Next meeting – Thursday 2 September 7.30pm

William Morris Community Centre, Greenleaf Road, E17 6QQ

ALL WELCOME

This meeting will take reports from workers, service users and young people facing cuts and discuss how to build the Anti-Cuts Union so we can defend our jobs and services

If we do not resist the cuts this is what we face:

· Destruction of the NHS

· 1.3 million job cuts

· 1.5 million young people out of work

· Public sector pay freezes – a real terms pay cut

· Pension cuts and work ‘til you drop

· Benefit cuts leading to overcrowding, homelessness and poverty

· 40% cuts in our public services

· Privatisation of housing, schools and health

· Higher student fees

· 38,000 could die as a result of these cuts

· The poorest will be hit six times harder than the rich by this budget

• Accuses this government of attempting to make workers – including young people, pensioners and the unemployed – pay for the economic crisis caused by the bankers and big business and their economic system.

Calling all public sector workers, public service users, parents, teachers, students, job seekers, trade unionists, socialists, campaigners, community activists and anyone who wants to fight cuts in our services to pay for the bosses’ bailout.

Nancy Taaffe who stood in the general election for the Socialist Party and is Unison joint campaigns officer said: “This has huge implications for all the children, teachers, parents and people of this borough. Academy status means taking schools out of local authority control and, by default, out of public accountability. This, in effect, leaves the precious education of our children to the vagaries of the market and we all know how that can fail us. A united campaign to defend schools and the public sector is required as a matter of urgency”.

We believe that some of the schools who have been asked are Edinburgh Primary, Greenleaf Road, Henry Maynard, Highams Park, Hillyfield and Handsworth Primary. Mission Grove and Roger Ascham have been asked and so too has Walthamstow School for Girls, as well as St Helens and St Mary RC School.

Nancy explained the threat posed by this proposal: “Academies are a divisive form of education, designed to pit student against student and parent against parent. Teachers will find their national pay and conditions torn up and their working life subject to the diktat of the school hierarchy”.

The Socialist Party calls on all parents, teachers and students to unite in a campaign to oppose these new Academies.

Lobby Iain Duncan Smith (Minister for Work and Pensions) on Friday 18^th June at his surgery. Meet at Chingford Rail Station 3pm.

1.4 million under-25s are not working or in full-time education. But the ConDem government wants to raise fees and punish the unemployed.

IDS & the ConDem Government says…

We will make young people work for poverty pay!

We will cut benefits!

We will freeze public sector recruitment!

We will cut £200m from university funding!

£340m from further education colleges! And

raise student fees to at least £5,000 a year!

Youth Fight for Jobs says…

Everyone has the right to a decent job, with a living wage of at least £8 per hour!

For a fully-funded job creation programme of socially useful jobs!

No to cheap labour apprenticeships! For all apprenticeships to pay at least the minimum wage with a job guaranteed at the end

No to university fees! No cuts and privatisation – for free publicly funded education.

The first slice of cuts under the ‘Con-Dem’ coalition government makes it clear that young people face a bleak future. But this year young people have shown they will fight back against attacks on education and also against racism and youth unemployment. Recent figures show unemployment amongst young people is around 1 million whilst almost half (48%) of Black people aged between 16-24 are now unemployed. Students and workers have not taken attacks on their jobs and services lightly. Students have occupied university buildings and protested against cuts and course closures. Alongside them workers have taken strike action in the UCU (University and College Lecturers Union), the PCS (Public and Commercial Services Union) and many other workplaces in defence of their jobs and conditions including the British Airways workers who are currently fighting to defend their jobs in the face of a brutal bullying management. Youth Fight for Jobs supports all these struggles of workers and students and organised a demonstration of 1,000 young people marching against unemployment and in solidarity with all workers and young people fighting for their futures. Neither the Conservative nor the Lib Dem wing of the new government has proposed serious measures to provide jobs for workers and young people facing the brunt of this ongoing crisis. And they won’t because their main aim is to make us pay to keep the bosses and the wealthy rich. The coalition’s cuts are a continuation of the Labour government’s attacks, which were also intent on extracting the price of the economic crisis from young people’s futures.

We can beat Tory attacks!

In the 1980s, Thatcher’s government reacted to mass unemployment by introducing the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), but its slave labour conditions through low wages and no job guarantees provoked mass opposition, including school student strikes involving 250,000 which defeated the attack. These attacks and those to follow will be unendurable, not just to the thousands who have expressed their opposition so far, but to millions of young people. Socialists call for mass participation in organised opposition. Walkouts and strikes involving the active support of the majority of students should be prepared for the autumn. Get involved, join the lobby as the start of a mass fightback. New Tory proposals could provoke a reaction comparable to the protests in the mid eighties. Youth Fight for Jobs will continue to organise for a mass fightback, for a programme of job creation to solve the problems of unemployment, for free education to allow people to develop to the best of their abilities, and for a living wage that will allow those in work to live a decent life. JOIN US!

