Wednesday 21^st September, 6pm, (click for map) Phoenix Community Centre: Nuclear Power

Thursday 22^nd September, 8pm, (click for map) Duke of Wellington: UN vote on Palestinian Statehood

Wednesday 28^th September, 6pm, Phoenix Community Centre: The Miners Strike

Thursday 29^th September, 8pm, Duke of Wellington: The Miners Strike

Wednesday 5^th October, 6pm, Phoenix Community Centre: Benefits, Health, Housing, Pensions... The Cuts So Far

Thursday 6^th October, 8pm, Duke of Wellington: Socialism and Psychology

Wednesday 12^th October, 6pm, Phoenix Community Centre: Popular versus United Fronts (Joint Branch)

Wednesday 19^th October, 6pm, Phoenix Community Centre: The Decline of the Labour Party

Thursday 20^th October, 8pm, Duke of Wellington: Ireland and the National Question

SOCIALISM 2011

Click here for the agenda

If you are interested and would like to come you can buy tickets click here

Youth must join pensions struggle

Strike together as in France 2010

Brighton University Socialist Students

The government and their friends in the media will always try, as they did in June, to spread division between workers and service users during strike action. It is important to cut across these lies with solidarity action and unity between young people and workers on strike.

Three quarters of a million teachers and civil servants took coordinated strike action in June against the government's decimation of public sector pension schemes.

This unity between students, young people and workers was shown last year in France, in the struggle against the pension reforms. With the Con-Dem coalition likely to face more strike action over pensions this autumn, it is important to analyse and draw lessons from struggles such as this.

Last October, President Sarkozy's plans to raise the retirement age saw a furious and enormous reaction from the French working class, with massive strikes and demonstrations - at the height of the movement, 3.5 million people demonstrated across the country.

A crucial turning point for the dispute was when young people and students began to take part in the struggle in a large and organised way. Ignoring the lies of Sarkozy's supporters and the right wing media who tried to re-assure young people that pension reform did not concern them, student strikes in solidarity with the workers helped shut hundreds of schools.

The idea that raising the retirement age does not affect young people is a downright lie used to divide the movement. For example, with one million young people unemployed in Britain, it is madness for the government to be forcing older workers to work for longer while these young people waste their talents on the dole queue.

Sarkozy revealed a lot when he was quoted as saying about the strikes, "school and college students...must be watched closely like milk on a stove."

Politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron are right to be frightened of a mass movement of youth and workers opposing their austerity measures! Such a movement would stand a real chance of stopping them and their cuts in their tracks.

Young people and students on their own do not carry the social weight to defeat governments, even weak ones such as the coalition in Britain. However, as last year's student movement in Britain showed, the energy and anger of a movement of young people can give confidence and inspire others in society to fight back. Three months after the last major student demonstration, half a million trade unionists marched through the streets of London.

Combined with the organised working class, which holds the power to make society grind to a halt, this kind of action would stand firmly in the way of the brutal austerity cuts of governments across Europe and beyond.

If more workers take coordinated strike action to defend their pensions, young people and students need to unite with them. We should take our solidarity to the picket lines but also organise walkouts at our schools, colleges and universities and join the protests and demonstrations taking place. Any blow against this government is a step towards a decent future for young people.

The great PFI schools rip off - once again!

By Phil Clarke, Brighton and Hove Socialist Party and NUT (personal capacity)

Before the 2010 general election Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was correct when he said Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes are "a bit of dodgy accounting - a way in which the government can pretend they're not borrowing when they are, and we'll all be picking up the tab in 30 years."

Of course, quite predictably, since the coalition government was formed, Clegg has been completely silent about morePFI schemes being signed than in 2008 or 2009.

PFI, which in 2009 George Osborne (now Tory chancellor) called "discredited", is a scheme where private money is used to build public buildings such as schools and hospitals - the private contractors then lease the building back to the public sector over a period of around 30 years.

The problem is that not only do PFI builds cost a great deal more than publicly run projects, but the private contractor ends up owning the building at the end of the lease!

For example, Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary cost £184 million to build, but through PFI it will cost the public more than £1 billion over 30 years. Add onto this the contracts for maintenance and repair private companies can get under PFI, where changing a light bulb can cost £333, and we have nothing short of a rip-off of the public sector for private profit.

