banking sector thing?
What has happened that no-one found it odd that the post office union had to strike under a Labour government in order to protect their jobs and prevent privatisation?
Have you forgotten just why Labour lost its majority? It’s because they did the Tories’ work for them. How can anyone tell me that Labour are the answer when they were the problem until May this year? Do you seriously believe that a man who has been at the heart of government since 1997 and who has a cabinet made up of people *responsible* for the creation and implementation of these policies are suddenly going to become lovely, fluffy social democrats without a war-mongering, authoritarian, privatising bone in their body? I don’t think so. People tell me to join the Labour Party – I can only reply that they have very, very short memories.
Hi! Vote green for fiscal irresponsibility based on middle-class outrage!
People who want me to join the Green Party, however, are assuming that what I am looking for is an even whiter, even more middle class organisation. But while I care about the environment, I’m not prepared to deal with “the welfare problem” by putting everyone on it, giving everyone in the country £5000 a year and shutting down all private alternatives to public services. Here be authoritarian paternalism… The Green Party’s major priority seems to be, not spreading their message or persuading others of their policies, but getting the voting system reformed so their party can get more people elected. Somehow, I find that rather suspect. And what is up with that banning stem stell research thing?
Brian from the CPGB tries to explain why supporting war credits in Germany in 1914 is *crucial* to current revolutionary struggles...
I’m not joining any of the spectrum of the right wing parties on account of the fact that they are cheerleading on the kinds of policies that made me quit the Liberal Democrats in the first place. Been there, done that, sold out people worse off than myself. The left-wing parties I think are more thoughtful, but useless. I appreciate that socialists and communists are fundamentally concerned with human beings rather than money, but on the other hand I have far better things to do with my time than argue over the shades of theories of documents written in 1926 (you think I’m kidding…). No revolutionary system can be that detailed because no-one’s going to agree to implement it.
As for me, I think I am largely done with party politics now. But right now I’m pretty open-minded on where I go next, so feel free to leave a comment if you adhere to a brand of politics worth looking into. And by that, I mean one that doesn’t shrug at the potential death toll of thousands of people in favour of some vague idea of “fairness” that stops being meaningful the second you have the chance to do something about it.
This blogpost is the third of a four part series, and the fourth part will be published tomorrow.
So, my friends, we established yesterday that the systems are going to be taking something of a hit as a result of coalition government. What about the people who depend on the state? What has the coalition government got in store for them?
By the way, I was going to cover students as well, but a) they aren’t at risk of death, tuition fees just piss me off and b), this article is long already. So it’s just the elderly and disabled being murdered today. But frankly, I think that’s horrendous enough really. See my analysis of the Browne Review on tuition fees if you are especially interested.
Who wants to support disabled people? Why can’t they just get a job?
A floor marker for people with disabilities.
People with severe impairments or disabilities are rarely able to live without government support. 3/4 of disabled people live below the poverty line (which is a meaningless statistic in reality given the way the poverty line is calculated but should give you some idea of how much disabled people are disadvantaged in society currently, let alone in the near future). Changes that affect disabled people specifically are:
“‘Time limiting contributory Employment Support Allowance for those in the Work Related Activity Group to one year. This is aimed to cut £2 billion a year by 2014-15.’
Disabled people will be subject to an arbitrary cut off point of a year. After that, whatever their circumstances, they will not get any ESA income. This will be in the context of sharply increasing unemployment and while entrenched discriminatory barriers to employment remain in place, and indeed will probably grow as a result of the overall impact of the government’s policy.
Nearly a million people may lose ESA worth £91.40 a week as a result.”
Now, maybe you think that £90 is pretty high, but it’s really not if you have personal assistants to pay for and extra travel costs. Worse:
“This change will apply side by side with the government’s reassessment of all Incapacity Benefit/ESA claimants. People ‘assessed as fully capable for work will be moved onto Jobseekers’ Allowance.”
Now, what they actually mean by “assessing” people is that they won’t trust your doctor anymore to assess themselves, but make you turn up on a specific day to see an assessor specially trained to certify as many people as non-disabled as possible. So if you have crippling arthritis which comes and goes, but which makes it impossible to hold down a job for the long-term, and your assessment date falls on a day when you can walk and open doors, the government will not be sympathetic. If you have blinding, searing headaches that make it impossible to concentrate for more than a few hours, they will not know nor care. This isn’t being a doomsday preaching, by the way, it’s what happens now:
“the ESA assessment process itself has been strongly criticised as being overly harsh and very badly designed. Many people are being wrongly denied ESA entirely or placed in the ‘work related activity’ group. This includes people receiving chemotherapy, whom the government claims are protected by guidelines.”Link.
