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No Ifs No Buts No Education or Public Service Cuts!!
Demonstrate Against The Cuts
Saturday 11th December, 11.30am – Assemble Woking Railway Station
Called By Save Our Services in Surrey.
With the participation of students and all local Trades Unions
People from all over Surrey are coming together to demonstrate against the cuts to education, the rise in university fees and the cuts to public services.
It’s time we made our voices heard
Here in Guildford, we want to use this demonstration to kick start a broad and democratic campaign against fees and cuts in the university and in the college- as well as the cuts to public services.
Join the campaign: Guildford Against Fees And Cuts – Join the Facebook page for updates and information.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Guildford-Against-Fees-Cuts/167151436659040
And Join us in Woking
Read Our Statement:
https://suacs.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/guildford-against-fees-andcuts-2.doc
Join Save Our Services in Surrey: Demonstrate 24 November.
Build General Assemblies
In Guildford
We need a broad based student movement in the University to resist education cuts. A General Assembly that recognises the attacks on education is part of a wider program of attacks on public services.Here in Guildford we are seeing the total scrapping of the Connections careers service. Youth centers are being closed and social workers are being made redundant. This is in addition to a £3.9m reduction to front-line services for children and young people that was implemented earlier in the year. There have been 400 redundancies at the hospital with more on the way. A 25% reduction in our fire service. Road repairs are being put on-hold and road-gritting will be stopped this year. Council workers are being made redundant. There are cuts in benefits for the ever increasing numbers of unemployed, and services for the disabled are being cut. The Education Welfare service is being scrapped. The ‘Mother and Baby’ support centers have been closed. The list is endless. Bus services are also about to be reduced and in some places scrapped, due to the ending of the grant bus companies receive to provide less profitable bus services.
These local attacks are in-part due to a 30% cut in the central government grant awarded to local councils. Students, workers, trade unionists and service users must campaign together to put a stop to these unnecessary assaults on public services.Save Our Services in Surrey has already led several successful campaigns, stopping the closures of Shortwood School and Brooklands College. It has a dozen trades union branches affiliated to it, and several community organisations. Royal Holloway University Anti-Cuts Alliance, based at the Royal Holloway University in Egham is also affiliated.Surrey University needs a large Anti-Cuts campaign “Save Our Services in Surrey Students” that can benefit from the knowledge of experienced campaigners and trade unionists, and with whom we can co-ordinate our campaigns.
Education Activists Network Planning Meeting, 15th November.
With millions of young people, teachers and students inspired by the size and militancy of the 10 November national education demonstration, last night’s planning meeting for the Education Activists Network (EAN) was full of two hundred students and trade unionists in London who were eager to join the resistance and make their voice on the way forward heard.
Education Activists Network Planning Meeting, 15th November.With millions of young people, teachers and students inspired by the size and militancy of the 10 November national education demonstration, last night’s planning meeting for the Education Activists Network (EAN) was full of two hundred students and trade unionists in London who were eager to join the resistance and make their voice on the way forward heard.
But it rapidly became clear that the meeting – billed as an open and democratic forum for action was just a fig leaf for decisions made behind closed doors by an unelected clique. Farcically, an irresponsible 2pm gathering point just outside the Liberal HQ on the 24th November had already been announced to the national press in a conference called a few hours earlier by Socialist Worker Party (SWP) members within EAN.
Even worse; while the EAN, little more than an SWP front was unilaterally announcing the Liberal HQ protest, the SWP’s other front organisation, Right To Work, was sending out emails calling for the protest to be outside Parliament.
Nonetheless, new faces, not just from the education movement but from London trade unions and youth services in the capital quickly filled the room. Activists excited by the prospect of a militant struggle against cuts chatted to each other, exchanging contact details and information.
When the meeting was started by Kings College UCU President Jim Wolfreys, there were shouts from the floor asking why NUS President Aaron Porter, who was due to be speaking, hadn’t turned up. “Where is he?!” students cried!
Speaking from the platform, Paul Whittaker, UCU President refused to condone or condemn the occupiers of Millbank Tower, while Mark Bergfeld from the NUS ‘block-of-12’ and SWP made an impassioned speech for solidarity with those arrested, to escalate the action and build committees of action as part of building a movement capable of launching a general strike to break the Con-Dem government. A speaker from a successful indefinite strike at Tower Hamlets College spoke about the electrifying effect student protests had had on workers at her college.
