this is a transcript of a piece made for this TORY podcast - the piece in isolation can be heard here:
Personally speaking, I am a believer of non-violent confrontation. Having said that, I am no pacifist nor am I Gandhi. Even he understood when under great duress, peoples frustration boiled over into violence. And I totally understand the frustrations vented by young people on the streets of London yesterday. In fact, what I would say is that what happened yesterday was about frustrations over the recent tory coup and undemocratic take over of this country and their insistence on foisting an ideology onto us - one that the majority of voters did not vote for.
This tory minority Government, without the help of the liberal democrats , could not enact this anti-poor, anti-woman, anti young people and anti working people cuts agenda.
People voted for the Lib dems as a vote against the tories - to stop them from carrying out their butchery of our social system and now, in order for the likes of Danny Alexander and Nick clegg to have a bigger salary – and – lets be honest – in order to pay off and protect their parties rich backers, they have done a back flip and are helping the Tories push through their un-necessary cuts.
The students, in my opinion, have actually began the fight back to retake our democracy from this unwanted minority and their failed ideology that saw the original big society quite rightly dismantled after the depression and after the second world war. People are seeing rights and needs their grand parents and parents fight for disappear. People in the past lost weeks and months of pay – and in many cases – their lives, in order to secure for future generations rights such as pension provision, child provision,homes and free education.
To vote for a party who said they stood in the way of the education cuts the Tories proposed, and then to have the same party open the flood gates of tory ideology must be gut wrenching for many voters.
I was glad to see that there were Scottish young people in that crowd. If anything, the Scottish people should be more angry than the rest as 85% of the electorate here voted against the tories. Scottish society is far to the left of the rest of the UK, yet because of the union, our government have no power to raise their own taxes or indeed save our services. The call is going out up here for the Scottish Government to refuse to pass on Westminster’s cuts. Rather, community organisations and activists are calling on the Scottiush Government to set No-Cuts Budgets, Defiance Budgets, and rally masses of workers and communities round a fight for the funds to retain every job, every penny in pay, and every single local service. There are other ways to raise the funds to pay off the richmans debts. The Scottish socialist Party have costed a Scottish service tax which not only would ensure no cuts in services or jobs, but would also raise extra money to invest in these.
Remember the lessons of the past. Remember the un democratic “saviour of Romania” ceaucescu or the people rising up against the right wing cuop in Venezuela. This undemocratically installed Government will have its ceaucescu moment. No-one voted for their ideology and no one voted for their cuts.
It was precisely mass civil disobedience, a refusal to obey Thatcher’s laws and the collection of her government’s hated poll tax, which tossed it (and her) in the dustbin of history.
I say well done to the students who have led the way in retaking our democracy.
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