Yes, people receiving chemotherapy are “fit for work”. I have, in fact, had an argument with someone who seriously argued that people with non-terminal cancer receiving chemotherapy are perfectly fit to work independantly. He was, unsurprisingly, a member of the Conservative Party. I’m glad he made an allowance for people with terminal cancer.
Moving on from work, what about disabled people who can’t work at all? What are they up to? Have a story:
“”Page 69 of the spending review explains that because of “the urgent need to tackle the culture of welfare dependency”, people in residential care will lose the mobility component of the disability living allowance in 18 months time.
My mother-in-law, Margaret, is 87 and had polio in 1953. She served as a Wren in the war and brought up her family from a wheelchair. She and my father-in-law worked tirelessly for the British Polio Fellowship. She moved in with us when she was widowed 23 years ago and was grittily determined to remain at home as long as possible. But her disability caught up with her and a year ago she had to move into a nursing home.
The one thing that has made this bearable for us all is that the mobility component of the DLA enables her to lease a wheelchair-adapted vehicle through the Motability scheme. So she can come home and join her family for lunch, can be taken on holiday or to the shops, to weddings and funerals, to celebrations and special occasions. She has been able remain part of the community and at the heart of her family. Without this specially adapted vehicle, she cannot travel.
If she loses her mobility allowance, her car goes with it and she will be stranded in the nursing home. This will have a catastrophic effect on the quality of her life, quite out of proportion with the amount of money it will save the country.” Link
Honestly, this doesn’t even begin to cover the many ways the disabled population is about to be penalised for being disabled. If these cuts go through, thousands of people who currently claim disability support from the government are going to be stranded. Some will be prevented from working at all, others will be trapped in their own homes unable to leave. Some will die. What does Inclusion London have to say about this?
“We reject George Osborne’s claim that these cuts are either fair or unavoidable. The spending plans represent a choice: a choice to make disabled people and others who are among the poorest in society, already facing enormous discrimination and inequality, pay for an approach to deficit reduction which is riddled with the risk of creating a double dip recession.”
Yeah, biatch.
Hey, elderly frail people! Get a job!
An elderly couple. In Romania.
As people get older, our bodies age so that we find it harder to move about. It becomes harder to judge distances, to react quickly to danger, and to recover from illness and injury. I’m 21 years old and I know this. The government, despite being run by older white men considerably closer to death than I, does not, it would seem:
“[The Comprehensive Spending Review] calls into question the ability of councils to deliver simpler and relatively inexpensive interventions – a grab rail in a bathroom, for instance – that can make the difference between an elderly person continuing to live independently or falling and ending up in a care home.
In fact, social care generally is being cut by 30% over the next three years. Even the government’s usual suggestion of charging people is redundant here (even if people could pay):
“On the level of charges, average means-tested rates for home care are already of the order of £8-£10 an hour. Some councils are contemplating increases of as much as 50% in the hourly rate and/or the maximum weekly payment. But the hard truth is that a 40% cut in funding would be almost £6bn: at present, social care charges of all kinds bring in a total £2.2bn.”
Of course, you could just not provide home care for the elderly. Charities and families will fill the gap, won’t they? Elderly people will be fine. The government will save money, won’t it? That’s all it’s really about, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
“We recognise that councils are between a rock and a hard place,” said Stephen Burke, chief executive of Counsel and Care, which specialises in information and advice for elderly people and their carers. “But cutting access to care and supporting fewer older people will only cost more in the long run. Older people will be left to struggle on their own and more will end up being admitted to expensive and often inappropriate hospital and residential care.”
“This will be the key. With up to 40% of elderly people in hospital beds placed there unnecessarily, and as many as 70% staying too long, there is a huge incentive for the NHS to use its supposedly protected funds to help out social care in its hour of need.” Link
Duly costing the government a fortune in care for the people who make it to the hospital, and costing numerous elderly people their lives and their dignity as their support is withdrawn and they are left to fend for themselves. What do you do if you can’t get out of bed yourself? What do you do if your arthritis is so bad you can’t call for help? This is so obvious and so dangerous (and expensive) it seems hard to believe that no-one in the government stopped to think about it.
Finally, have you ever wondered why the government keeps saying that the cuts are progressive? What are they basing that on?
“The BBC’s Stephanie Flanders points out that the government’s analysis ‘excludes a third of the benefit changes planned by the government and does not go up to 2014-15. The changes excluded by this are clearly regressive – they have the greatest effect, relative to income, on people at the lower end of the income scale.”Link.
…sneaky. One does wonder if fiddling the statistics is how Nick Clegg comforts himself at night.
