In May, the University of London (UOL) announced its decision to shut down the University of London Union (ULU) from August 2014, and replace it with a management run services centre. In response, students at UOL have launched a campaign to reverse the decision, which was taken without student consent. The ‘Save Your Union‘ campaign is not only fighting to prevent the closure of ULU but is also demanding better working conditions for all campus workers and greater student oversight into the running the university itself. 

The initial organising meeting for the campaign took place at the beginning of October and representatives from numerous campuses, clubs and societies were in attendance and spent the evening in working groups developing a coordinated campaign strategy for the next six months. The first major date of the campaign will be a national mobilisation on campus (Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY), scheduled for this Wednesday (13 November) at 13.00pm. Additionally, a student referendum is expected to be carried out in the near future and a number of complimentary actions—including club-nights and promotional videos—are already being planned.

The loss of ULU—the only democratically ran representative body for students within UOL and a genuine focal point for student life in London—would be catastrophic.

For more information contact:

daniel.cooper@ulu.lon.ac.uk

michael.chessum@ulu.lon.ac.uk

womens@ulu.lon.ac.uk

Source: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/demonstration-to-save-the-university-of-london-union/

‘Margaret Thatcher is Dead: This lady is not returning!’ is one way of the calmer statements celebrating Thatcher’s demise on my Facebook page. I can’t join the clamour singing ‘Ding dong the witch is dead’, trailing as it does its horrific historical sexism. More sadly, I can’t see anything to celebrate.

Whilst this once formidable Tory trailblazer is dead, her ideas are more resurgent than ever. Neither Cameron nor Osborne will ever be damned as warlocks or necromancers – this rarely happens to men – yet it is thanks to them that Margaret Thatcher dies triumphant. Thatcher’s success, like that of her pal, Ronald Reagan, was that through a combination of shrewdness and luck she could ride the high tide of corporate capital’s determination to increase profits by rolling back all the popular gains of the post-war settlement. She was neoliberalism’s willing tool, rather than something unique, evil or otherwise.

‘Markets know better than governments’

What is truly extraordinary about these times is that while Thatcher’s economic legacy has imploded, her ideological stance – which as she said was always her main agenda – is more viciously enforced than ever. ‘Markets know better than governments’, was her pivotal mantra, the rest flowed from this. Oh no they do not! You would think we must all have learned this from the catastrophic economic collapse in 2008, when so many banks had to be bailed out by governments, only to be returned as quickly as possible: old bonuses intact, new regulations non-existent.

All too quickly forgotten is the revelation of the cruel absurdity of the economic collapse set in motion by the buccaneers of the finance sector that Thatcher had ‘liberated’ in October 1986, with all the reckless gambling and belief that ‘toxic debt’ was itself a tradable commodity. Or at least, any such knowledge is drowned out by the continued combination of coalition rhetoric baiting Gordon Brown and the Labour Party, together with relentless media attacks on the ‘undeserving’ poor, or any other scapegoats conjured up to misdirect people’s sense of resentment, fear and insecurity: ‘Crisis: Blame the baby boomers, not the bankers’, was a typically absurd headline in The Times when Irish banks were on the point of collapse at the start of 2010, summarising the argument by their chief economic analyst, Anatole Kaletsky.

In these topsy-turvy times, any thoughtful, reforming responses to the crisis, no matter how carefully argued and widely supported by fellow economists – such as those put forward by the highly respected American economist, Paul Krugman – are tossed aside in the UK. No reference to Keynesianism or any policies for decreasing the obscene inequality that helped generate the crisis are considered. Instead, after so much mayhem, Thatcher’s worship of market values rules supreme, motivating vicious cuts in welfare and the surreptitious turning over of what remains of the public sector to the private, even as the crisis in market forces and the finance sector continues to deepen, especially in Europe.

Where is the alternative?

