This People’s Assembly recognises:
1. The historic nature of the attack mounted by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition against the entire post-1945 welfare state;
2. The months ahead are a critical period for the implementation in the government’s plans to slash welfare benefits, jobs and pensions, and to fragment and privatise the NHS and education;
3. Cameron and Clegg also aim to smash the trade union strongholds in the public services;
4. Since this is a political attack on behalf of the capitalist class this requires a massive response by the whole working class and all its allies. This means industrial and direct action culminating a general strike to halt these attacks and drive those conducting them from power;
5. So far the resistance – which reached a highpoint in 2010-11 – has lacked a clear focus. Our forces have been divided, both locally and nationally;
6. Neither the TUC nor the Labour Party has coordinated or led a fightback. A series of competing coalitions against the cuts, set up by parties to the left of Labour, have not found a solution either. Nor have the purely local or the sectoral campaigns – magnificent as their actions have been – proved able to draw together everyone yearning to save our public services.
This Peoples Assembly therefore resolves:
1. To call on the various national anticuts campaigns to permanently unite into one common movement;
2. To call on local anticuts campaigns, where they have not already done so, to hold town, borough or city-wide People’s Assemblies and to elect bodies of delegates to ensure solidarity with all sectors under attack and participation in national action;
3. To call on the TUC to make good its pledge and to set as its goal a general strike, accompanied by various forms of direct actions, to demand an end to the cuts, to unemployment, to wage-freezing, and to defend the various services – centrally, the NHS itself;
4. To this end we will organise a demonstration on 8 September in Bournemouth to support the unions calling for action. If the TUC fails to do this we will recall the People’s Assembly – this time seeking delegates from the trade unions and local assemblies – to plan how to generate a mass strike and direct actions to gain our objectives.