Several people have argued to me that the best response to the coalition government is to join the Labour Party. Tomorrow’s post will therefore point why that’s a short-sighted idea. Join me then. Don’t join the Labour Party. :)
This blogpost is the second of a four part series, and the third part will be published tomorrow.
Many Liberal Democrats drunken on power seem to be getting all misty-eyed over an AV referendum and the pupil premium and entirely forgetting about things like, say, the cutting of social care for the elderly by 30%. Or the impending eviction of 200,000 people from London for the crime of being poor. Stuff like that. But hey, we might get same-sex marriage in a few years, that makes up for the kids who won’t be able to travel to sixth form anymore because their Educational Maintenance Allowance has been removed, won’t it?
Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think that “efficiency savings” and “reining in reckless spending” will somehow cover the £952 billion pound deficit. And maybe that’s true, but that’s not what’s happening. Here’s (some of) what’s happening:
Goodbye social housing sector, hello cardboard box
Homeless people asleep in corridor.
October 20th, 2010: “George Osborne announced that the housing budget for England would be cut from £8.4bn over the previous three-year period to £4.4bn over the next four years. The loss would be covered by new social housing tenants who face rental charges of up to 80% of market rates.
The average rent for a three-bedroom social home is about £85 a week, but the National Housing Federation warns this could triple to a “staggering” £250 a week. The federation, which represents English housing associations, said that the changes could lead to thousands of low-income families having to pay up to £9,000 a year more in rent.” Link.
Perhaps possible for some, but if you are living in London with higher rents to pay, a support network of friends, maybe even a low-paying job that just about keeps you fed and clothed? George Osborne would rather you just left, actually.
“Councils in the capital are warning that 82,000 families – more than 200,000 people – face losing their homes because private landlords, enjoying a healthy rental market buoyed by young professionals who cannot afford to buy, will not cut their rents to the level of caps imposed by ministers.
The National Housing Federation’s chief executive, David Orr, described the housing benefit cuts as “truly shocking”. He said: “Unless ministers urgently reconsider these punitive cuts, we could see more people sleeping rough than at any stage during the last 30 years.”
Hmm. People being made homeless with nowhere to go? Surely this is unfair?
“A DWP spokesperson said: “The current way that it [housing benefit] is administered is unfair. It’s not right that some families on benefits have been able to live in homes that most working families could not afford.”"
What? But what do you do if you can’t find a job in an era of rising employment, with nearly 500,000 people shortly to be made redundant from the public sector?
“The controversy follows comment last week by Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, who said the unemployed should “get on the bus” and look for work.”Link.
…wtf? So if you can’t afford to live next to your job, or you can’t pay your rent so you have even somewhere to live where you can look for a job, you should just… get a job? Can we see something a bit wrong there? And how are people even supposed to pay for the bloody bus without having a home or money?
Homeless person sleeps in a doorway.
The coalition government’s argument is that by refusing to flood the market with taxpayers’ money, the cost of rents will naturally fall because people who are near destitute won’t be able to pay their rent anymore. The problem is, there isn’t any shortage of demand in areas, such as London, where people actually want to live. Those also happen to be where most jobs are located as well, so people dependent on housing benefit are doubly screwed. The reality is that landlords with a choice between reducing their rents to accommodate the new changes, or evicting their tenants unable to pay to replace them with young urban professionals who desperately want to move out from their parents’, are not going to go for the cheaper option. That’s just capitalism in action.
There are going to be a lot of people made homeless because of this near-sighted policy. In fact, have tons of facts on homelessness. Being homeless is dangerous – you are at greater risk of physical attack, illness, malnutrition, not to mention the physical risk of freezing to death and contracting disease from unsanitary conditions if you are actually on the streets themselves. Then there’s the mental risk of stress, worry, fear, and uncertainty as you have no idea how you are going to survive another day. And that’s if you’re single. I dread to think what is going to happen to families. As Shelter put it, “Protecting NHS spending and education while introducing policies that will see more children living in damp and overcrowded conditions simply does not add up.”
If this cut in housing benefit goes through, people are going to die, the only question is how many, and how many children will end up in care when their parents can’t cope anymore, and how many will enter mental health services because of the pressure they are under and the indignities they face. And the Lib Dems are going to vote it through and claim it’s fair?
Jobs, jobs, jobs… but not for lawyers
The Old Bailey criminal court in London.
Legal aid! That thing that most of us will never use and is just there to enrich fat lawyers trying to help immigrants into the country, right? If you want to believe the Daily Mail, lol. Here’s a story:
“20-year-old called Danni … had lost his job as an apprentice joiner in the recession. He was wrongly told that he could not claim housing benefit to help pay his rent, and found himself in court as the council tried to repossess his council flat.