Of course there have been impressive flurries of resistance, and for a while in the wake of the Occupy movement, grass-roots dissent was back on the political agenda. Networks of resistance are active around the country, especially in defence of the NHS. Yet those eager to dance on Thatcher’s grave have much thinking to do, when there remains such a lack of connection between protesters and mainstream politics. Indeed, as Paul Mason admits in his book celebrating all the new protest movements around the globe, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, most of the people he interviewed ‘were hostile to the very idea of a unifying theory’. Yet it is surely some sort of compelling counter-ideology and alternative strategy to the ubiquitous rule of market forces that we are desperately in need of if we are ever to safely bury Thatcher.

Although the rich few get richer and the rest of us poorer, the left has yet to strike any real chord with the broader public. We know that it was Tony Blair, or ‘Blairism’, which – as Thatcher knew – did so much to entrench her legacy: with his seamless endorsement of market values and public veneration for wealth and celebrity, even as it furthered cynicism about politicians and politics generally. We have headed so far down that stream, it is hard now to turn things around.

It took the extraordinary conditions of the Second World War to create the Labour Party’s comprehensive commitment to welfare, albeit of a conservative and authoritarian kind. The reforms and nationalisations inaugurating the British welfare state, post-1945, were based on the deliberate spread of a consensus that it was economic insecurities and domestic unhappiness that created unhappy societies: ‘many of the maladjustments and neuroses of modern society’, as Bevan explained when minister of health, arose directly from poverty and insecurity. When will our politicians say these words again? Any direct action, movement politics or coalitions of resistance we build today has to find ways to influence national government to reaffirm that mind-set, hopefully with more creative agendas than hitherto, before we can bury Thatcher.

Thatcher and feminism

And since I began with a feminist note, let me also end there. Some women have argued that it was Thatcher who provided the best role model for helping women release their true potential. No she did not. She was the perfect role model for the ever deepening gulf between women, as the privileged few have been able to rise to the very heights of political or corporate power, even as the majority of women, affected at every turn by the rolling back of welfare and the politics of individual success she promoted, are ever more firmly left at the bottom of the heap.

Source: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/i-dont-feel-like-dancin/

It was immediately seen as a tax on the poor (who lived in more crowded conditions than the rich, obviously) and an extension of government powers over the population due to the need for registration of every individual.

The battle of Trafalgar (Square) A countrywide demonstration was planned for Central London. On March 31st 1990 over 250,000 people participated in the demo, calling for mass non-payment and resistance to the tax. There was a carnival atmosphere. As the demonstration passed Thatcher’s headquarters (Downing St) there was a confrontation with police, which soon turned into a battle with mounted police and riot units. Eventually, Trafalgar Sq nearby became a battleground as thousands of people fought police for control of the square. As the police became more desperate and brutal the battle spread to nearby streets and throughout the main commercial streets in the West End. It went on for hours.

source: http://radicalhistorynetwork.blogspot.nl/2010/03/poll-tax-and-battle-of-trafalgar-square.html

Public support increased after the demo. By the following year 18 million people were refusing to pay the tax. Thatcher resigned, largely as a result of the damage to her credibility and strategy over the poll tax fiasco. And a few days before an anniversary demo at Trafalgar Sq the next March, PM John Major announced that the tax was uncollectable and would be scrapped.

George Osborne‘s latest budget confirms that austerity policies are set to continue for years to come (Budget 2013, 20 March).

This is a call from economists and academics to all those millions of people in Britain who face an impoverished and uncertain year as their wages, jobs, conditions and welfare provision come under renewed attack by the government. It is important that people understand that there is a large body of opinion against these policies.

