Assemble 12noon, West gate of Dudhope Park (postcode DD1 5RE for satnav / GoogleMap). March off at 12:30pm. Route; Lochee Road, Marketgait, West Marketgait, Nethergate to rally in City Square (postcode DD1 3BA) commencing at approx 1pm. Provisionally, feeder marches are being investigated from Dundee University (via Hawkhill to join up at Marketgait Circle) and Abertay University (via Bell Street to join up at Marketgait).

TUs are asked to check & advise on speakers (Dundee or national officers). STUC speaker has been requested.

Further details; dundeetuc@ymail.com, 07951 443656.

Called by the Scottish Trades Union Congress

11.00 am: Assemble East Market Street Edinburgh
11.30am: March off
12.30 pm: Rally Ross Bandstand

Unite and Defy Demolition Coalition Cuts

The Twin Tory millionaires’ Cabinet gloated and cheered as Osborne declared war on over 100,000 Scottish jobs; benefits for the most vulnerable; schools and community services; the NHS; workers’ pay and pensions. Slashing Scotland’s block grant by £1.3bn this year spells devastation in local government, construction, education – public and private sector. The vast rise in unemployment will worsen the deficit! The poorest will be hit hardest. The hour has struck for united, decisive action – as well as alternative policies – to stop this slaughter. The thousands marching today are critical to building a rebellion on the scale of the anti-poll tax movement – through your union, community, pensioners’ or students’ organisations – and by building local anti-cuts alliances.

• Demand the SNP government and Councils set ‘No-Cuts’ Defiance budgets that refuse to pass on Westminster’s butchery.

  SNP, Labour and other politicians who claim to oppose the Twin Tories’ cuts now face a stark choice: defy or destroy.

  If the SNP government was serious about defending Scotland, they should set a budget next month without a penny cut in pay or services, not a single job loss, and demand the missing £1.3bn back off the Westminster thieves who stole it to bail out the bankers and billionaires. They should call workers and communities into action in support of their defiance, with rallies, demonstrations, peaceful civil disobedience and industrial action. A nation in rebellion could win back the £1.3bn for next year’s Scottish spending needs.

• Build a mass lobby of Scottish parliament

  Given the SNP’s record so far, they won’t show the spine to do this unless they face a rebellion from below. The STUC should use today’s demo to call a mass lobby of the Scottish parliament to stop tartan butchery next month. If the STUC fail to, public sector unions should call it.

• Make councillors fight

  Councils face the same stark choice: defy or destroy. Bombard councillors with demands for No Cuts budgets, mounting mass campaigns to demand the stolen millions back off Holyrood to balance the books, with no cuts.

• Axe the Council Tax

  Demand an emergency Bill in the Scottish parliament to replace it with the income-based Service Tax; to raise £1.6bn extra in 2011.

• Build a Scottish one-day public sector strike in early 2011

  No cuts are acceptable – or necessary. Neither Coalition cuts, nor lesser, slower Labour or SNP cuts. The STUC should today declare plans for a united one day strike of the entire 600,000-strong public sector in early 2011 – to force back the Scottish butchers, before the council budgets are set in stone. To build the rebellion in the workplaces that would embolden communities too.

The butchers’ Coalition – with 23 millionaires and 4 ex-bankers in a Cabinet of 29 – spew out the monstrous lie that cuts are unavoidable and necessary.

The public debt is mainly the result of the £1.3trillion bankers’ bailout, mass unemployment, loss of taxes. But it is still only 70% of GDP – whereas it never fell below 100% of GDP from 1918 ‘til 1961. Job cuts will massively add to the debt. There are numerous better ways – without a penny cut in pay, benefits, pensions, or the loss of a single job or service – with vast scope to improve the shoddy system we endure already:

• scrapping the unfair, regressive Council Tax and replacing it with a Scottish Service Tax based on income would raise an extra £1.6bn next year – more than Osborne has slashed off the Scottish budget!
• £120bn a year in taxes on the rich and big business are avoided, evaded or uncollected – that’s 75% of the 2009 deficit!
• a modest 10% wealth tax on the richest 1,000 fat-cats would raise £35bn a year – enough to create 1.4 million jobs on a £25,000 wage.
• restoration of tax on the richest elite and Corporations to pre-Thatcher levels (a policy the SSP shares with the PCS union) would raise up to £250bn a year extra.
• scrapping Trident (whilst guaranteeing Faslane workers’ jobs through diversification into peaceful, socially useful work) would save £100bn.
• full and democratic public ownership of the banks would give us access to £560bn in liquid cash and £5trillion in assets.