Danni, who like most people had no knowledge of legal proceedings or civil law, faced the daunting prospect of representing himself in court and being made homeless. He was saved by a lawyer from the centre called Niki Goss, an amazing and vastly experienced man who has spent his career taking on this kind of case, for which he earns less than the average primary school teacher. Goss, funded by a legal aid scheme that enabled him to be on duty in court that day, persuaded the judge to oversee a compromise with the council so that Danni could remain in his accommodation.” Link.
Legal aid helps people who can’t afford their own representation and who are facing bankruptcy, prison, deportation, and homelessness to avoid any of those fates. It levels the playing field and means everyone in the country can get legal representation irrespective of their ability to pay so the courts aren’t just a rich man’s game. Sounds like a good, fair way of ensuring equal access to the law, right? Who could argue with that?
“[Justice Secretary Ken] Clarke said [on the 21st October, 2010]: “Our legal aid system is almost the most expensive in the world. Our proposals will look to reduce legal aid and related spend by around 16 per cent and it will still be one of the most expensive systems by far in the world.
“We want to do this by focusing funding on those who need it most and on those cases that require it. That will mean difficult choices on less priority areas, and on the ways in which lawyers are paid.”
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said: “The severe cuts to legal aid, both criminal and civil, will mean some individuals will have minimal or no representation in court.” Link.
…huh. But I guess that if we just gave free legal advice to everyone who needed it we’d bankrupt the country?
“The Law Centres Federation estimates that the average cost to the taxpayer of evicting people like Danni is £34,000. The service provided by Goss that day and subsequent court hearings costs less than £1,000. Providing vulnerable people with legal representation saves money down the line.”
Ah. Right. So legal aid is cost-effective a lot of cases. But not as cost-effective as just getting people to work for free!
Most legal aid is provided by small offices with few resources.
“One idea that has proved popular among Tories is the idea that lawyers should do more work for free. Pro bono legal advice and representation, senior Conservatives have argued, are an important part of a lawyer’s civic duty. Jonathan Djanogly, the justice minister in charge of legal aid, has even suggested that it would be a good way of keeping busy women who wanted to return to work from maternity leave.
“Pro bono can be a good filler for those lawyers out of work, or women who want to get back into the legal job market after having children,” Djanogly said at a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference.”
Ignoring the blatant sexism and patriarchy contained in this statement, surely in the big society we need to help our fellows, to “do our bit”. Isn’t Djanogly’s call to pro bono work a good thing?
“To a disproportionate extent [legal aid lawyers] are made up of people working in small high street firms, women, and ethnic-minority lawyers. The idea that they should work for free is neither sustainable nor fair. If the taxpayer cannot stomach paying lawyers to represent people who cannot afford to pay for themselves, then the supply of legal representation will dry up.”Link.
So cutting legal aid will disproportionately affect local solicitors, women, and ethnic minorities. It’ll leave thousands of poor and destitute people without legal representation at the mercy of the wealthy, councils and government departments who can afford to throw bottomless amounts of cash at lawyers to do their utmost to ruin the lives of people who can’t fight back, by bankrupting them, by breaking up their families, by giving them criminal records, and by making them homeless. It will result in the deportation of thousands of asylum seekers to countries where they may be tortured or killed, because that’s “what’s right for the country”. Right, yeah.
That change that works for you?
Tomorrow in “Who’s Affected by the Cuts?”, we’ll be looking at the elderly, disabled people, and students. Join me then. Don’t join the Liberal Democrats.
This blogpost is the first of a four part series, and the second part will be published tomorrow.
Further to my rage-fuelled spontaneous combustion last week, I thought I would write a somewhat more thought-out explanation as to why I was planning to leave the Liberal Democrats even before I was so offended by the insinuations that one of my friends quit the party over personal issues rather than politics. The reason I was so offended was not necessarily that one of my friends was insulted, although I was annoyed by that, but because the means by which the Liberal Democrats intend to ruin people’s lives and end not a few of them is SO FRICKING OBVIOUS, it defies belief that anyone could suggest that someone upset by the scale of destruction about to be unleashed is evidently just using the cuts as an excuse for something else. What an inverted pyramid of piffle (Boris Johnson being far more polite than me).
Now, I’m not one of those far lefties who live in some sort of dreamworld where cuts never need to happen, tube cleaners should be paid £3000 a week and the front-bench should be made up solely of women for the next thousand years to make up for patriarchy. We do have a deficit, we are paying £120 million a day to pay for it, and something does need to be done. What I do fail to understand, however, is why exactly the deficit needs to be reduced at the expense of the sick, elderly, young, disabled, and seemingly anyone who needs government assistance to get by.
Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister
Because it won’t be Nick Clegg who won’t be able to send his kids to school because they can’t afford to pay for the bus. And it won’t be Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who has to choose between food and heating after having to pay his increased rents because of cuts to social housing. It won’t be Chris Huhne, the climate change minister, who sits at home in his own urine because he can’t afford to pay for a personal assistant when he needs it.
Note that I used Liberal Democrats as my examples there. I’m not surprised in the slightest that the Tories are bringing in such changes, because that’s what they do, and I’ve never known a Tory besides myself who had the slightest understanding that people on benefits are there because they need help to survive; and I promptly quit when I realised that Tories don’t quite live on the same planet as the rest of us.
But I joined the Liberal Democrats because I read their tax policy (I’m not kidding) and I thought it was great, I thought it was fair, and I thought it was a vast improvement on the excessively complicated system Gordon Brown had brought in to exercise his brain. I believe in human rights, civil liberties, and a “fair, free and open society… in which no-one will be enslaved by poverty, ignorance, or conformity”. That’s the preamble to the Liberal Democrat Federal Constitution, and it’s a cool statement. I believed in that. I still believe in that. But because I believe in that, I can’t be a Liberal Democrat. And I honestly don’t understand why anyone else who believes in that could keep up their membership either.
Who's defending the less well off now, Mr. Hughes?
Out of the six of my friendship group who joined the Liberal Democrats from March last year, I am the last to leave. While speaking to people who have remained members about why they’ve chosen to stay, there are two main responses. One is “yes, I am absolutely horrified, but the Liberal Democrats are staving off the worst of it, surely we need to stay and try to fend off what we can?” I could subscribe to that view, if that was what was happening. But did those of you who believe that miss Nick Clegg and Vince Cable overriding party policy and approved increasing the debts of students by tens of thousands of pounds? Just how much worse could it have been under the Tories? This coalition isn’t a battle between scissor-happy Tories vs. plucky Liberal Democrats salvaging what they can – they’re both at it, and they’re going to cause massive, irreversable, potentially deadly, hardship to millions and millions of people.
The second response is “OMG, yay, we’re in government, isn’t this amazing!! What do you mean, hitting the poorest hardest? How much Liberal Democrat policy have we passed since we’ve been in government? How much would we have passed in opposition? We’re doing our bit. Yay government, we’re in government, woohoo! This is so cool!” I don’t like these people. Unfortunately they’re generally elected officials.
Mr. Cable, I believe your pants are on fire.
The thing is, I like a smaller state. I like “cutting waste”, I like the bonfire of the quangos and I like lowering taxation where possible. The Liberal Democrats like that too, that’s why I joined them. The part where we start to diverge is when the Liberal Democrats now seem to define waste as “poor people”. And I can’t be a part of that.
But what exactly am I talking about? This blogpost is entitled “Why the Coalition is Going to Kill People”, but when I started to write it, it rapidly became several thousand words long. I have therefore broken it down into four parts. This introductory blogpost, has, I hope, established why I have left the party for ideological rather than personal reasons. The next two parts, “What’s Affected by the Cuts?” and “Who’s Affected by the Cuts?” will explain to people who might not be aware, especially those Liberal Democrats who continue to support the coalition government, exactly why people’s lives are in danger because of the Liberal Democrat supported-Coalition Programme. And finally, “Other Parties Helped!” will cover why joining the Labour Party is a short-sighted response and why I’m not planning to join any other parties in the future. So join me tomorrow for more fury, and this time, some facts.
Sent to the DELGA (the LGBT Liberal Democrat group) mailing list in response to an appalling email from a current member of the Executive following the principled resignation of a colleague. I will make no claim that this is well-written or well-referenced.
Dear all,
I was waiting it out with regard to the Comprehensive Spending Review, but after reading Dave’s disgusting, partisan, and utterly unacceptable jibe at Ollie, I am hereby resigning immediately from DELGA and the Liberal Democrat Party. The fact that [redacted] is Ollie’s partner is no way enhances or detracts from the fact that our university teaching budgets were just cut by 80%, our cornerstone pledge that every student should receive a free education was ripped up with glee, 100,000 people are about to be forced to move out of London because they cannot pay the rents, legal aid has been REMOVED for housing and family cases, Disabled Living Allowance is being denied to many people with mental health problems, social care for the elderly has been cut by 30% – do you think that people too frail to leave their beds will just learn to care for themselves?
