Archive

2,000 protest in Belfast against education cuts vote

A huge protest brought Belfast city centre to a standstill as over two thousand young people, mainly school students, showed their opposition to £9,000 a year tuition fees for nearly 4 hours. Police filmed school students as young as 13, pushed young protesters faces into police vans and shoved people into the crowd as a clear attempt to intimidate protesters.

byArchive

December 9, 2010

1 minute read

What next after 9th December
After a short vote the Tory-Lib Dem government voted through up to £9,000 a year fees and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance. The next step is the implementation of these attacks in Northern Ireland.

In Belfast a meeting has been called to bring together young people to build the movement against fees and EMA cuts. Now is the time to build a united movement of catholic and protestant youth to defeat fees.

Socialist Youth, youth wing of the Socialist Party is calling for another mass day of protest across Northern Ireland. Now campaigning groups need to get organised in every school, tech, university campus and link these groups with workers struggles to defeat fees and fight public sector cuts.

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Thousands of jobcentre workers threatened with dole

Jobcentre workers are reeling this week. Having been told how valuable they have been in getting the country out of recession, this week they were told that 4,000 of them are to be sacked within the next few months. This is even though unemployment has started to rise again and, with over 2.5 million unemployed, the recovery is still a long way off.

The previous Chancellor, Alistair Darling was forced to acknowledge in his budget in March that jobcentre workers had helped to reduce the budget deficit by a whopping additional £4 billion by getting people back into work quicker than anticipated. Since then the new Con-Dem government has announced these savage job cuts aiming to save £30 million.

byArchive

Archive

China – Women’s struggle then and now

There are important lessons from women’s struggle in Chinese history that should be studied again

International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time in China in 1924. By then, growing workers’ and women’s movements were already developing. The Hunan Women’s League was formed in 1921. By the end of that year they had pushed through provisions on women’s suffrage and personal freedom in Hunan’s constitution. The Association for Women’s Rights in Zhejiang province issued an appeal for women to join the revolution to overthrow the warlords and introduce democracy. In Shanghai, 20,000 workers in the silk spinning industry went on strike in 1923 demanding a 10-hour day and wage increases. Chen Pi-lan, who became a Trotskyist, was one of the leaders of the Communist Party Women’s League in Shanghai.

byArchive

Archive

Oppose the IMF/EU backed attacks

Sunday 21 November, the day the Irish government formally applied for a bailout to the EU and IMF, should be marked as the day that the Irish capitalist class were exposed as a rotten, despicable failure, bankrupt in every sense and incapable of offering any way forward. The significance of these developments cannot be overstated; they are a turning point in Irish history and will impact on other countries in Europe and the EU itself.