There is nothing unavoidable or necessary about this Coalition’s butchery.

The cuts are driven by ideological hatred of public services, a ruthless intent to reverse the gains made by past working class struggles – a mission to use the whip of mass unemployment and starvation-level benefits to drive wages down even further, boosting profits even higher.

The ultimate ‘better way’ is a socialist Scotland, independent of the Westminster butchers, with democratic public ownership and control of the vast wealth and resources; an end to war and Trident; and a plan of clean, green production and services, based on people not profit. Join Scotland’s genuine socialist alternative, the SSP, to build that future.

Professional Firefighters in Tayside are on the Threshold of taking Industrial Action to Protect Your Community from cuts to Your Front Line Emergency Fire Cover.

Join us on Saturday 20th March 2010
Protest Once Again Against the Chief Fire Officer’s Proposals

Speakers include
Matt Wrack, FBU General Secretary
Jim Malone, FBU Regional Organiser
Local Tayside Politicians

Assemble 12.30 Castle Green, Broughty Ferry
March Begins at 13.00.
Rally at St Aidens Hall.

CUTS COSTS LIVES – YOURS

March will be led by the Mains of Fintry Pipe Band

For more information see the campaign site

By Richie Venton – SSP national workplace organiser

Two major trade union events in the space of 48 hours demonstrate the seething anger at public sector cuts, the potential for a united resistance across the trade unions, and the potency, increasing popularity and urgent necessity of the Scottish Socialist Party’s alternatives to this assault on jobs, services and conditions.

EIS 10,000 march

On Saturday 6th March, 10,000 teachers, lecturers, nursery staff, parents, pupils and other trade unionists poured out of Glasgow ’s Kelvingrove Park , snaking their way round a mammoth route to the EIS union’s rally in the SECC.

This was the first national demo called by the EIS in decades. The overwhelming majority of the marchers had never been on a demo before. The age profile was a whole cross-section, from toddlers in buggies and primary kids, through trainee and newly qualified teachers, to bearded veterans of the profession – united in their fury at education budget cuts, whilst bankers’ bailouts, renewal of Trident weapons and bloody war cost the public a fortune.

Anger at that obscene contrast was reflected in speeches by the EIS president and others at the rally. They denounced the governments of Westminster and Holyrood for regarding these expenditures as more important than the education of our children, who represent the future, and lambasted the SNP government for now confronting children with the choice of either free school meals or smaller classes, when they had promised both and children deserve both.

SSP on the march

The EIS march is part of a campaign they have entitled “Why must our children pay?”

The SSP was the only party with a leaflet that directly dealt with the issues of the march, demanding “make the rich pay – not our kids; bail out education and all services – not bankers’ profits; 20’s plenty in any class – give our kids a chance.”

People snapped up the leaflets, smiled and murmured their agreement with the headlines, turned and quoted it to their friends as they assembled to march off.

The lively SSP contingent was joined by parents and children who fought the heroic Save Our Schools Campaign in Glasgow last year. As we marched we led the chant “Twenty’s plenty in any class – give our kids a chance”, which caught on with the crowd marching and bystanders on the pavements.

As the 10,000 trod towards the end of their marathon march to the SECC rally, we improvised an SSP “street meeting” on the pavement as they passed us! We belted out our message on a very loud PA system: “The SSP demands that the government tax the rich, to bail out education, not bankers’ profits and bankers’ bonuses.” Several sections of the march shouted back their agreement with us as they marched past, and even more contingents applauded us as they marched past. A sign of how profoundly the bankers’ bailout has changed people’s consciousness, including their open-ness to the SSP’s unashamed socialist demands.

The EIS leadership promised in speeches that this mass demo is just the start of the campaign, which is to be welcomed, and which EIS union activists and members will make sure is the case.

It is absolutely right that as the union representing 60,000 members in education they should take up the cudgels in defence of that service. But what would be tragic, and totally divisive and counter-productive, is if the EIS leadership argued for cuts in other services to save education; unity of opposition to all service cuts, combining the power and scale of members of all public sector unions and the communities they service is what is urgently needed to stop the slaughter.

Biggest civil service strike since 1987

It was therefore encouraging that an EIS representative (as well as speakers from the FBU, UNISON and STUC) addressed the 8th March strike rally in Glasgow, called during the 48-hour stoppage by all civil service workers, members of PCS.

This was the biggest civil service strike since 1987. Across the UK, over 250,000 workers brought services to a halt in tax and customs offices; Job Centres; driving centres; the Courts; the MoD; passport offices; the Scottish parliament (for the first time ever); Westminster … to name but some. 30,000 of these strikers were in Scotland .