I joined this party because I believe that we should “build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.” I still believe in that and that is why I must quit. We have betrayed those values, we have betrayed those who voted for us, and we have betrayed our own membership by disregarding their horror at what is unfolding due to our connivance with a cuts programme which rivals Thatcher by deriding it as some sort of lovers’ tiff. Shame on you, Dave, and shame on every one of you who has shrugged their shoulders at the CSR and the hundreds of thousands of desperately poor people are who are now facing oblivion.
The Liberal Democrat Party are in the process of making our country more unsafe, more racist, more unfair, and more hypocritical. Access to health, education, housing and justice has been curtailed and people will die as a result. I hope you can live with that, because I certainly can’t. Goodbye.
I am currently reading the extremely interesting autobiography of Christopher Hitchens at the moment. Besides the vast, vast , VAST amount of name-dropping, the work is enthralling, the narrative compelling, and the prose grandiloquent. But Hitchens’ recollection of the time he spent as a young Marxist revolutionary while at university is the part I find most intriguing. I didn’t realise it when I first came across his work, but Hitchens has a criminal record as extensive as his capacity for alcohol, the product of many demonstrations and altercations with the police, and in his time at Oxford managed to have an Oxford Debating Union meeting indefinitely suspended for the first time in its 147 year history due to his rather well planned disruption of a debate on the ethics of Vietnam. It’s all fascinating stuff (especially the parts where he talks about all the sexual encounters he’s had with men – but that’s my own personal, ahem, research interest…).
The part I wanted to share, however, is brief, but interesting:
“As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political”. At the instant that I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was – cliche is arguably forgiveable here – very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference”, to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words, “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation of disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment where the Left lost or – I would prefer to say – discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time I was to see the sell-out so cheaply. ” – p121, Atlantic Books (2010)
I’m not so what my friends and comrades in the liberation movements or the Left make of that, but I think he has a point. Not to say that those who work, hard, on feminism and other liberation movements are not making advances on behalf of us all, but that it is their work which matters and not the features they have which qualifies them to be termed “activists”. Sadly, many seem to believe otherwise.
Manchester Students for Sensible Drug Policy’s second year has been hard work, but enjoyable. We have gained members, developed leaflets, posters, and other materials, and held events, training sessions, stalls, and socials. We have succeeded in holding some kind of meeting or event almost every week of term, with varying degrees of success.
Our greatest success this year has undoubtedly been the campus-wide awareness of SSDP and what we do. The number of emails I have had regarding the society has been steady and we have gained a number of new members through the union website membership form, so they must be finding us somehow. We have also been approached for numerous joint events and support, and it has been extremely heart-warming to stand on a stall and have 1 in 10 of the people we talk to already on the mailing list or who have attended one of our events. I hope we can continue this awareness raising next year as well.
Our greatest failure has been an inability to get together promotion on time. Although an improvement on last year (we actually managed to produce posters this year), our inexperience and somewhat chaotic approach led to a very haphazard promotion strategy which did not pay off well. We have experimented with new methods of promotion, including Facebook ads and will continue to do so. Our primary goal as an organisation next year is to get this sorted.
Activities
Throughout the year, we have held a wide range of events, alone and in collusion with others. It seems likely that we will continue some which have now become fixtures in our calendar, such as a termly film showing with Openmedia and a presence at Pangaea, and some will be rethinking in order to be more successful. Also throughout the term, we have put forward a motion committing the union to campaign on drug law reform to most General Meetings; this was never debated due to a failure to reach quorum this year – however, the effort we put into promoting the motion has resulted in several SSDP activists coming to General Meetings, which has been excellent.
This term we launched our newsletter, “War on People”. Although a great success among those who read it, its production severely overran the budget allocated to it and although we sold advertising to another society, Free Culture, our print run of 200 copies still cost £300. Copies have been distributed to other chapters all across the UK, and have been popular. Having learned from the lessons of our first attempt, we will be producing our second issue in time for Freshers with a view to going half-termly.
Also this term, we held two awareness weeks. Elephant in the Room week was our generic week to raise awareness of drug law reform. Although struck down by numerous problems and the unexpected cancellation of our main speaker, it was nonetheless quite fun, and we received extremely positive feedback from those who participated (although people were near unanimous that the name must be changed next year). Mephedrone Week was hastily organised in response to the criminalisation of mephedrone in April. Largely organised entirely by our Events Officer, we held some stalls, gave out leaflets containing information and safety advice on mephedrone and held a talk at the end of the week with a local speaker from Lifeline on the topic. It was low-key, but I think very successful.
Things left over from last term: the drugs guide is now complete but has been awaiting legal approval for some months. If anyone has legal expertise on drugs, we would be very, very grateful for a proofreader. The first aid workshops ground to a halt because of the convener’s commitments, but we have found a new teacher for next year. We are also planning to push ahead with our schools programme, hopefully through gaining and training volunteers through the Manchester Leadership Programme, although that is a very tentative plan at the moment.
