Last year the Trade Union Congress took the important decision to adopt the People’s Charter for Change as TUC policy. Movements like the Peoples Charter spell out the alternative to cuts and crisis, uniting people in action. The cuts will only be defeated by the unity of popular community action like the opposition to the Poll Tax, with the breadth of the anti-war movement with strong trade union organisation at its core. The Charter’s positive alternative to cuts, for a route to security and prosperity, can help bring that together.

A few months ago the banks brought our whole system close to collapse. Now it is all of us who are being told we have to pay. The banks, the great companies, the wealthy are not ‘in it with us.’ The government want another historic shift of wealth and resources from ordinary families to the rich.

Now the government has cut a new, giant opening in the NHS for the profit makers. Already private business makes £80 Billion a year from contracts in Health, Education and other government departments. Now GPs are to decide where health money goes. Last time this was tried in the 1980s the majority of GPs rejected the government’s offer.

WE all knew that a huge social battle was coming and lawyers were only a part of it. But there is now an alternative to the huge attacks on ordinary working people, argues Imran Khan

IT is not often that lawyers deserve attention or sympathy especially when they are complaining about a cut in their income.

However, the announcement of proposed massive cuts to legal aid and plans to close 157 courts deserves attention, if not immediate sympathy.

Without any mandate the politicians who lead Britain have launched a huge change for the worse in millions of people’s lives. They have joined a race with other EU regimes to use the banking crisis as an excuse for breaking down the welfare state.

Banking losses cost Britain’s taxpayers £2,000 Billion. There are only two ways available to deal with a system-shaking catastrophe like this.  The first way is the one that was chosen (but not openly debated in the General Election) by all three mainstream parties. It is to shift away a vast amount of money and social wealth from the majority of the population. The second is to reorganise your economy in the interests of all. There are obvious signs of the meaning of the first policy in examples like the tiny bank levy of £2 billion in the budget when even the Bank of England (25 June) says if last year’s bank bonuses were stopped it would make £10 billion instantly available. At the same time millions of workers are to be forced to go into years of pay cuts.