Reblogged: anti-fascist call out for tomorrow, 10am, St Lukes (bombed out church)

Fascists are planning to hold another demo tomorrow to continue fanning the racist backlash over the Woolwich killing. They are set to meet at St Luke’s/the bombed-out church on Berry St at 10am and a counter-protest has been called. Be there and invite anyone you know: friends & family, workmates, students, trade unionists, community campaigners, LGBT groups etc.

On Friday around 30 fascists had the run of the streets, marching around the city chanting racist abuse, at one point bringing a Muslim woman to tears, all the while recruiting for their movement. We can’t let it happen again tomorrow.

This isn’t an optional extra: there have been over 150 reported attacks on Muslims since Wednesday, mosques have been attacked and petrol bombed, fascist street groups have been given a massive boost. Nick Griffin of the BNP described the situation as ‘the Stephen Lawrence moment of the Right’, after 18 months of decline the fascists hope to enter back onto the stage alongside the rise of UKIP and the drumbeat on immigration.

Its not just the immediate victims of racist abuse and violence who are at threat: if the fascists are left unchallenged on the streets it will make it increasingly difficult for those of us fighting the cuts and trying to build an alternative to organise. Our stalls will be attacked, meetings disrupted and marches harassed. The far-right are gaining traction and starting to get involved in channelling the anger at the government and its attacks on the working class such as the bedroom tax. Let’s roll them back.

Fascists on the streets of Liverpool

Yesterday around 30 fascists had free rein on the streets of Liverpool in their attempts to stoke up racist tension and violence after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich on Wednesday. They marched all through the city centre from St George’s Hall, past St John’s, down by Wolstenholme Square, on Lord St & James St where they stopped at The Liverpool pub. At one point a Muslim woman was harassed to tears with racist abuse, and no doubt many more were threatened on their own streets where we should all feel safe.

There are also reports that fascists were in town during in the day attempting to recruit, and judging by the spike in ‘likes’ on their facebook page ‘scouse nationalists’ (now over 1000 likes, 200+ in the space of 2 hours yesterday) it’s working.

The question is: where was the opposition? Some of us tried to respond at short notice and gathered a group together in town, but it was too little too late. Anti-fascist organisation in Liverpool has collapsed and this is a stark reminder of the need to rebuild.

The fascists are gaining strength, riding on the back of UKIP successes and the political lurch to the right, tapping into hatred of the Tories & the celebration of Thatcher’s death and ‘anti-political’ anger.

Perhaps most worryingly they are attempting to get involved in the campaigns against the bedroom tax. In Knowsley, known members and supporters of the National Front, ‘Scouse Nationalists’, North West Infidels, and other groups with recent histories of violence against trade unionists, anti-cuts activists, students and Occupy/UK Uncut supporters, have tried to get involved in the campaign. In Bootle, National Front members provactively marched past a PCS picket line while handing-out anti-bedroom tax leaflets.  That is too far.

Many local fascists travelled to the national EDL demo in Newcastle but they will attempt to keep up momentum over the bank holiday weekend and into next week, they have already threatened to attack a Liverpool Irish march taking place in the Vauxhall/Scotland Rd area of the city next Friday’.

Two years ago confronting the BNP in the city centre anti-fascists could be sure of broad support. However, in the aftermath of Woolwich the fascists are hell bent on cynical manipulation of the sentiment in support of the Army and Help For Heroes that has accumulated over a decade of war abroad.

This has gone alongside attacks on multiculturalism and the rhetoric of ‘Britishness’ promoted by the leadership of New Labour and intensified by the Tories, and will continue with UKIP snapping at the coalition’s heels. The situation hangs on a knife edge and could fall either way.

To all anti-fascists, trade’s unionists and activists: we need to get our act together. In practical terms this means a meeting to call us all together, a phone tree, proper use of mailing lists, materials, approaching broader groups to work alongside, and a plan to build up our numbers.

We need an honest balance sheet of where we are and a strategy to go forward. In the here and now we should be contacting local groups to make sure our communities are defended if the fascists try and attack as they have done in other cities (so far a recorded 156 attacks on Muslims since Wednesday).

We also call on student societies to support anti-fascist activity in the coming weeks. The far-right represent an unacceptable threat to our multicultural campus and city. We all have an important role to play in exposing and countering their racist agenda, be it by leafleting, putting up posters or joining local counter-demonstrations.

Beyond Resistance: The Chilean Social Movement

Chilean students have continued to make the headlines this week. Here we reproduce an article by a Liverpool student from earlier this year on the movement.

What has been going on in Chile since the beginnings of this year can be summed up as a major civil unrest with the economic, institutional and political structures that were imposed undemocratically more than 30 years ago. The student movement has made possible the actual visibility of the roots of this unrest: the forced imposition of an extreme version of the neoliberal model.