Membership
This year we recruited nearly 250 people onto our mailing list at Freshers Fair, and have been signing people up throughout the year. Our current mailing list is just under 300 and our Facebook group just over – allowing for overlap I would say that it is not unlikely that we are in regular contact with about 400-450 people through email, Facebook events, and stalls, which puts us somewhere in the top 40 student societies at UMSU. This is somewhat lower than I had anticipated in my interim report – however, the larger part of this can be put down to the accidental loss of over 80 email addresses at the January Pangaea stall and misplanning for Elephant in the Room Week which led to much shorter stalls than intended.
SSDP was also much more active this year in involving other people, although we did not achieve as much as we would have liked to in this area. Our Executive expanded dramatically from four to fourteen, although it must be admitted that some roles we created have not been as useful as we hoped and these have been duly scrapped. We’ve had greater commitment from a larger pool of semi-regular activists, several of whom have come from outside the main friendship circle of the society, which has been very gratifying. We have, however, accidentally lost several other potential members because of insularity and this is also something which should be addressed next year.
Our demographic remains broad, with a good mix of first, second and third years, which bodes well for our future. I have tried hard to ensure that financial hardship is not a barrier to participation in SSDP, but we have much further to go in that respect.
Finances and Equipment
This year we achieved full funding of £750, as well as claiming £270 in the first semester for first aid equipment and £300 for newsletters in the second. We have so far spent approximately two thirds of our regular budget, and one of my remaining tasks as Chair for this year is to invest in more materials for Freshers and other items with a view to next year.
In terms of equipment, this year we have acquired a projector to avoid the exorbitant costs of hiring union equipment, and have also bought a table and a gazebo. We also have access to a bike trailer, trolley, barbecue, megaphone, and numerous other pieces of equipment that will come in handy next year.
We are also very rich in resources. We currently have several thousand badges for Release and SSDP UK, numerous “nice people take drugs” wristbands, a wide selection of harm reduction literature and a reasonable supply of everything Transform has ever written. We also have in stock nearly a thousand condoms for future distribution on stalls. We do need to get more stickers, banners and develop a new leaflet, but this will happen. We will also need to get a new batch of Release bust-cards, as we get through hundreds of the damn things faster than a new-forged sword through a pat of butter.
As Chair
I mentioned in my interim report that I intended to continue to decentralise the work required to keep Manchester SSDP running. This process continued this term, with our Events Officer Andi Sidwell taking on most of the events-related work this term, which they organised with great aplomb. Kudos also has to go to our newsletter editors, Alasdair Sladen and Luke Taylor, for the hard work they put into producing War on People with very little input for me (though perhaps I should have had more input into the budget… :P). Thanks also to our Treasurer and Secretary, Jesse White and Robi Folkard, for their quiet but consistent contribution to our organisation. James Jackson, our Promotions Officer this year, didn’t do a lot as Promotions Officer, but has turned up to most of our stalls, put up a great defence against the Debating Union in our joint event with them, and gave a popular workshop at our training weekend on Stop and Search powers. Our stalls this year also could not have happened without the hours spent on them by everyone above and Mo Saqib, Benji Starr, Ste Monaghan, Miles Battye, Jess Bradley, Dan Fahey and Chris Loh. I may be amazing, but without everyone helping out this year we simply wouldn’t have got as much stuff done.
As Chair, I have continued to handle the majority of our paperwork, correspondence, communication work and interviews. I have tweaked the design of the weekly email and developed our Facebook group to be more useful. I also organised an activist training weekend which saw 7 different chapters represented to learn about running a chapter, campaigning, and effective tabling. I have continued to contribute to the long-term strategic planning on the national organisation in my capacity as a member of the Board of Directors, and recently published a 6,000 word three part guide to Running an SSDP Society, with the third part due to be published in February next year, as well as developing an activist tool-kit with a variety of resources that I have developed and acquired during my time as Chair.
The Future
I am stepping down as Chair this year, as I am taking a year out and it seems inappropriate to continue as head of a student organisation while not a student. Following our AGM, Andi Sidwell, previously both Events Officer and Secretary of Manchester SSDP, will be taking on the role. I wish them the greatest of luck with it and hope they will keep the flame of drug law reform burning on our campus. I have no idea what I will be doing, and await my performance review with interest. :)
In my remaining months in office, I will be finishing off the remaining business of our society this year – ordering materials, writing cheques, and re-registering the society and booking our Freshers’ stall. Along with Andi, I will be conducting soon-to-be-entitled-something-other-than-the-somewhat-scary-sounding-performance-reviews with all our regular activists to get more detailed feedback on how our membership feels about our direction and where they want to contribute. It is a time-consuming process, but a very rewarding one. Together we have been writing an SSDP Year Plan 10/11 which collates all the feedback we have received from the ongoing evaluations over the past year to ensure successes are repeated and failures overcome. This will be followed by an ubermeeting to plan our calendar for next year, which I believe Andi wishes to be open to all who wish to participate. And finally, I would like to organise a summer social over July/August for any activists left in Manchester before we start badgering people to stand on Freshers’ stalls.