While the government's constant refrain is 'we must all tighten our belts', education minister Michael Gove is using PFI to finance his new school building scheme - already cut to £2 billion from the £55 billion 'Building Schools for the Future' Labour-initiated PFI scheme he scrapped.

An established hate figure for education workers, Gove is making hundreds of schools that desperately need new buildings go without, and making the minority who do get them pay massively over the odds with PFI. It will come as no surprise either that new schools, or those getting new buildings, will be pushed to become academies or 'free schools'.

If publicly built, publicly run state comprehensive schools are cheaper and shown to be more successful, why are they not being built?

Even more tellingly, why won't Ed Miliband's Labour Party put this forward?

It is because all the major parties are more interested in promoting private profit in the public sector than in delivering services to us.

PFI, academies and free schools are, in the long term, about bringing in the private sector to make profit, not just out of building schools but running them.

Workers and unions must say 'No to PFI', 'No to academies' and build a new mass workers' party that stands solidly for a publicly funded, publicly owned comprehensive education system.

Mass workers' movement - the only way to make the super-rich pay

Members of the teachers' union NUT on the 26 March TUC demonstration, photo Suzanne Beishon (Click to enlarge)

"The system [capitalism] produced an ever-expanding flow of goods and services, which the impoverished proletarianised population could not afford to buy. Some 20 years ago...this would have seemed outmoded. But it needs another look, following the increase in concentration of wealth and income." These are not the words of a socialist but Samuel Brittan, the Thatcherite columnist for the Financial Times, giving his summary of Karl Marx's analysis.

In the 19th century Marx explained that capitalismcreated a trend, with brief interludes of growing prosperity, towards the concentration of wealth and power in an ever decreasing number of hands at the top of society, with increased poverty and misery at the bottom. This has never been truer than today.

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After Gaddafi

Stop the revolution’s derailment - independent workers’ action needed!

Robert Bechert, CWI

Almost every day there are warning signs of the dark shadows that NATO’s intervention has thrown over the Libyan revolution.

In a country with hardly any tradition, so far, of a workers’ movement, the distorting effects and dangers posed by the manner of Gaddafi’s overthrow are starting to come into the open.

Quickly after the revolution started, imperialist powers, Britain, France and the US especially, took advantage of the counter-attack by Gaddafi’s forces towards Benghazi and the east. Stung by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, these imperialist powers intervened as “protectors” of the Libyan people and, via the agency of the self-appointed and pro-western Transitional National Council (TNC), sought to control the revolution and exploit it for its own ends. Thus the fledging democratic bodies that had begun to develop in Benghazi were curtailed and, in essence, the TNC became a NATO ally.

The newly revealed correspondence confirming the close links between the Gaddafi regime and imperialist agencies, like the CIA and Britain’s MI6, show the Western powers’ utter hypocrisy. Their “concern” for the Libyan people under Gaddafi did not amount to much. Trade and assistance with the ‘war on terror’ were the West’s priorities.

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Con-Dems out to destroy NHS

Health and Social Care Bill final reading

Roger Shrives

March to save the NHS, 17 May 2011, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge)

On Wednesday 7 September, Tory health minister Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill reaches its report stage and third reading in parliament. This bill is intended to be the next step in destroying the national health service (NHS) won by the struggles of working class people.

Click here to read on

Plus,

Brighton protest to defend NHS collects 2,500 signatures, BBC article with quote from Socialist Party member Phil Clarke:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-14779676

EDL kept out of Tower Hamlets by thousands protesting

EDL supporters rallying in London, 3.9.11 (Click to enlarge)

Paula Mitchell

The racist and divisive English Defence League (EDL) had wanted to march through the streets of Tower Hamlets in East London on Saturday 3 September to create division and intimidate the local community.

But they were humiliated by the campaign against them. Despite the police ban on their planned march, they were still allowed a static protest. However, they could find no venue in Tower Hamlets that would have them!

Parks and public places were ruled out by the council; they were turned away by several pubs and from the Sainsbury's car park - no business wanted to be the target of a community boycott or of potential attack.

When they planned to "muster" at Liverpool Street station, the RMT in London announced that it would shut the station down on grounds of health and safety and once again the EDL were forced to change their plans.

Nonetheless, despite being thrown into disarray and demoralisation, 1,000 EDL supporters held their rally at Aldgate, just over the Tower Hamlets border in the City of London.

Click here to read on