The existing Chilean educational system was basically set up within the context of 1980 Chilean Constitution. This was an illegitimate document imposed in a military dictatorship by a fraudulent referendum. In 1990 general Pinochet approved the Organic Constitutional Law of Education (LOCE) just one day before he left power. This law set up the basic principles that would trigger subsequent conflicts. Students are essentially questioning the neoliberal principles set by the constitution; they are aware that these enable not only institutionalized inequalities but an economic assault on the working class, who is forced to go into debt with huge interest rates for life.

The occupations of Universities and schools started in June 2011 while the number of people (not only students) marching weekly on the streets was rising up to 400.000 people nationally. In 2012 Chilean students and workers once again have demonstrated the strength of the social movement. This April 25, people took over the streets with more than 80.000 in Santiago and 200.000 nationally. President Sebastian Piñera has been forced to nationalise student debt. Students claimed the expulsion of private banks as their first victory, but it is not enough as they want to achieve free education and the total removal of neoliberal education.

From students and workers unions to strong grass-root social organizations, right now this movement is beyond a student movement. At this point the movement has gone beyond mere ‘resistance’ or ‘defence,’ and has taken the offensive, while simultaneously proposing alternatives. Chilean people are no longer simply ‘resisting’ privatization but rather attacking the very foundations and assumptions of bourgeois society.

Patricio De Stefani C.

Occupy Sussex solidarity statement

The following is a solidarity statement with Occupy Sussex by students in Liverpool. After a huge national demonstration and weeks of occupation, students have been served with an injunction banning protest on campus.

We, student’s and activists studying in Liverpool, have watched from afar the last seven weeks of the occupation at University of Sussex.

From the initial occupation, to the national demonstration this week, your innovation and creativity in struggle has re-animated an increasingly demoralised student movement.

We stand united with the occupiers in demanding management end its craven attempts to shut down political opposition with the courts.

We make this call not just out of support for your cause, but because this unacceptable attack on opposition bears depressing similarity to events on our own campuses.

At University of Liverpool, management pushes forward with cuts to essential services (such as a modest subsidy for students and staff using its nursery) while borrowing ludicrous sums of money to invest in wildly optimistic infrastructure developments. Over the summer a respected, long-serving academic was unceremoniously kicked out for raising opposition to managerial decisions.

Each university will have its own similar stories. Changes to funding, brought in at the end of 2010 at the end of a policeman’s truncheon, are beginning to filter down to the campus level in the form of outsourcing jobs, hiking of student rent, cuts to services, cuts to courses, attacks on access and bullying of critics.

But Sussex reminds us that we don’t have to tolerate this. Higher Education today is not the isolated world of a privileged few that it once was. Today’s system is a social factory taking in 50% of all young people and producing economically essential graduates and research. We are at once the commodity and the workforce.

Jon Snow, himself a former Liverpool student activist, told us on a visit last year that today’s students can only organise around issues of self interest. With your cooperation and solidarity with campus workers, you have proved him wrong.

The university is a factory, and we can shut it down.

• Beth Redmond, Liverpool John Moore University and NCAFC National Committee
• Pippa Georgeson, Edge Hill University & NUS Disabled Students Committee
• James Margeson, University of Liverpool
• Luke Staunton, University of Liverpool
• Jack Hogg, University of Liverpool
• Patricio De Stefani, University of Liverpool
• Anna Mason Buckley, King David College
• Millie Kidson, University of Liverpool
• Milena Schwab-Graham, University of Liverpool
• Tom Prior, University of Liverpool
• Maev McDaid, University of Liverpool and former President of Liverpool Guild of Students
• Rhiannon Lowton, Liverpool Hope University
• Kevan A. Feshami, University of Liverpool
• Gwen Grahl, University of Liverpool
• Ben Stacey, Liverpool John Moores University
• Charlotte Nichols, University of Liverpool
• Rachael Boothroyd, University of Liverpool
• Lucy Tonks, University of Liverpool (alumna)
• Aislinn Johnson, Liverpool John Moores University (alumna)
• Emma Segar, University of Liverpool & Edge Hill University
• Andrew Lockhart, King David College
• Anna Beverley, University of Liverpool
• Anna Machell, Liverpool John Moores University
• Keith Daniel Roberts, University of Liverpool
• Joe McArdle, University of Liverpool
• James Caven, University of Liverpool
• Camille Tsang, University of Liverpool (Alumna)
• Steph Dickinson, University of Liverpool

We urge readers to sign the ‘Defend The Right To Protest’ petition against the anti-protest injunction here.

Save the nursery subsidy at University of Liverpool!

