DATES FOR DIARIES FOR THE BATTLES TO COME!

The details for National Demo on the 20th of June can be found on The People's Assembly website. TUSC will be there in force - look out for our banners.

The NSSN Conference details can be found here

AFTER THE ELECTION!

TUSC LOCAL MEETING - 3rd JUNE, West Croydon, 7.30pm
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Venue: Croydon Voluntary Action Centre, London Road
Right out of West Croydon station & Centre is 200 metres on right
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SPEAKERS -
Paula Mitchell - TUSC National Steering Committee
with
Glen Hart - TUSC Candidate Croydon North
April Ashley - TUSC Candidate Croydon Central
Pauline Gorman - TUSC Candidate Sutton & Cheam

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The Tories didn’t win this election. New Labour lost it!

Labour leaders offered little of substance to distinguish Labour from the Tories and LibDems - offering no hope and no concrete programme for improving the lives of the vast majority.

And for their part, the majority of trade union leaders remained shamefully silent during this crucial election - offering no counter-arguments against the daily ravings of the right-wing media. Where were they?!

Their members must organise to elect leaders prepared to organise, inspire and fight back. TUSC supporters with other union activists will be in the forefront of that battle!

Many people are now openly talking about the final demise of New Labour. There can be little doubt that shifting further rightward would finish it off.

So the fight goes on! The Tories have no mandate to impose their pro-rich agenda. Of the total electorate they obtained less than 24%. Even of those who did vote, only one out of three people voted Tory! Hardly a ringing endorsement!

In Croydon, workers and young people can expect precious little from the New Labour council. It is so bereft of ideas that it has asked the Bishop of Croydon to lead a commission to come up with suggestions!

In Sutton and Cheam a tweedledee MP has been replaced by a tweedledum one. And Sutton residents are benighted by a council of faceless and self-important place-seekers. Not a socialist amongst them - yet!

So there is much to be done!

Locally and nationally TUSC supporters will be drawing up a balance sheet of the lessons from the elections. At the same time we will be planning for the fightback over the coming period.

In addition to being an opportunity to ask any basic questions you might have about TUSC, the meeting will consider key issues such as:
* What are the key lessons of the election?
* Why building TUSC is vital - in workplaces, local communities, union branches.
* Building TUSC, right here, right now, in Croydon and Sutton!

Hope to see you!

TUSC National Steering Committee Report

We are organising our local TUSC post election meeting. Watch this space for details in the next few days.

In the meantime our national steering committee held its first post-election meeting this week. Here is its report.

- Against the backdrop of a Tory-majority government committed to accelerated austerity, albeit one with the lowest ever share of support amongst the total electorate (24.4%), the need the build on the TUSC campaign to develop a socialist electoral alternative was recognised by all.

The meeting agreed a vote of thanks to all the 748 candidates - and their agents and campaign teams - who contested the elections on May 7th under the TUSC umbrella, polling a combined total of 118,125 votes.

A detailed report of the TUSC results was accepted and is now available, in PDF format, at www.tusc.org.uk/txt/338.pdf

The meeting noted the best parliamentary scores were for Dave Nellist in Coventry North West (1,769 votes, 3.9%) and Jenny Sutton in Tottenham (1,324, 3.1%) but recognised, as anticipated, there was an almost uniform incidence of 'split voting'.

This meant that many voters - in some cities by a four to one ratio - supported TUSC but, afraid of the (now realised) prospect of another Tory government, were only prepared to vote for a local council candidate at this stage.

Most English councils outside of London had elections this year and TUSC fielded a record total of 613 candidates.

The victory of the Southampton anti-cuts 'rebel councillor' Don Thomas was applauded by the meeting. Don was re-elected for his Coxford ward, which he holds with the TUSC national steering committee member Keith Morrell, with a 37.2% share of the vote, exactly 1,000 votes ahead of Labour.

There were also two Town councillors elected on Thursday on TUSC's anti-cuts platform, another sign that the fight around local council services will be a vital part of building resistance to the government.

On this basis the steering committee agreed to organise a 'councillors forum' in July, open not just to TUSC supporters but to any councillor who wants to fight, to discuss the details of how to prepare and build support for no-cuts 'needs budgets'.

A TUSC directory of councils with elections in 2016 - nearly half of which are Labour-controlled - is available at www.tusc.org.uk/txt/340.pdf

The steering committee also agreed to organise a TUSC conference for September 26th to prepare for the 2016 elections, which include the elections to the National Assembly for Wales and the Greater London Authority elections as well as the local council contests (and Mayoral elections in Bristol, Liverpool and Salford).

The Scottish TUSC steering committee will organise a separate conference to plan for the Scottish Parliament elections also taking place in May next year.

TORY VICTORY!...

There will be much celebrating in London’s exclusive gentlemen’s clubs today!

And workers will feel downcast.

Despite 5 years of a strongly anti-working class government (and anti-middle class too, if truth be told), New Labour has utterly failed to rally working class votes to defeat the smug Tories.

Those votes Labour did get were in the forlorn hope that they would help keep the Tories out.

But hope is not a strategy!

The two parties most associated with betrayal - the LibDems and New Labour - were punished.

In Scotland Labour is finished - their open alliance with the Tories during the independence vote was the last straw for the vast majority of workers and young people.

Many people asked themselves - why vote for a party that generally speaking has adopted Tories’  policies? - even some of UKIPs! - I may as well vote for the real thing! 

And UKIP has made gains in Labour strongholds.

That UKIP obtained nearly 4 million votes is a blistering condemnation of the Labour leadership and those right-wing leaders of the trade unions who failed to counter head on the arguments of UKIP that it somehow represents the interests of workers!