Mark was right dead right that we need committees of action – but it soon became clear that this meeting certainly wasn’t one.
Strike together!
John Bowman from REVOLUTION said that it was “a disgrace” that Aaron Porter hadn’t shown his face and that if he refuses to fight to save our education, then he should “make way for someone who will.” He said that we should defend education “by any means necessary”, and that we needed a national UCU strike alongside mass student struggle to defeat the cuts.
Echoing this, a member of the National Union of Teachers NEC said that their union was bringing forward their claims, aiming to coordinate national strike action with other public sector unions. He said that a focus for our movement had to be getting rid of Britain’s anti-union laws that allow the courts to ban strikes if they do not fulfill strict criteria. Simon Hardy from REVOLUTION at Westminster University said: “If they’re scared of a few broken windows, they’ll be terrified when we build a movement that gives workers the confidence to break the anti-union laws.”
Act before you think?
But as more speakers from the floor put forward ideas for the next steps that should be taken, Education Activists Network leaflets were passed round the room – declaring that students should gather outside the Lib Dem HQ at 2pm.
But a meeting of 60 students the night before, representing a large number of different universities and F/E colleges had already decided that this was potentially dangerous – at best leading people into a police pen or “kettle”, and at worst gathering an unformed and unorganised demonstration into the hands of violent police bent on revenge for the Tory HQ occupation. So a compromise was reached, that protests should meet at Trafalgar Square at 12pm, 10 minutes away from the HQ.
Socialist Workers Party and EAN activists, including Mark Bergfeld had attended this meeting – and chose to ignore the democratically agreed decisions.
Ashok Kumar, Education Officer at LSE was exasperated. He said that he was on the EAN steering committee – but had not been at all consulted about the 2pm Lib Dem office start point, and told about the press conference only one hour before it happened.
EAN is looking and acting more like a party front than a grassroots campaign, if it continues like this, it will not organise the movement but become irrelevant to it.
So what can we do instead? – General Assemblies
In European countries which have seen mass movements of youth and students, like France and Greece, General Assemblies are called which bring students, workers, different unions and campaigns together, at local, regional and national levels. This is what we need to see in Britain now as a burning priority. At these meetings proposals for action are made, voted upon and taken back to local groups by delegates for implementation – and breaking the decisions made by the mass movement is a recipe for isolation.
The assemblies are democratic and grow out of the movement, being called and built for by all activists as organising centers for the struggle.
We need a general assembly of students in Guildford to unite students into an unstoppable movement and to co-ordinate our actions locally and nationally with workers, youth and trade unionists.
A General Assembly has been called in London for the 21st November. Jo Pinto from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) said she hoped the Assembly on Sunday would be the first of many. “It’s a great initiative. This is where things really kick off. The General Assembly will bring unity to our movement – but that doesn’t have to mean consensus – if we democratically choose the strategy to go forward, we’ve succeeded.”
“In France and other countries across Europe with enormous student movements, general assemblies have played a key role not just in organising mass unified resistance to government attacks, but have even gone on to becoming key coordinating bodies in mass general strike situations”.
Revolution Socialist Youth and NCAFC member John Bowman, one of the General Assembly’s organisers said “The General Assembly will aim to bring together university and college anti-cuts groups, trade unionists, student unions, college students and school students into a mighty mass forum of resistance to the attacks on education and beyond.
We musn’t let the SWP split the student campaign. Come to the lunch-time protest on 24th November, 12-2pm outside Starbucks, near the entrance to the Student Union. Join the campaign against Fees and Cuts by joining Guildford Against Fees And Cuts on the 24th. 
Save Our Services in Surrey:
www.saveourservic.es
Guildford Against Fees & Cuts:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Guildford-Against-Fees-Cuts/167151436659040
London General Assembly on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/l/d609cWb0KaSafN8-yterA3Vs1_g;www.socialistrevolution.org/1416/londonassembly
As The United States declines trade war looms
In the wake of the fractious International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting held October 9-10 in Washington, the descent into global currency and trade war has accelerated, with the United States playing the role of instigator-in-chief.
