After the referendum: what we can do

Some early thoughts by EWA JASIEWICZ, an organiser with the Unite union’s hotel workers branch in London

Don’t come undone, people.

1) Don’t hate on leavers. Some voted for reactionary and racist reasons, some for good reasons. Reclaiming power and taking control are what most people want in and over their lives, but the obstacles to that, or the route to that, are highly contested and influenced by thirty years of neoliberal hegemony, underwritten by establishment media.

2) Don’t let the Right control the narrative and define reclamation – overcoming

A picket in London that helped win reinstatement for Hungarian union activist Robert Czegely. See “about the picture” at the end

dispossession means redefining what should be ours on inclusive deep democracy terms – housing, education, public and health services, transport, energy, control over our own labour.

3) Join a union – we need control over work and workplaces and right now we’re weak. And the raid on our rights is coming, as is division between workers including migrant,

Let’s look the Brexit dangers in the eye

The first danger is that the Leave vote in the UK referendum on EU membership has given voice to xenophobia and racism on a scale not seen in UK politics since the 1970s.

The empty promises that people could “get control of their country back” may have come from the demagogic liars of the Tory right. But the tone was set by the right-wing populist leaders of UKIP, with their racist poster and their dislike of anything “foreign”.

It is not, absolutely not, that the millions of people who voted Leave are racist. Many of them, in the former Labour strongholds across northern England and the Midlands, are
screaming their anger at a political establishment – Tory and Labour alike – that has slowly suffocated their communities with cuts in welfare, health and education, with unemployment, with the-rich-get-richer housing policies, and all the rest.

That establishment views those people with contempt. And the feeling is mutual. What is frightening is that the Tory right and UKIP have fashioned, out of that legitimate

Global warming in the Indian context

People and Nature is today publishing Global Warming in the Indian Context, a pamphlet by Nagraj Adve. The pamphlet’s detailed description of the effects of global warming in India should be of interest to readers not only in India but elsewhere too. It also includes a straightforward presentation of the causes of global warming, and proposals for collective action to combat it by communities and social and labour movements. Read the pamphlet here. 1 June 2016.

A huge statue of the god Shiva being washed away during the floods in Uttarakhand in 2013