Fight Labour's social murder
What can you do?
Hello!
Welcome to the many new subscribers here, and hello to those of you who have been around for a little while. For those of you in the former category, you will not know that this newsletter is a return from an unintentional month off.
What you will normally find here is weekly listings of protests, demos, court solidarity dates and workshops, alongside analysis and the inside story of some of the biggest movement moments. Somewhat ironically given the topic of this newsletter, the last few weeks I’ve had a fairly acute bi-polar flare up. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I’ve had to take a little time off to try and get myself on a more even keel. I’m still not quite there, but I’m much better than I was and I’m hoping to resume normal service from Monday next week.
I wanted to take this opportunity, given the publishing of the green paper on cuts to welfare yesterday, to flag a couple of organisations who are doing the work for people who, like me, spend their lives fighting illness or disability. I am very lucky in that I have a job that means I can take days off when I need to, or lower my workload, and still be relatively ok. This has not always been the case. In my teens and for most of my twenties I worked either in hospitality jobs, where one cannot take it easy, or was too sick to even begin to think about work. In those moments I was supported by a meagre and threadbare welfare offering from the state (which should have been so much more). The proposed changes would completely remove what little support there is for people. They are akin to nothing less than social murder, and must be resisted at all costs.
The green paper is less than 24 hours old as I write this, so understandably, plans for resistance, calls for support, strategy for intervention are still being drawn up but it is vitally important that we all show up, in as much as we can, to resist this latest attack on the poor and the sick.
Two demonstrations have been announced by Crips against Cuts, with I’m sure, many more to come.
As I said at the top of this email, I’m still working on getting back to fighting fitness, and I’m hoping to resume weekly emails + breaking news and more from next week. I’m very grateful to you all for bearing with me and to all the people around me who’ve been supporting me, knowingly or unknowingly, as I get better.
I’d love to know what’s going on, what I’ve missed, what your organising around so as ever, if you would like your event, protest, fundraiser etc. included here or if you have any tips, press releases or save the dates please do drop me a line!
Hope to see you on the streets soon,
ben x