UK group plans historic anti-cuts rally

Let down by a parliament that has failed the people, Britons have pinned their hopes to the new “People’s Assembly Against Austerity”, which is planning its first muscle-flexing with the government with a millions-strong protest unseen in the history of Britain.

The new movement has called all anti-government groups to join in saying that it wants to provide “an alternative democratic forum to a Parliament that has failed the people it is supposed to represent” through mobilizing millions of people against the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat government.

The assembly, backed with trade unions’ cash and led by a group of trade unionists, rebel MPs, journalists and comedians, says it wants to bring together campaign groups and coordinate action against the government’s austerity policies.

The assembly is holding a protest rally in cooperation with the Stop the War Coalition on June 22 to break that group’s record for the largest public rally in the nation’s history.

The Stop the War Coalition has announced that the June 22 march would “have to be bigger than the ‘stop the war’ march” in February 2003 that saw up to two million people flood the streets of London to voice their opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Unite the union, whose General Secretary Len McCluskey is among those spearheading the assembly, said the anti-austerity movement calls on “all those millions of people in Britain who face an impoverished and uncertain year as their wages, jobs, conditions and welfare provision come under renewed attack by the government” to come together and voice their anger at the spending cuts.

“With some 80 per cent of austerity measures still to come, and with the government lengthening the time they expect cuts to last, a People’s Assembly Against Austerity will bring together campaigns against cuts and privatization with trade unionists in a movement for social justice,” Unite said.

The Assembly has also said that it wants to become a movement of opposition broad enough and powerful enough to generate successful coordinated action, nationally and simultaneously with the European anti-austerity movements, to fight the government.