The US is deliberately encouraging a sell-off of dollars on international currency markets in order to raise the relative exchange rates of its major trade rivals, increasing the effective price of their exports to the US while cheapening US exports to their markets.
While largely responsible for the growing financial disorder, Washington is accusing China, in particular, of jeopardizing global economic recovery by refusing to more quickly raise the exchange rate of its currency, the renminbi (also known as the yuan). By working to drive down the value of the dollar, the US government and the Federal Reserve Board are placing ever greater pressure on the Chinese to revalue, ignoring warnings from Beijing that a rapid rise in its currency will harm its export industries, leading to mass layoffs and social unrest.
The protectionist cheap-dollar policy has an important domestic political function as well. It aims to divert growing public anger over the refusal of the government to provide jobs or serious relief to the unemployed away from the Obama administration and Congress and toward China and “foreigners” more generally. Among its most enthusiastic supporters is the trade union bureaucracy.
The US Commerce Department report Thursday that the US trade deficit widened nearly 9 percent in August, primarily due to a record $28 billion deficit with China, will be used to justify further trade war pressure against China.
The US policy and the growth of international tensions were on full display at the IMF meeting in Washington. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner declared China’s currency to be undervalued and demanded that the IMF take a harder line against surplus countries, such as China, that fail to revalue their currencies and accept a reduction in their exports.
China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, charged that expectations that the US Federal Reserve would pump yet more dollars into the markets through quantitative easing were compounding imbalances and swamping emerging economies with destabilizing capital inflows.
With the representatives of the world’s first- and second-largest economies at loggerheads, the IMF failed to arrive at any agreement on the currency crisis. Washington’s allies such as Germany and Japan indicated support for a revaluation of the renminbi, but they balked at lining up behind a US-led diplomatic offensive against Beijing.
This, in effect, postponed the US-China confrontation until the upcoming G20 summit of leading economies, to be held November 11-12 in Seoul, South Korea.
The ensuing week saw an escalation of Washington’s cheap-dollar policy, as the Federal Reserve Board gave further indications that it plans to resume the electronic equivalent of printing hundreds of billions dollars, so-called “quantitative easing,” perhaps as soon as its next policy-setting meeting November 2-3. While it is doing so in the name of stimulating job creation, the main effect of a renewal of Fed purchases of US Treasury securities will be to increase the supply of virtually free credit to the major US banks and corporations and fuel a further rise in stocks and corporate profits.
Since August, when the Fed took the first steps toward the large-scale resumption of debt purchases, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by more than 10 percent despite continuing declines in US payrolls.
In a much-anticipated speech Friday at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke broadly hinted that he favored an early resumption of quantitative easing. Speaking of the Fed’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), he said, “Given the Committee’s objectives, there would appear—all things being equal—to be a case for further action.”
Bernanke took the highly unusual step of declaring that the present inflation rate is too low and making clear that the Fed’s policy going forward will be to raise the rate of inflation to around 2 percent by means of monetary stimulus. “Thus, in effect,” he said, “inflation is running at rates that are too low relative to the levels that the Committee judges to be most consistent with the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate [to maintain price stability and contain unemployment] in the longer run.” [Bernanke’s emphasis].
The call for an inflationary monetary policy is not driven, as Bernanke would have the public believe, by a desire to significantly bring down the jobless rate. The Fed would not declare that inflation is too low unless it was confident that continued high unemployment will enable big business to proceed with its wage-cutting drive and prevent a rebound in wages.
In giving his speech, Bernanke was well aware that simply talking of quantitative easing and a policy of reflation would spark a further sell-off of US dollars. In the event, the renewed decline in the dollar, which began after the IMF meeting, accelerated on Friday.
On a trade-weighted basis, the dollar dropped 0.7 percent to a new low for the year after Bernanke spoke, and the Australian dollar reached parity for the first time since it was freely floated in 1983. The US greenback also fell to parity with the Canadian dollar.
In addition, the dollar fell to a new low against the Swiss franc. Virtually all Asian currencies rose versus the dollar, gold hit a new record high, and other commodities such as silver, copper and corn continued their upward spiral.
