Momentum is everything in politics and now we have it. Instead of a one-off isolated event like G20 we now have a series of actions week after week. Novembrer 24th walk out now encompasses occupying Lib Dem constituency offices and is to be followed by action against tax avoiding companies on december 4th.

The violent attacks on Tory HQ far from alienating public opinion has energised it. A quick trawl through the Sunday Papers reveals columnists like Suzanne Moore in the Mail on Sunday standing 4 square with the violent students and is replicated by opnion pieces elsewhere not only in the liberal media but in the right wing ones.

Where commentators are not in support they are fearful. take Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times : ‘If a rash of violent disputes were to become a settled pattern the coalition government might look as if it were no longer in control, the agenda of early cuts too confrontational, it’s narrative of national salvation could be challenged.Public opinion is the prize. Who runs the country asked Ted Heath.

Clearly not you replied the voters’. Nick Clegg’s u-turn on student fees has alienated the middle classes into a temporary alliance with the proles.’What would happen now if nurses took to the streets against NHS cuts? Liberal opinion would be with them as well.

The government could fall.It’s all to play for – but the door is open now – NOW is the time to push further.Forget next March – the next 4 weeks will be decisive. Go for it.

Ian Bone..


The veneer has well and truly peeled from the sham that is British democracy. Even those who believed in – and voted for – the supposedly democratic process are now forced to recognise that it is nothing more than a con-job (or should that be ConDem-Job!).

Clegg the Smeg claimed to oppose a rise in tuition fees, but was secretly supporting them (though we’re sure that he – and everyone else for that matter – never expected that he would be in a position where he’d be found out). Cameron’s Tories claimed to want to decentralise government, break up quangos and stem governmental attacks on liberty – yet now they’re further centralising the education system, replacing Labour’s quangos with their own and are further strengthening the database state. The story under Labour wouldn’t have played out any differently. For they are all following the same neoliberal agenda that has been fucking us over for 30+ years (regardless of who’s supposed to be in power at the time).

For the last couple of decades too many people in our country have silently enjoyed the crumbs and baubles that the rich have awarded them for their compliance, whilst the voice of the oppressed has been completely ignored; for a long time those paying the highest price were comfortably out of view – far away in the ‘third world’ or hidden in ‘sink estates’ (and although the media liked to encourage people to be ‘charitable’ they always helped to maintain that underlying myth that poverty was the fault of the poor, not the inevitable result of others having hoarded most of the wealth for themselves) – but now the rich are tightening their belts (i.e. stealing from the poor) and more and more people are seeing the true face of capitalism – and it’s biting them right on the arse. At last the beast is unmasked. And shit is it ugly!

Government as we know it is a tool used by big business and corporations to control the very people that ‘representative democracy’ claims to represent – us. In reality the job of government is to control the flow of currency, ensuring that wealth and power goes to the right people – the rich. Everything else – everything truly worthwhile – is actually created by society itself; though government still likes to take credit so it can keep the taxes coming in. The good news is that modern technology now allows us to go way beyond the old bureaucratic systems and effect a true, participatory democracy; a rule by and of the people – self-rule.

The people who best understand the technology that will allow this to happen are also the ones who have made the most visible and direct stand against the current British government – it’s time we all took a lesson from the students!

On Wednesday 24th November there will be a National Day of Action where students, school-kids, teachers and lecturers will walk out of universities and schools to take a stand against the cuts and rise in tuition fees. There’s talk of occupying Lib Dem constituency offices across the country – among many other things