The following letter was sent by Nancy Taaffe and printed in the Walthamstow Guardian on 27/05/10. It is an open letter from The Socialist Party to Waltham Forest Council, whose Labour leader Chris Robbins said this week that he aims to “work hard to protect the services that matter most to residents”. We ask if they really will:

Waltham Forest Council now has 37 Labour councillors. Across east London and in Waltham Forest millions of workers voted Labour in an act that they believed might protect them from the Tory-led public sector massacre that is now set to take place. Throughout the election the Socialist Party campaigned on a ‘NO cuts’ platform, explaining that these cuts were being demanded by the unelected hedge fund managers and city wolf packs, with politicians repeating ad nauseam that ordinary people should pay for bank bailouts. The reality is that Waltham Forest has experienced in-efficiency cut after in-efficiency cut. Failed privatisation experiments, in the form of Ascham Homes and EduAction, abound. We have the dirty contract of Kier. On top of this, the swansong of the previous Lib/Lab pact was to vote through £10 million of budget cuts. The Socialist Party stands in the tradition of the fighting Liverpool City Council, which stood up to Thatcher between 1984 and 1986; which built houses and schools and created jobs in the teeth of a vicious Tory government. Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party led the magnificent battle against the poll tax that saw 18 million people refuse to pay, defeated the tax and, ultimately, saw the back of Thatcher herself. Council leader Chris Robbins has said that we face “exciting but difficult times”. Well, this Labour council has a choice – will they slavishly do the bidding of the Tory government, as they did under New Labour, or will they refuse to implement the cuts? Then, like the socialists in Liverpool, they should set a needs budget based on real needs in the borough in terms of services, and build a campaign amongst council workers, college lecturers, teachers, school and college students etc, linking up with other boroughs to force the government to increase funding. The Socialist Party is ready to be part of that campaign. Is the council?

We don’t need to read the small print to know that it is going to mean enormous suffering for the mass of the population.

The 27 members of the new cabinet will be deliberating on these measures. This bunch of millionaires and ex-bankers inhabit another world to the rest of us, where their wealth and privilege will insulate them from the implications of their policy decisions.

Parents who send their children to posh, fee-paying schools will tend to be less worried about cuts in education budgets. Those on six-figure salaries won’t fear VAT increases so much. Young people with rich parents are less likely to be put off university by rising fees.

However, the top politicians will not be able to avoid the huge anger that their policies unleash. This anger must be organised and expressed in a powerful show of opposition to cuts.

The first step needs to be a campaign for a massive national trade union-led demonstration against all cuts in public services. Local meetings to prepare for this will be important, as well as protest actions on 22 June, ‘bloodbath budget day’.

Local anti-cuts committees can also bring campaigns together and coordinate in preparation for the mass movement that will be necessary.

Who they are:

• Almost half the Cabinet are millionaires
• Each Cabinet member will earn between £164,000 and £208,000 a year
• 4 Cabinet members are ex-bankers
• Half of Cabinet members are privately educated (compared to 7% of the population)
• Over two thirds of the Cabinet went to Oxbridge
• Over 70% of Cabinet members voted for war in Iraq and over three-quarters voted for renewal of Trident nuclear weapons
• Over 80% voted for part-privatisation of schools

Who we are:

• 62 million public service users, 6 million public sector workers
• Over 2.3 million university students
• 2.5 million unemployed people, of which 1 million are young
• 2 million marchers against the Iraq war
• Over 70% oppose further privatisation of public services

Nancy Taaffe is standing as a Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition(TUSC) candidate for Walthamstow for the general election. Nancy has a record as a trade union activist, fighting cuts in jobs and services.

Socialist Candidates standing for the local elections

VOTE Susan Wills in William Moris ward

VOTE Uthayasenan T in Higham Hill ward

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has tried to provoke the ‘big three’ parties into breaking their silence and coming clean on the ‘savage cuts’ they all intend to make.

The IFS estimates that the cuts could be the worst since the Second World War, which includes some bad times!

Any combination of the three main parties in government will hope to bring the pain of the Greek working class to Britain. The Financial Times has said a new government may cut public sector pay by 5%, freeze benefits for a year, means-test child benefit, abolish winter fuel payments, and cut bus passes for pensioners.

We have to prepare to fight for our jobs, services and living standards.
On Thursday 6 May take the first step – VOTE SOCIALIST!

Wednesday 5 May – day of action against cuts in adult and further education at Waltham Forest College
Show support for the lecturers and all workers at the college facing cuts and worse conditions
Contact Susan Wills, UCU secretary on susanlmwills@aol.com

Get in touch if you have any time between now and Thursday night – we will be leafleting tube stations, bus stations, schools and trying to get ourselves noticed over the next few days!

Sarah Sachs-Eldridge
020 8988 8771, 079 580 320 71