The dollar is now at 15-year lows against the yen and nine-month lows against the euro. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday published a scathing editorial bluntly summing up the currency- and trade-war implications of Bernanke’s speech. It began: “Amid the dollar rout of the 1970s, Treasury Secretary John Connally famously told a group of fretting Europeans that the greenback `is our currency, but your problem.’ If you read between the lines, that’s also more or less what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday as he made the case for further Fed monetary easing.”
The editorial continued: “In a nearly 4,000-word speech, the Fed chief never once mentioned the value of the dollar. He never mentioned exchange rates, despite the turmoil in world currency markets as the dollar has fallen in anticipation of further Fed easing… The chairman’s message is that the Fed is focused entirely on the domestic US economy and will print as many dollars as it takes to reflate it. The rest of the world is on its own and can adjust its policies as various countries see fit. If other currencies soar in relation to the dollar, that’s someone else’s problem.”
Earlier in the week, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf published a column similarly pointing to the unilateralist and nationalist essence of US policy. “In short,” Wolf wrote, “US policymakers will do whatever is required to avoid deflation. Indeed, the Fed will keep going until the US is satisfactorily reflated. What that effort does to the rest of the world is not its concern…
“Instead of cooperation on adjustment of exchange rates and the external account, the US is seeking to impose its will, via the printing press… In the worst of the crisis, leaders hung together. Now, the Fed is about to hang them all separately.”
The Financial Times on Friday gave some indication of growing anger within Europe over US monetary policy, quoting a “senior European policymaker” as calling the Fed’s policy “irresponsible.” The article cited Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as saying one reason for the exchange rate turmoil “is the stimulating monetary policy of some developed countries, above all the United States, which are trying to solve their structural problems in this way.”
Following Bernanke’s speech on Friday, the Obama administration announced two further moves in its confrontation with China. The Treasury Department delayed the release of its semiannual assessment of the currency policies of major US trade counterparts, saying it would withhold the statement until after next month’s G20 summit in Seoul.
The administration is under pressure from leading Democratic lawmakers, backed by the unions, to declare China a currency manipulator in the currency assessment, an action that could lead to retaliatory duties and tariffs against Chinese imports. The administration, however, has resisted such an overtly hostile move that would, moreover, preempt G20 discussions on the currency issue. It prefers to build a coalition of European and Asian states against China.
At the same time, however, largely to placate protectionist hawks in the Democratic Party, the US trade representative announced that he was launching an investigation into a claim filed by the United Steelworkers union charging China with unfair and illegal subsidies to its green energy industry.
Global impact of US monetary policy
Washington’s cheap-dollar policy increases the pressure on the major surplus countries—China, Germany and Japan—as well as the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America to respond by devaluing their own currencies to offset the trade advantage of rivals with falling currencies, first and foremost the United States.
This is the classic scenario of competitive devaluations and “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s and produced a fracturing of the world market into hostile trade and currency blocs, ultimately leading to World War II.
All of the major powers and rising economic nations solemnly foreswore precisely this course of action at international meetings following the outbreak of the financial crisis in September 2008. It has taken less than two years for this much-touted global coordination to collapse into mutual threats and outright economic warfare.
Germany and Japan, while more than happy to force China to raise its exchange rate and prepared to fire some shots across China’s bow toward that end, are reluctant to fully enlist in Washington’s anti-Chinese crusade since they know that they too are targeted by the Fed’s cheap dollar policy.
Last month, Japan, whose currency has risen by more than 10 percent against the dollar over the past year, retaliated with a massive and unilateral one-day sell-off of yen, and this month the Japanese central bank announced a further lowering of its key interest rate and its own program of quantitative easing, through central bank purchases of $60 billion in Japanese government bonds.
Emerging economies such as South Korea, Thailand, India, Taiwan and Brazil are reeling from the upward pressure on their exchange rates fueled by waves of speculative dollars seeking a higher return through the purchase of government and corporate bonds of these faster-growing countries.
The Institute of International Finance, which lobbies for major banks, estimates that $825 billion will flow into developing countries this year, 42 percent more than in 2009. Investments in debt of emerging economies alone are expected to triple, to $272 billion.
Last month, the Brazilian finance minister warned of the outbreak of a global currency war and earlier this month his government announced the doubling of a tax on foreign purchases of Brazilian bonds in an attempt to stem the inrush of capital and the relative rise of the nation’s currency, the real.
