Cleo Sharp, Brighton Socialist Party
One pressing issue for young people in Brighton is the cost of living. Rent is through the roof, totally unaffordable.
According to LiveWhere, the average monthly rent for a four-bedroom student house is £2,514. If you want bills included in student halls, it could easily cost you up to £250 a week.
Ahead of term, we have been preparing material on how to organise tenant unions, to give us a fighting chance against unfair landlords.
For campaigns like this, however, we need money to print leaflets and to pay for meeting rooms, which is why our fighting fund is so important. We also sell our weekly Socialist newspaper, which you are reading now.
All this campaigning and fundraising helps us create Socialist Party placards for events such as the National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) lobby of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on Sunday 13 September in Brighton. This is another topic we have been campaigning on.
The people we have connected with are eager to engage in activism which makes a material difference. Sometimes it only takes one enthusiastic person to share it with their friends, and it can quickly spread.
Our demand for a £15-an-hour minimum wage has also caught people’s attention. Sometimes people tell us that this demand seems utopian, which is why it’s so important for us to be able to point to the NSSN lobby – a real material demonstration, fighting for this cause, a real physical way to make a difference.
Donate to fund fight to save our NHS
Adam Harmsworth, Coventry Socialist Party
Coventry Socialist Party is campaigning to end parking charges at our hospital. Through a rotten 40-year PFI deal, a private company makes millions of pounds in profit out of patients, visitors, and even staff.
Over 16,000 people have signed our petition. Equally important are the donations we receive from those who sign.
We can easily raise over £50 on one of our campaign stalls. Our campaign is so familiar, many residents who visit Coventry city centre sometimes stop by just to donate.
Even people who tell us they disagree with our wider socialist politics will donate and support the campaign, to which we can explain – there’s a reason it’s only the socialists, not Reform, not Labour, who will actually put in the effort to oppose these charges.
We’re not just fighting to end parking charges and a terrible PFI contract at one hospital, but end all privatisation in the NHS, and win a socialist society that will put people before profit. No other party is fighting for a fairer society like we are, and every penny collected on our stalls goes towards that.
- Socialist Party branches are organising a special ‘mega stall’ day of action on 5 and 6 September
