Manchester Central WDM is fully behind the public sector strikes on 30 November. We believe you should be too – fight the cuts, fight austerity.

The austerity measures currently being imposed in the UK and across Europe mirror those which have been visited upon the people of the global south for over 30 years. The attacks on trade unions, cuts to health, education and welfare, mass privatisations and deregulation of environmental and labour protection – all to ‘pay the debt’ and ‘encourage growth’ – is a familiar story to those across Latin America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Austerity was and continues to be imposed at the behest of Western financial interests, multinationals and states through the World Bank, the IMF and World Trade Organisation. It deepened levels of poverty, inequality, and insecurity for the world’s poor, and led to increasingly regular economic and environmental crises. It failed to deliver the promised growth and ‘trickle down’ of wealth, while profits soared and the rich grew richer. The system is discredited, but still the poor are being made to pay for a crisis not of their making.

The ‘crisis’ has now come home, and the same logic used for the last thirty years is being deployed to justify an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich following the financial meltdown of 2008. Since then, with public spending, jobs, healthcare, education, pensions and all the rest face swingeing cuts across the UK and industrial world, the number of billionaires in the world has increased by nearly a third.

For a myth-busting article and six reasons to support the UK pensions strike see this piece in the Manchester Mule from back in June. For information about N30 in Manchester check out the new N30Manchester website here.