March against austerity

At today’s 20^th October TUC March against Austerity Labour leader Ed Miliband dubbed the Prime Minister "clueless" today as he joined the huge protest against the Government's austerity measures. More than 150,000 people took part in the demonstration in London, which heard calls for a general strike. There were also demonstrations in Cardiff, Glasgow and Belfast. Mr Miliband accused the Prime Minister of "clinging" to policies which were not working. He said the coalition was cutting taxes for millionaires and raising them for everyone else. "It is one rule for those at the top and one rule for everyone else."

The Tories, of course, tried to dismiss this as Labour being in the pockets of the unions with all the usual right-wing rhetoric it and its supporters can muster. We all know that’s just the Tories mood music; the comfort blanket it turns to whenever the public opinion tide starts to turn.

October 20th protestors bring Democracy to Parliament

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For the tide is turning and the Tories should be scared.  Their covert agenda of rolling back the state; of dismantling our NHS; stripping workers of rights, of creating a large pool of cheap labour to bring about a new order, is gradually being rumbled. No-one now believes that we are all in this together.  The austerity programme offers little hope to anyone who doesn't have a million pounds in the bank. Living standards of hard-working families are being driven down; pay is being cut and frozen while prices are allowed to soar.  We have just seen the perfect storm of cost of living increases that signal economic hardship for years to come.

Today in Tory Britain, we have food banks, pay-day loan sharks, benefit cuts  to those who most need them and tax cuts for those who don’t.  We have more than one million of our young people without work and no hope of getting a job in the future.  We have the longest period of falling wages since the 1920s, while the wealth of the richest soars. Even the International Monetary Fund is now saying that cutting too deep and too fast is bad for the economy and will push it down even further.

This government has tried to drive a wedge between the majority of people,  fostering job and pension envy, blaming the public sector for the economic crisis and demonising those who can't help themselves.  But the real divide they have engineered, is between rich and poor. Pitting the public sector worker against the private sector worker is wearing thin.  People realise that care workers, teaching assistants, dinner ladies and the army of people who look after our poor, sick and vulnerable and keep our streets clean and safe, are equally struggling to make ends meet.

The Tories are already spinning rubbish, trying to make out they are making tough decisions, well it’s not them who are. It’s the millions of people who no longer can afford to heat or eat or know how their wage packet will last. The people are 100% suffering in the UK directly because of incompetent economics policy led by Cameron and Osborne.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "The evidence is mounting that austerity is failing. More than 2.5 million people are out of work, a further three million are not working enough hours to make ends meet, and wages have been falling every month for the last three years." He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the "huge squeeze on wages and living standards" had led to a "massive hit on confidence and on demand in the economy". "That's why some of our biggest companies that are sitting on big cash reserves aren't investing that and getting our economy moving again."

Aylesbury Labour Party's Banner was proudly carried on the march