by Mark Harrison
On Saturday the 30th of January I attended the ‘Right to Work’ conference in Manchester, organised by the Socialist Workers Party. In spite of the unfortunate title slogan it was billed as “a conference of resistance and solidarity” it was heavily over-subscribed, around 900 people crammed into Manchester Central Hall.
The first to address the conference was Ian Allinson, member of UNITE’s First Executive Council and a senior rep for Fujitsu Manchester, which recently saw the first ever IT strike in Britain. Ian explained that although we may all have had different hopes for the day, we all share the same interests. We were reminded that we are experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, there was worse to come, we would be made to pay for it and that resistance is essential. This was followed by a generic bout of populism as Ian finished by attacking ‘the bosses and the bankers’: in reality it is the barbaric system of capitalism that oppresses us all which is the problem and must be replaced by a society in which we all have control of our own lives. Continue reading “‘right to work’ conference report”