The UCU (the union for academic staff) have announced that the University of Liverpool are to stop the subsidy they currently offer to staff and students with children who use their on-site nursery.

The change will come into effect in September, and will mean students and staff having to find £200 more per child per month. 18 students and 40 staff currently use the service.

To put this in context: the university is currently investing £300m in new facilities.

Cutting the subsidy will especially hit mature students and women, and is an attack on access to education. With university funding and budgets being slashed we are seeing student services and welfare first in line for closure, but it is very likely academic departments and provisions will follow in order to plug the funding gap.

Childcare was first offered at this University because students, through LGoS, pressured for it in 1969. That same student pressure will be essential to save this subsidy.

There is a petition being circulated and members of the campaign will be meeting at the Guild Reception at 12pm on Mon 18th, Tues 19th & Thurs 21st March to spread the word on campus.

Liverpool Education Activist: #demo2012 issue

The #demo2012 issue of Liverpool Education Activist can be downloaded in PDF here: #demo2012_bulletin

#Demo2012: why bother marching?

Originally published on liverpoolstudentmedia.com

So the National Union of Students has called a national demonstration.  Its hard not to be cynical about it. Those who took part in the demonstrations of 2010 probably had the same initial reaction as me to #demo2012: too little, too late. Why bother marching?

#demo2012 is about more than fees

This isn’t 2010 anymore and the situation has changed. A familiar pattern has emerged in government policy, of which Higher Education is a central pillar. The sense of crisis that the financial crash created, concentrated on government finances, has been wielded as a justification for attacks on public services.

As the first 9k cohort of students enters university, they will not be citizens enjoying a universal right, rather consumers making a subprime investment in their own human capital. Any doubt about the use of the word “subprime” can be dispelled by a glance at the graduate unemployment figures.

Hailed by some as “bold and radical”, the governments plans for education, as manifest in the HE White Paper, are in fact a continuation of a 30 year old consensus. As G4S are hired to run prisons, ATOS makes huge profits ruining people’s lives and NHS trusts prepares to sell off services to private contractors, so too does the government court those who would run universities for profit.

None of this started with the coalition. It is merely a continuation of the New Labour supply side reform, which itself was rooted in the ideas of Margaret Thatcher. This was never about saving money. It has been about an ideological transformation of education from a universal right into a consumer product and shifting debt from the state to individuals.

The Higher Education Policy Institute in a recent report came to the startling conclusion that the new student loans policy only adds up by assuming male graduates will earn in the future an average wage of £99,500. It may even turn out to be the case that 9k fees are more expensive than the old 3k fees system. Even the architect of the original top-up fee system Nick Barr has branded it “a crap policy” and “an accounting wheeze.”

This political future is far from inevitable. The coalition is weaker than it was two years ago, and fears taking on students. Nothing highlights the fractures between its two constituent parties more than universities, once a Lib Dem power base, and no policy has yet been met with such sustained opposition. Legislation that was planned for this year has been delayed and the situation is in limbo.

Why bother?

I’m not asking anyone to put all their faith in the NUS. Nor do I expect anyone to believe a walk through London is going to trigger some huge policy change in itself. Least of all do I expect anyone to fall in behind the “we are one nation” Labour party. I am as bored as everyone else of slick manifesto promises that get conveniently forgotten at the first whiff of power.

What I will argue is for students to autonomously organise for their own interests, both within and beyond our union. Recently students in Quebec defeated a planned fee rise, and toppled their provincial government with a sustained strike and radical protests.

Chilean students continue to be an inspiration as they raise the demand for a Higher Education open to everyone, and in the act of doing so expose the very foundations of vicious inequality that still pervades their society.

Both these movements recognised a key point: the imposition of fees & debt onto university students, and access to university, is a class issue. The ideology that justifies fees is the same that maintains such high youth unemployment, allows profit to be made from healthcare and strips us of rights at work.

Only by raising our demands for education together and in solidarity with the wider cause of the organised working class can we affect national politics in a meaningful way.

Soyez réaliste, demandez l’impossible!

In the UK we are a long way from achieving movements of such magnitude, but who would have thought the movement of 2010 was possible? Just briefly students punctured the seeming invincibility of the dull consensus, and provided a real challenge to the authority of the political class.

In the face of weasel words about ‘diversity of providers’ and ‘changing education landscape’ we can stand up for the basic principle: education that benefits everyone in society, is accessible to everyone in society and is paid for by everyone in society.

As Guild President Sam Butler told students at the beginning of the semester, marching is an empowering experience. Politics stops becoming something you complain about in the pub; you become an actor; participating not spectating.

The time is right for students to raise their voice again. Bring on #demo2012.

James Margeson, 4th year Geology student