The Socialist 16 March 2011

Defend jobs and services: Protest 26 March

Defend jobs and services: Protest 26 March

Building the battle against the cuts - now and beyond 26 March

Campaigning against all cuts and privatisation

Save our NHS!

Hutton's plans mean savage cuts - Fight to defend your pension!

Vote for a socialist alternative

Huge protests against job insecurity

The rich get richer - by another $1 trillion

Wisconsin occupation

Yahya victory

Hunger strike

March from Jarrow with Youth Fight for Jobs

Save our youth services

For real jobs not exploitation

Review: Classroom Warriors

Northern Ireland: Broad left gains in union elections

Privatisation threat to the blood service?

Defend jobs and education at Newcastle College

Action called off by Birmingham bin workers

Left victory in building workers' union

Support the UCU strike

Japan: Tsunami results in misery for millions

Workers hit hard by earthquake and tsunami

Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories: "We'll struggle like in Egypt"

Tunisia: 'You come back - we come back'

Saudi troops to suppress Bahrain protesters

Thousands protest against Lib Dems in Sheffield

Protester challenges Lib Dem MP to debate

Students want to protest too

Thatcher was no heroine

Lively discussion at LGBT meeting

Leeds: Celebrating International Women's Day

Celebrate International Workers' Day in the Socialist with a May Day greeting

PDFs for this issue




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As youth unemployment soars...

Join the international fightback

March from Jarrow with Youth Fight for Jobs

The announcement of the latest youth unemployment figures comes as a chilling reminder of the worsening situation facing workers and young people.

Danny Byrne

The attempts by the government and its masters - big business and the financial markets - to make us pay for their crisis will effectively rubbish any hope of a decent future for the vast majority.

And the 'anti-crisis' policies favoured by the Con-Dems will not improve the situation. In fact, the austerity consensus of cuts, tax rises and job massacres will have the opposite effect - deepening the crisis and ruling out any serious economic growth.

But young people won't just sit back and allow our futures to be consigned to the scrapheap! Alongside the student protests in Britain, recent weeks and months have seen inspiring proof of this in numerous countries throughout Europe and beyond.

On Saturday 12 March over 200,000 people (in a country of less than ten million) marched through Lisbon, Portugal, in a protest against youth unemployment and the precarious conditions forced on young workers by rotten low pay bosses. One placard mused that the situation being foisted on the youth had made Portugal "no country for young men"!

In Italy hundreds of thousands of young people participated in a mass protest movement in December against attacks on the education system.

A huge response by school and university students also confronted Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms in France.

Even in the US, where people say 'it will never happen', thousands took part in two days of school student walkouts against the cuts and anti-trade union laws, inspired by workers' protests in Wisconsin.

Britain

In Britain, all the conditions for an 'uprising' of the young, students and the unemployed, exist in spades! After all, in the revolutionary events in North Africa and the Middle East, mass youth unemployment formed an important ingredient in the explosive cocktail that saw tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt overthrown.

Young people will be marching from Jarrow to London in October with Youth Fight for Jobs to show that we won't take this situation lying down.

There is an alternative to growing youth joblessness. It involves breaking with the austerity consensus.

The Socialist Party stands for a society where the economy is democratically planned to meet the needs of people and where our money and wealth is 'put to work', not to bail out the rich for their mess, but to improve the lives of everyone.

Just a fraction of the amount used to bail out the bankers and speculators would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for young people - on decent pay too!