People disputing the figure need to take it up with the Police. If anything, since that was the Police estimate, the true figure was probably more like 400,000. Michael Meacher writes:
Governments
don’t listen to Parliament so long as they have a majority, but they do listen
to social movements amassing their forces against them.
Saturday’s rally
against austerity assembling 250,000 activists is a very good start, and it
needs to be followed through with ever bigger demos over the next few months.
You can always tell when the Establishment is worried: at first they ignore it (only The Times reported the rally, not the other right-wing papers), then they report it but only if scuffles or violence takes place (there wasn’t any), and then if the pressure continues and grows bigger still, government takes notice and behind the scenes begins to backtrack.
There are very good reasons why the government can, and should be, forced into retreat.
This prolonged austerity is brutally unjust, punishing the victims of the financial crash whilst letting the perpetrators off with impunity.
It isn’t even working: the deficit is still £92bn and hardly reducing at all, whilst growth – the real way to pay off a deficit – is being squashed, the latest quarterly growth figure having plummeted to just 0.3%.
And Cameron/Osborne have no mandate for austerity, anyway.
It wasn’t mentioned in the Tory manifesto, and they even doggedly refused to make clear where the next £12bn of welfare cuts which had been announced would come from.
Moreover the Tories got less than 37% of the electorate to support them, and they were only backed by less than a quarter of those who voted – the lowest share of the vote in their history.
The Tories are far from invulnerable.
They only have a majority of 12, and the formation of a hard-right faction in the Tory parliamentary party risks exposing very deep divisions and conceivably even triggering a split as in 1846.
The economy is in much deeper trouble than Osborne lets on or the Labour party highlights.
The Tories are still seen and resented as the defenders of a discredited elite, and top pay excesses have reached such heights that grotesque inequality could still spark the explosion waiting to happen.
And Cameron’s plans to make most strikes illegal as well as ramping up strike-ballot thresholds should ensure that the whole weight of the trade union movement is thrown in to support not only industrial action, but demonstrations and local fightbacks across the country.
You can always tell when the Establishment is worried: at first they ignore it (only The Times reported the rally, not the other right-wing papers), then they report it but only if scuffles or violence takes place (there wasn’t any), and then if the pressure continues and grows bigger still, government takes notice and behind the scenes begins to backtrack.
There are very good reasons why the government can, and should be, forced into retreat.
This prolonged austerity is brutally unjust, punishing the victims of the financial crash whilst letting the perpetrators off with impunity.
It isn’t even working: the deficit is still £92bn and hardly reducing at all, whilst growth – the real way to pay off a deficit – is being squashed, the latest quarterly growth figure having plummeted to just 0.3%.
And Cameron/Osborne have no mandate for austerity, anyway.
It wasn’t mentioned in the Tory manifesto, and they even doggedly refused to make clear where the next £12bn of welfare cuts which had been announced would come from.
Moreover the Tories got less than 37% of the electorate to support them, and they were only backed by less than a quarter of those who voted – the lowest share of the vote in their history.
The Tories are far from invulnerable.
They only have a majority of 12, and the formation of a hard-right faction in the Tory parliamentary party risks exposing very deep divisions and conceivably even triggering a split as in 1846.
The economy is in much deeper trouble than Osborne lets on or the Labour party highlights.
The Tories are still seen and resented as the defenders of a discredited elite, and top pay excesses have reached such heights that grotesque inequality could still spark the explosion waiting to happen.
And Cameron’s plans to make most strikes illegal as well as ramping up strike-ballot thresholds should ensure that the whole weight of the trade union movement is thrown in to support not only industrial action, but demonstrations and local fightbacks across the country.
Addressed by Charlotte Church and Russell Brand.
ReplyDeleteFurther comment would be superfluous.
Even they are intellectually more serious than George Osborne. Just ask the Institute of Economic Affairs.
DeleteThat is before mentioning Boris Johnson.
No one suggests that either Church or Brand ought to become Prime Minister.
But then, Osborne's and Johnson's party has no one else. That is how Osborne is Chancellor at all: there is no one else.
It is, I agree, a crime that intellectually brilliant economic thinkers like John Redwood (who has no match in Parliament) are kept out in favour of Cameron's Eton chums.
ReplyDeleteHe's not an economist at all. A far better historian than Osborne. But no more an economist. That was Ed Balls.
Delete