This past week, Thailand took similar steps, announcing a 15 percent withholding tax on the interest payments and capital gains earned by foreign investors in Thai bonds, in an attempt to arrest the appreciation of the baht, which has already risen by 10 percent against the dollar this year.
The eruption of currency and trade war is being driven by the general slowdown in economic growth to anemic levels that make impossible any genuine recovery from the deepest slump since the 1930s. Faced either with slumping domestic demand or stagnant foreign markets, or (as in the case of the US) a combination of the two, the major economies are all intent on increasing their sales abroad. As the prospects dim for a revival of economic growth to pre-recession levels, the system of multilateral currency and trade relations dating back to the agreements made at the end of World War II is collapsing. So too are the chances of genuine multilateral coordination.
Ultimately, global coordination of economic policy between the major powers in the post-war period was anchored by the economic supremacy of the United States, embodied in the privileged position of the US dollar as the world trade and reserve currency. This has irretrievably broken down, with the palpable decline in the world economic position of the United States.
The result is a struggle of each against all, combined with a general onslaught in every country against the working class, which is to be made to pay—in the form of wage-cutting and austerity measures—for the breakdown of the global capitalist economic order.
By Barry Grey
18 October 2010
WSWS
Surrey’s Tory Council Prepares To Cut The Fire and Rescue Service
“Councillors say they are ‘trimming the fat’. However, the fat went years ago and they have been gnawing on the bones ever since”. Richard Jones.
When Richard Jones addressed a “Save Our Services in Surrey” lobby of Surrey County Council, Kingston Town Hall on March 23rd, the Surrey Fire Brigade Union (FBU) branch secretary painted a picture of crisis in Surrey’s rescue services. He said: “We’ve reached a point where fire crews are turning up at emergencies and having to tell the public that they cannot make a rescue because they have to wait for more staff to turn up. These cuts put lives at risk. We turn up to incidents without enough crew and have to wait for back up before we can safely enter the building. Fire fighters are going in understaffed and risking their lives. The public is in danger, fire-fighters are in danger, enough is enough!”
He continued: “If the Council’s cuts go through, Surrey will be spending less per head of the population on fire services than any county in Britain. It will mean the loss of fire engines and station closures. It’s life or death in the fire services and if these cuts continue the Grim Reaper will be taking up residence in Surrey.”
Richared Jones was quoted in the Woking News & Mail yesterday as saying: “The council have said it is making cuts to Surrey Fire and Rescue because there had been a reducution in funds from the government”. However Richard continued, he could see no cuts that had been made by the government, and accused the council of “making reductions to enable lower council tax bills, in order to gain votes in elections in the coming years”.
The Tory Council is considering several cuts packages, including stopping day-time retained day cover and reducing the number of night time fire engines in service. Many of the smaller towns in surrey have a retained fire service, where fire crews are called in to the station from home when there is a fire. Any further reducions in these services will greatly lengthen response times and cost lives. These cuts are being made from council set budgets and are going to cause great damage to the fire service.
In his Woking News & Mail interview, Richard Jones said: “The cuts would only amount to an average of two pence per week for an average council tax paying household”. These cuts have already begun, with the fire service already loosing half a million pounds from its budget.
The interview took place following the Woking News & Mail’s freedom of information request, which revealed Woking area fire crews have been called to 384 night time incidents in the past twelve months.
The Tory Council is using the recession as a smoke screen for its own political agenda. Up and down the country the recession is being as an excuse to attack working conditions, pay and services.
The government blamed the recession when it announced their plans (now scrapped) to privatise the post office. Many universities have used the real cuts in education funding to hide large scale cuts of their own, desisgned to re-orientate the focus of the entire education system. The same tactic is being used by bosses in the rail industry and across the public sector.
However, time and again, local people have shown that when they stand together in anti-cuts groups, local coalitions or ‘committees of action’ they are able to defeat plans to cut services. The government has baulked at privatising the posal service; the campaigns against cuts in education have met with etraordinary successes everywhere.- And here in Surrey, Brooklands College was recently saved after a huge campaign by staff, students, and the whole community.
Remember public services when you vote May 6th.
Voice of Anti-Capitalism in Guildford 
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