I remain, as ever, open to the interests and suggestions of our membership. Our society has been largely built upon the systematic nicking of ideas from every society, organisation and individual willing to offer them, and I believe we have benefited greatly as a result of the mistakes and knowledge of others. Long may it continue.
I was already booked to attend another conference this weekend, so was unable to attend the Liberal Democrat Special Conference in Birmingham this weekend. Just reading through all the coverage of it, especially on Twitter and over at Lib Dem Voice, no-one really mentions all the amendments that were passed into the main motion, some of which are very interesting. However I may feel about the coalition, given the wide range of subjects and movers, the Lib Dems are far more democratic than Labour or the Conservatives.
To what extent it is actually of any use to “affirm” commitments to scrapping tuition fees when the coalition agreement that was approved by the same motion explicitly states that Liberal Democrat MPs and peers shall abstain on the issue on tuition fees if the Browne Review recommends raising the cap (which it will almost certainly do) is debatable. Similarly, affirming a commitment to LGBT equality is all very well but what does that actually mean when the minister for equality, presumably approved by Nick Clegg, has voted against LGBT rights whenever she can? I guess coalitions take us into strange territory. I hope that our leadership, and government, as I suppose we must now call them, will not ignore the amendments to this motion.
All the amendment can all be found in the Conference Extra document that was put out today, but I include them below:
Amendment 1
Moved by: Evan Harris
Supported by 14 conference representatives
“Conference notes that negotiations with the Labour party were not fruitful, despite the best endeavours and good faith of the Liberal Democrat negotiating team, because many in the Labour Party did not wish to participate in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats or to continue in government; and that therefore it was not possible to form a stable administration with the Labour Party.
Conference further notes that a stable coalition with the Conservatives with a clear partnership agreement has significant advantages for the country, for the implementation of progressive policies and for the creation of a more cooperative style of politics compared to the remaining option of a minority Conservative administration.”
Amendment 2
Moved by: David Grace
Supported by 15 conference representatives
“Conference recognises that party members in government and in parliament will be bound by the usual conventions and by the terms of this agreement but declares that the Liberal Democrats remain an independent political party and that nothing in this agreement prevents the party from developing new policy through it’s democratic processes.”
Amendment 3
Moved by: James Graham
Supported by 23 conference representatives
“Conference calls for Liberal Democrats to work constructively in government to ensure that the net income and wealth inequality gap is reduced significantly over the course of this parliament.”
Amendment 4
Moved by: Liberal Youth
“Conference notes that many Liberal Democrat MPs signed the NUS ‘vote for students’ pledge against any real terms rise in the tuition fee cap. Conference calls upon Liberal Democrat ministers and MPs to ensure that on any decision made on Lord Browne’s report on higher education funding, they above all else take into account the impact on student debt. Conference affirms the Liberal Democrat objective of scrapping tuition fees.”
Amendment 5
Moved by: David Matthewman
Supported by 10 conference representatives
“Conference urges Liberal Democrat ministers and MPs to take all possible steps to ensure the repeal of those sections of the Digital Economy Act 2010 which are inconsistent with policy motion Freedom, Creativity and the Internet as passed at Spring Conference 2010.”
Amendment 6
Moved by: Jo Shaw
Supported by 10 conference representatives
“Conference also calls on Liberal Democrat ministers and MPs, in line with the Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment to protect the Human Rights Act 1998, to oppose moves by any party or individual towards repeal of this act.”
Amendment 7
Moved by: Dave Page
Supported by DELGA
“Conference reaffirms the party’s long-standing and unparalleled commitment to matters relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans equality.”
Amendment 8
Moved by: David Wright
Supported by Harlow Local Party
“Conference calls on Liberal Democrat ministers and MPs to seek to include proportional representation for local government elections in England and Wales as apart of the political reform programme of the coalition government.”
Amendment 9
Moved by: David Rendel
Supported by Newbury Local Party
“Conference regrets that it proved impossible to agree the introduction of a system of proportional representation for elections to the House of Commons, and reaffirms the party’s long-standing commitment to the introduction of such a system.”
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Most legal aid is provided by small offices with few resources.
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