Instead of fighting on a clear anti-austerity platform with policies aimed at benefiting working people, they said they would stick to Tory cuts in services!

Labour produced a campaign mug with “Immigration Controls” on it! 

They should hang their heads in shame.

It is surely time now for all those who want to fight openly, as we do, for the interests of working people to join together with TUSC and others to build a fighting party of labour.

Our voice isn’t yet loud enough.

Help us raise it! 

MORE REASONS TO SHOP AT MORRISONS?

It is widely known that Morrisons hasn’t been doing well lately. In fact the chief executive officer (Dalton Philips) was sacked recently because he failed to improve Morrison’s position.

It’s also widely known that top managers are supposed to be paid by results. When the firm does well (by the shareholders, that is), so do they.

So you’d expect that Mr Philips would not be rewarded very much, due to having been sacked for failure. Well you’d be wrong.

According to the Financial Times, today,

“His pay package in his final year added up to £2.1m. The remuneration committee decided that he had hit enough targets to justify 60 per cent of his maximum bonus, including for his “personal” attributes, whatever they were.

Because he is classed as a “good leaver” he will collect a year’s salary and will keep the right to future share payments, which could add up to another £2m as a going-away present”.

So that’s around £4m altogether. Food for thought.

Could Morrisons afford to pay its workers £10 an hour?

PRESS FREEDOM?

One of the many different issues that General Election candidates are being questioned about is the issue of 'press freedom'. Here is Martin Powell-Davies' response (TUSC candidate Lewisham West and Penge) to the emails that he has received:

Thank you for getting in touch to publicise to Election candidates your concerns about the lack of real press freedom in Britain and the undue influence that press barons like Rupert Murdoch can exert.

I completely share your concerns. The 2015 World Press Freedom Index put the UK only in 34th place. The ‘Murdochgate’ scandal helped to expose the close links between David Cameron and News of the World editors but also between Tony Blair and Murdoch too. Just recently, Richard Desmond announced he was donating £1m to UKIP, a Party that likes to pretend it isn’t part of that establishment.

These links are designed to bind together the political parties with the interests of the wealthy super-rich. Their ranks have swelled by another 13 billionaires in the last year according to the latest Sunday Times rich-list – and they say ‘we’re all in it together’!

Of course, it is made very clear to those Party leaders that if they speak out against those big business interests, they can expect to be silenced or attacked in the press. TUSC, as a Party campaigning against the austerity policies of big business and their establishment parties, is itself a victim of the lack of genuine media freedom. With 135 candidates standing in the General Election, well over the legal threshold for ‘fair coverage’, we have been largely excluded from much of the media, opinion poll forecasts and, of course, the leadership debates.

Despite this, our 280 seconds of Party Political Broadcast, backed up by the campaigning we are doing in towns and cities across Britain, has already helped to break down the barriers put up to hide our alternative voice from voters. Our policies for decent homes, wages and services chime with people’s views and mean our support is growing all the time.

The pledge in our broadcast from TUSC candidates, including Dave Nellist and myself, to be a ‘workers’ MP on a worker’s wage’ also wins support. It is a policy that hopefully reassures voters that TUSC’s elected representatives will remain committed to the people that backed them, rather than being persuaded otherwise by the press barons.

TUSC would certainly support tighter rules on media ownership and legislation to support, at the very least, the full implementation of the Leveson report. However, I believe the fundamental problem is not one of poor regulation, but that the media is almost entirely owned by big business individuals and conglomerates. As a journalist once put it in a letter to Der Spiegel, ‘Press freedom is the freedom of 200 rich people to express their opinion’.

A genuinely free press requires substantial media resources to be made available for genuine public use, under public ownership, control and accountability. I would support all political parties and trends being granted access to the media, perhaps in proportion to their support in the population as shown in elections. Then we would start to have a media that can provide accurate information and quality investigative journalism, one that can be accessed by minority points of view not just those of the establishment political parties.

SUTTON CAMPAIGN NOTES

Tousle-haired “ordinary person” Boris Johnson was on Sutton High Street today, hoping to boost the Tory campaign in this marginal seat. The LibDems repeat endlessly their mantra that only they can keep out the Tories.

As though that would make any material difference for working people in Sutton and Cheam. Tweedledum out, Tweedledee in.

But, as for keeping the Tories out, have not the LibDems actually been a Tory partner in the coalition government for the past five years! They haven’t kept the Tories out; they’ve kept them in!

As for New Labour (or is it “One Nation Labour”?) - the local party seeks to follow the “Croydon Line”. Like Croydon, Sutton Labour are also bereft of ideas and ambition. They too would set up a local “Fairness Commission” like the one in Croydon - which is chaired by the Bishop.

What an admission of defeat! The once mighty Labour Party reduced to scratching around for ideas. At least one of their MPs knows what the Labour Party is for, Rachel Reeves.

She said, “We are not the party of people on benefits”, or those out of work! Labour leaders themselves have repeated that they will continue austerity policies. Ed Balls has said he would not reverse any of Osborne’s cuts to public services.

There is one party standing in Sutton, though, that we do have much sympathy for - the National Health Action Party. There is nothing of substance that TUSC would disagree with in their analysis of what’s happening to the NHS.

They expose the wastefulness of privatisation and PFI. They expose the hypocrisy of the main parties in their posturing “defence” of the NHS - whilst in power, destroying it.

We especially like their exposure of Paul Burstow’s “brass neck” in pretending to support the NHS whilst supporting Tory legislation that undermines it.

TUSC agrees with what the NHA party says on the NHS. However, a party that seeks election of MPs must have policies that address all the key issues that affect working people and their families.

As the NHA develop a wider range of policies - which their website suggests they may be doing - we hope that in future we will be able to work more closely with them. Perhaps they could consider joining the TUSC coalition?