With some 80% of austerity measures still to come, and with the government lengthening the time they expect cuts to last, we are calling a people’s assembly against austerity to bring together campaigns against cuts and privatisation with trade unionists in a movement for social justice. We aim to develop a strategy for resistance to mobilise millions of people against the Con Dem government. Register for the People’s Assembly here

Professor Ha-Joon Chang Cambridge
Professor Hugo Radice Leeds
Professor Stephanie Blankenburg SOAS
Professor Ian Gough LSE
Tom Lines Economic consultant
Professor George Irvin SOAS
Professor Malcolm Sawyer Leeds
Senior lecturer David Hudson UCL
Professor Diane Elson Essex
Professor Sergio Rossi Fribourg
Professor Andrew Dobson Keele
Professor Frances Stewart Oxford
Professor Alan Freeman London Metropolitan
Sir Anthony Atkinson Oxford
Professor Christine Cooper Strathclyde
Dr Bruce Philip NTU
Professor John Weeks SOAS
Molly Scott-Cato Gaia economics
Professor Simon Mohun London
Professor Giuseppe Fontana Leeds
Diego Sanchez-Conchea Oxford
Professor Victoria Chick UCL
Michael Burke Economic consultant
Professor Simon Lilley Leicester
Professor Andy Denis City
Richard Wolff
Senior lecturer John Simister MMU
Professor Colin Richardson Imperial
Professor John Ross Shanghai
Professor Matthew Watson Warwick
Dr Julian Wells Kingston
Professor Judith Clifton Cantabria
Professor David Byrne Durham
James Meadway Senior economist, Nef
Professor Andrew Cumbers Glasgow
Professor Mario Seccareccia Ottawa
Associate professor Anitra Nelson RMIT
Ann Pettifor PRIME
Dr Theodore Koutsobinas UWG
Professor Guglielmo Davanzati Salento
Professor Hartmut Elsehans Leipzig
Professor Julie Matthaei Wellesley
Professor David Harvey CUNY
Professor Raphael Kaplinsky Open University
Professor David Gleicher Adelphi
Professor Geoffrey Harcourt UNSW
Adjunct professor Steven Hail Adelaide
Professor Noemi Levy-Orlik UNAM
Professor Stefano Lucarelli Bergamo
Associate professor Louis-Philippe Rochon Ontario
Roy Rotheim Skidmore
Professor Judith Mehta
Dr Hideo Shingu Kyoto
Professor Daniel Diaz-Fuentes Unican
Professor Riccardo Bellofiore Bergamo
Professor Alan Ciblis UNGS
Dr Jesus Munoz Lancaster
Professor Mary Mellor Northumbria
Dr Veronica Villarespe UNAM
Arturo Hermann
Dr Pritam Singh Oxford
Professor John King La Trobe
Professor Elizabth Dore Southampton

 Source: http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/2013/03/63-economists-pledge-support-for-peoples-assembly/

Clearly, the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail. When prosecutors choose not to prosecute to the full extent of the law in a case as egregious as this, the law itself is diminished. The deterrence that comes from the threat of criminal prosecution is weakened, if not lost.

In the HSBC case, prosecutors may want the public to focus on the $1.92 billion settlement, which includes forfeiture of $1.26 billion and other penalties, as well as requirements to improve its internal controls and submit to the oversight of an outside monitor for the next five years. But even large financial settlements are small compared with the size of international major banks. More important, once criminal sanctions are considered off limits, penalties and forfeitures become just another cost of doing business, a risk factor to consider on the road to profits.

There is no doubt that the wrongdoing at HSBC was serious and pervasive. Several foreign banks have been fined in recent years for flouting United States sanctions against transferring money through American subsidiaries on behalf of clients in countries like Iran, Sudan and Cuba. HSBC’s actions were even more egregious. According to several law enforcement officials with knowledge of the inquiry, prosecutors found that, for years, HSBC had also moved tainted money from Mexican drug cartels and Saudi banks with ties to terrorist groups.

Those findings echo those of a Congressional report, issued in July, which said that between 2001 and 2010, HSBC exposed the American “financial system to money laundering and terrorist financing risks.” Prosecutors and Congressional investigators were also alarmed by indications that senior HSBC officials might have been complicit in the illegal activity and that the bank did not tighten its lax controls against money laundering even after repeated urgings from federal officials.

Yet government officials will argue that it is counterproductive to levy punishment so severe that a bank could be destroyed in the process. That may be true as far as it goes. But if banks operating at the center of the global economy cannot be held fully accountable, the solution is to reduce their size by breaking them up and restricting their activities — not shield them and their leaders from prosecution for illegal activities.

