The following is a
short extract from Tony Benn's speech made at the weekend. It is all
well and good what he says, but we don't want to to defeat the
government and see a Miliband Labour government in its place. After
all the man himself Ed, has said that they cannot reverse the cuts.
To replace the Cameron/Clegg millionaires with look-a-like named
Miliband is hardly going to improve the conditions of the ordinary
people of this country. They are all singing from the same music
sheet, it's just that the Cameron mob are singing it as a reel, while
the Miliband bunch want to sing it as a waltz. The end result will be
the same, a drastically decimated welfare system, a low wage economy
and millionaires making loads of cash. It is not the faces at the
front of the package that is the problem, it is the package itself.
“The present
government is mounting the biggest attack ever made on the welfare
state created after the Second World War. Their aim is to finish the
work begun under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
When people
came back from the war, the view was that it was the responsibility
of government, representing the people as a whole, to provide
affordable homes, free medical care, education for all, and key
public services.
All of that
is now under threat. The Con-Dem Coalition's programme of austerity
and privatisation will take us back 80 years.
We are going
to need a tidal wave of resistance from below to defeat the
government. Every one of us needs to get active, involve others,
spread the spirit of resistance to help to build a united mass
movement to stop the cuts.”
What we want is a mass
movement of resistance to change the system, not to change the face
at the podium or the bums on the seats of power, and party political politics will never do that.
