Vote TUSC postcard
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is a new electoral coalition that was set up by leading trade unionists including RMT general secretary Bob Crow, and socialists, including the Socialist Party, to provide a political voice to the millions who oppose the cuts. TUSC is standing candidates with a proven campaigning record.
Dave Nellist handing NSSN petition to Frances O’Grady at Congress House, 11 Sept 2011, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
Dave Nellist, Socialist Party councillor and former Coventry Labour MP, expelled for fighting Thatcher’s poll tax
Coventry has 24,000 people on the housing waiting list, and the Labour council has a target of 305 new affordable and rented homes a year – which isn’t being met because they rely on the private sector to build them, and people can’t afford to buy.
The wait for overcrowded families is tragic – last year, in one part of Coventry 752 families applied for a single three-bed house. We urgently need a mass public programme of house building; but none of the establishment parties will deliver that.
We need a new party that will stand for socialist policies, stop the cuts which all three main parties agree on to pay off the bankers’ gambling debts, and plan the country’s resources so that young people have a future, families have security and pensioners have dignity in old age.
In Coventry council I am often the only one to raise my hand to vote against cuts which shows the urgent need to build a new mass party of the working class. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is an important step towards that.
Tony Mulhearn, photo Harry Smith (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
Tony Mulhearn, veteran socialist and trade unionist, former Liverpool District Labour Party president, and one of the leaders of the 1983-87 socialist council
The Labour group in Liverpool proposes a vision of cuts today and jam tomorrow, claiming that private developers will deliver thousands of jobs and houses at some time in the distant future.
These are meaningless promises given the scale of problems which demand an immediate solution.
I will demand that councillors support a fight against this millionaires’ government whose main objective is to transfer wealth from the 99% into the pockets of their friends, the mega rich.
Liverpool’s working people are being subjected to the most savage cuts in post-war history. The Labour-controlled council and its Con-Dem acolytes are slavishly implementing the cuts and granting freedom of the city to former minister Tory Lord Heseltine, who wielded Thatcher’s axe in Liverpool during the 1980s.
Liverpool is entitled to an alternative candidate to the cuts candidates. A socialist challenge is imperative, that’s why I’m proud to stand in the name of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.
Unison conference 2009: Nancy Taaffe, photo Paul Mattsson
Nancy Taaffe, east London library worker made redundant through cuts and Waltham Forest anti-cuts union coordinator
Social provision of services is the main way women improve their lot. Healthcare, welfare, education for themselves and children, public housing, etc – when these things are well resourced and easily available women’s lives improve; take them away and we suffer.
They say that women in Bradford West helped to make the break with the ‘traditional’ pro-cuts parties, punishing them instead by voting for George Galloway. This change is symptomatic of the mismatch between what we’ve been promised and what our lives are actually like.
Over a million women are now unemployed, the services we rely on are disappearing. No wonder women are in the fightback everywhere – in the pension strikes, in the anti-cuts unions and in this TUSC election campaign.