Nurses, firefighters, teachers and prison officers joined over 150,000 protesters yesterday in huge demonstrations against the Government, loudly cheering calls for a 24-hour general strike.

No wonder the protesters are back. They are angry at the backdoor rewriting of the social contract

• Ha-Joon Chang

Rioters beat a policeman during a rally against government austerity measures in Athens. Photograph: John Kolesidis/REUTERS

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, when many developing countries were in crisis and borrowing money from the International Monetary Fund, waves of protests in those countries became known as the “IMF riots”. They were so called because they were sparked by the fund’s structural adjustment programmes, which imposed austerity, privatisation and deregulation.

The IMF complained that calling these riots thus was unfair, as it had not caused the crises and was only prescribing a medicine, but this was largely self-serving. Many of the crises had actually been caused by the asset bubbles built up following IMF-recommended financial deregulation. Moreover, those rioters were not just expressing general discontent but reacting against the austerity measures that directly threatened their livelihoods, such as cuts in subsidies to basic commodities such as food and water, and cuts in already meagre welfare payments.

The IMF programme, in other words, met such resistance because its designers had forgotten that behind the numbers they were crunching were real people. These criticisms, as well as the ineffectiveness of its economic programme, became so damaging that the IMF has made a lot of changes in the past decade or so. It has become more cautious in pushing for financial deregulation and austerity programmes, renamed its structural adjustment programmes as poverty reduction programmes, and has even (marginally) increased the voting shares of the developing countries in its decision-making.

Given these recent changes in the IMF, it is ironic to see the European governments inflicting an old-IMF-style programme on their own populations. It is one thing to tell the citizens of some faraway country to go to hell but it is another to do the same to your own citizens, who are supposedly your ultimate sovereigns. Indeed, the European governments are out-IMF-ing the IMF in its austerity drive so much that now the fund itself frequently issues the warning that Europe is going too far, too fast.

The threat to livelihoods has reached such a dimension that renewed bouts of rioting are now rocking Greece, Spain and even the usually quieter Portugal. In the case of Spain, its national integrity is threatened by the separatist demand made by the Catalan nationalists, who think the austerity policy is unfairly reducing the region’s autonomy.

Even if these and other European countries (for other countries have not been free of protests against austerity programmes, such as Britain’s university fees riot and the protests by Italy’s “recession widows”) survive this social unrest through a mixture of heavy-handed policing and political delaying tactics, recent events raise a very serious question about the nature of European politics.

What has been happening in Europe – and indeed the US in a more muted and dispersed form – is nothing short of a complete rewriting of the implicit social contracts that have existed since the end of the second world war. In these contracts, renewed legitimacy was bestowed on the capitalist system, once totally discredited following the great depression. In return it provided a welfare state that guarantees minimum provision for all those burdens that most citizens have to contend with throughout their lives – childcare, education, health, unemployment, disability and old age.

Of course there is nothing sacrosanct about any of the details of these social contracts. Indeed, the contracts have been modified on the margins all the time. However, the rewriting in many European countries is an unprecedented one. It is not simply that the scope and the speed of the cuts are unusually large. It is more that the rewriting is being done through the back door.

Instead of it being explicitly cast as a rewriting of the social contract, changing people’s entitlements and changing the way the society establishes its legitimacy, the dismembering of the welfare state is presented as a technocratic exercise of “balancing the books”. Democracy is neutered in the process and the protests against the cuts are dismissed. The description of the externally imposed Greek and Italian governments as “technocratic” is the ultimate proof of the attempt to make the radical rewriting of the social contract more acceptable by pretending that it isn’t really a political change.

The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies – not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract. Especially if they are going to have to go through long tunnels of economic difficulties in coming years, and in the context of global shifts in economic power balance and of severe environmental challenges, European countries can ill afford to have the legitimacy of their political systems damaged in this way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/28/europe-riots-root-imf-austerity?CMP=twt_gu