They are overwhelmingly low-paid workers, whose partial compensation for low pay has been a modest average pension of £6,500 and a reasonable redundancy scheme – which is now under assault. The government has set in motion the legislation to slash the Civil Service Compensation Scheme, cutting the package that most workers would get on being made redundant by up to one-third, tens of thousands of pounds each. A sure sign that the Labour government (backed up quite openly by the Tories on this) want to slaughter tens of thousands of jobs on the cheap – in addition to the 100,000 already shed in the past 5 years – and usher in privatisation by making the prospect more attractive to the privateers.

The response to the 48-hour strike was absolutely overwhelming – forcing management to stoop to tricks like jetting in a handful of scab managers from Newcastle to open the Glasgow DVLA office.

Socialism in the civil service

Again, not only did SSP members in PCS play an instrumental part in building the strike, but our policies were more widely and eagerly embraced than for a long time: on the picket lines, at the PCS strike rallies in Glasgow and Dundee, and at the SSP public meeting in Glasgow after the union rally. This was a really large meeting, with over half those present attending their first ever SSP meeting. And strikers were enthusiastic in their support for our socialist aims – many commenting wryly that if only we could get a fair hearing in the media, imagine how popular our case would be – as well as our proposals on how to build public sector unity against all cuts in the immediate future.

Unity against the carnage – build 10th April Demo

Alongside a rolling programme of further industrial action by the PCS, railway workers are striking (Scotrail) and balloting for pre-General Election strikes (Network Rail). Numerous anti-cuts campaigns, involving council workers’ unions and communities, are campaigning against the brutal council cuts that loom. Already 5,000 council jobs face the chop, with hair-raising predictions of 32,000 jobs (one in every eight!) being butchered by 2014. And community centres face closure up and down Scotland .

So an immediate opportunity to tie all these strands of struggle into a rope to restrain the axe-wielders presents itself on Saturday 10th April. Scottish UNISON is calling a mass, national demonstration in Glasgow that day, in defence of public services.

SSP members in all the various trade unions – alongside other union members – need to move heaven and earth to make this an almighty display of the power of a united working class on the march, by calling on their unions to mobilise members into an event that dwarfs even the brilliant 10,000 on the EIS march.

As Labour, Tory, Lib Dem and SNP politicians sharpen their knives in a grisly pre-election competition for whose cuts are the deepest, the SSP in contrast will stand up for public sector workers and the communities that depend on public services.

We will build for a united march for public services – not private profit, demanding the governments tax the rich and bail out all public services – not bankers’ and billionaires’ profits.

We will campaign inside the unions for measures that would fund these services, protect and create jobs, and begin to re-distribute wealth from the millionaires to the millions.

Measures such as a 10% tax on every millionaire (to fund 80,000 new jobs in Scotland alone, on £25,000 a year for 3 years!); restoration of income tax on the rich to pre-Thatcher levels (83%) and likewise Corporation Tax on big companies, from the current paltry 28% to the 52% it was at before Thatcher and then New Labour made this country a tax haven for the tax-dodging rich.

A sea-change has begun in the outlook of workers in the frontline of public sector carnage by the parties that back big business and the profit system. Socialist measures – including full-blown public ownership of the entire banking sector, natural wealth, services and big industries, but with democratic control – are increasingly convincing to people whose future is under threat.

The time is ripe for the potential power of a united trade union movement to be mobilised – starting with 10th April – and for socialist demands to be boldly advanced amongst an increasingly receptive crowd of angry workers. The SSP will do its part, emboldened by the events of the past 48 hours.

Michael has learned through his Legal Aid solicitor that the procurator fiscal decided way back on 18 December not to proceed with the charge of Disorderly Conduct against him. Only they did not tell anybody. Does this mean that very useful CCTV evidence against the police may have been discarded?

When we got back to Aberdeen bus station, we had a chat with some Stagecoach bus drivers about what we were doing and why. They agreed that its shocking that the couple were spoken to as they were by the driver. The Stagecoach employees agreed that a gay person has just as much right to ride the bus as anyone else, and said that their company should apologise to the couple.

Around the country there was a similar picture from Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow. One can only assume that since no one complained, and the drivers didn’t say anything either, that the driver Steven and Mark were unfortunate to have was homophobic, and of course Stagecoach is 100% behind him.

Theres a great article on protest from http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6064.html and there are photos from the Aberdeen protest on http://www.flickr.com/photos/20902609@N05/ more from around the country will be going up as I get them in.

