English

SEP (UK) public meetings: Socialism and the fight against austerity and war

A UK general election is scheduled for May 7, with all the major parties committed to savage spending cuts and bloody military adventures.

No matter who wins, policies will be imposed that serve the interests of a fabulously wealthy elite. The crisis of the profit system will deepen and workers and young people will pay the price through wage cuts, job losses, attacks on benefits and the destruction of education, the National Health Service and other essential social provisions.

Britain has 2 million unemployed and millions more are part of an army of the “working poor.” Now the ruling elite intend to carry out an offensive equal to that in Greece.

The UK has signed up to new bloody wars in Iraq and Syria that threaten to ignite a regional conflict throughout the Middle East. Its aim is to utilise the “special relationship” with the US to facilitate a return to its old empire territories as part of the mad scramble between the US and European powers to control vital oil and gas supplies. The UK is taking full part in the bitter conflicts with Russia over Ukraine, the constant eastward expansion of NATO and the bellicose threats against China and North Korea, which are the product of a renewed drive for world domination every bit as dangerous as that which led to world war in 1914-18 and 1939-45.

The terror attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris is being cynically utilised once more to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment, justify militarism and warmongering and implement further repressive powers against domestic political opposition. The revival of legally sanctioned mass surveillance under the “snoopers’ charter” and the pledge to give MI5 “whatever it wants” is one step closer to police-state forms of rule.

The same picture unfolds throughout Europe and internationally, as world capitalism teeters on the brink of a further plunge into recession and economic collapse.

The Socialist Equality Party, British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, offers workers and young people a means through which to fight back against these dangers. We advance a perspective for the end of the capitalist profit system and the formation of a workers’ government, pledged to socialist policies as a component part of the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe.

Only this can bring an end to the social nightmare into which working people have been plunged. Likewise, the danger of war can only be prevented through the overthrow of the nation-state system, the revolutionary conquest of political power by the working class and the establishment of an international socialist system.

Bradford

Monday March 2, 7 pm
Glyde House (opposite the National Media Museum)
Glydegate
BD5 0BQ

Peterborough

Thursday March 5, 7 p.m.
Central Library, Hartley Room
Broadway
PE1 1RX

Manchester

Tuesday March 10, 7 p.m.
Friends Meeting House (Room G1)
(rear of Manchester Central Library)
6 Mount Street
M2 5NS

Sheffield

Wednesday March 11, 7 p.m.
The Red Deer public house
18 Pitt Street S1 4DD

Glasgow

Wednesday March 18, 6.30 p.m.
Mid Hall, Woodside Halls
36 Glenfarg Street G20 7QE

Liverpool

Tuesday March 24, 7 p.m.
The Quaker Meeting House (Lecture Room)
22 School Lane
L1 3BT

Bristol

Wednesday March 25, 6.30 p.m.
Sunshine Room, Easton Community Centre
Kilburn Street
BS5 6AW

London

Sunday March 29, 4 p.m.
Room 3D, University of London
Malet Street
WC1E 7HU
Nearest tubes (Goodge Street/Euston Square)

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