We would like you and another person of the same sex to go on a stagecoach bus that day, and one of you have your arm around the other, just like the couple were doing when they were threatend to be booted off the bus, then made to sit apart. Even just one stop would be fine. We want as many people as possible to do it so please let me know how many of you are taking part in the Equality Ride, i.e. more than one couple, what the bus route is and the bus number, and where you are in the UK, and if possible take a picture of the two of you on the stagecoach bus with you arm around the other person. It would be even better if you were holding a bit of paper or something with the word ‘apologise’ or ‘let all couples take the bus’ or something. And we will send it off to the media and to Stagecoach.

Then either text (07760308173) or email me the image (hendersonn2704@hotmail.com).

Some of us are going to Aberdeen where we will retrace the route with the couple, Steven and Mark, where the incident originally took place. If you are free to travel to Aberdeen that day or are there already then please let me know.

Remember that if someone does complain, and the driver threatens you, then that constitutes discrimination under the Equality Act and is illegal. Nor is it innapropriate behaviour, straight couples do far worse on busses all the time.

Please take a ride for Equality this thursday by participating. The media attention we will get and the extra pressure it will put on Stagecoach to apologise will outweigh the downside of having to give money to Stagecoach to protest, but this is about the right of all customers to be able to ride the bus without hassle or intimidation.

After several months of suspension, fourteen days of strike action and a six day disciplinary Karen Reissmann, chair of the Manchester Mental Health Unison branch has been sacked for the ‘crime’ of opposing mental health cuts.

The 700 strong branch has voted to go on indefinite strike. Urgent financial and other solidarity is needed.

Unison’s national industrial action committee has sanctioned the community mental health team comprising some 160 workers to go on indefinite official strike action from this Thursday. This is a strike Unison must win. Donations need to flood in, with messages of support, invitations for speakers, national publicity and demands of Unison officials that they respect the demand of the branch and that the official strike is spread to cover the whole branch.

Rush donations and messages of support to the Manchester Community and Mental Health Unison branch, 70 Manchester Road, Manchester, M21 9UN. Phone 07972 120 451 or email unison@zen.co.uk

Cheques can be made out to UNISON Manchester Community & Mental Health

Visit the support website at reinstate karen site .

The petition can be downloaded here and printed off to use at work or union meetings.

More background here and here

——————

UNISON STATEMENT ON KAREN REISSMAN

On Monday November 5th Karen Reissmann, CPN and UNISON branch chair was sacked on 4 counts. Firstly that, when she was interviewed in December 2006 criticising the transfer of NHS work to the voluntary sector, she brought the Trust into disrepute. Secondly, for telling people that she was suspended and what for. Thirdly, for protesting her innocence. Fourthly, for allowing the press to print information, some misleading about her case. The fifth charge of misusing time was dropped. All the charges were gross misconduct and all sackable offences.

UNISON believes this is an absolute disgrace. Union reps must have the right to campaign against cuts and victimisation of our trade union reps. The Human Rights Act brought in by the Labour government allows for freedom of expression. Karen works in the NHS, in 2007, in Britain not Burma – she must have the right to speak out without fear of persecution. If she remains sacked it will make all NHS staff and all trade union reps feel much more cautious about saying anything.

UNISON is determined to fight for Karen’s reinstatement. 150 members of her branch who work in community mental health teams and crisis resolution teams will start an indefinite strike from Thursday 8th November as part of that fight. There will be picket lines from 8am to 11am at North Manchester General Hospital, MRI Hathersage Rd, and Chorlton House. On Thursday strikers will then meet at 12noon to organise their next activities and march to the strategic Health Authority at Piccadilly.

In 2 weeks we will have a branch wide one-day strike.

We also hope to have a solidarity rally on Wednesday 14th November in Manchester in the early evening, details to follow.

We also plan a Saturday demonstration in Manchester, probably 24th Nov.

We expect to be able to pay very substantial hardship pay to all strikers and will be sending delegations of strikers around the country to speak to other trade unionists and raise money. Already we have had significant promises of money from a number of branches eg Pennine have promised £2000 a month.

If you want to make a donation please send to “Manchester Community and Mental Health branch UNISON” c/o union office, Chorlton House, 70 Manchester Rd, Manchester M21 9UN. If you want a speaker at your next union meeting please contact us on unison@zen.co.uk or 07972 120 451.

Bus leaves Dundee, The Howff (opposite GPO) 9.00 a.m.

Departs Edinburgh 3 p.m. Ticket donation only