O R G A N I S I N G
W O R K I N G
Autumn 2010 Star Conference
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The conference will take place in the STUC Building, 333 Woodlands Road, Glasgow G3 (Kelvinbridge Underground). The conference will be chaired by Pauline Bryan, editor of the Scottish Labour Campaign for Socialism’s Citizen
The Con-Dem government has begun a savage attack on working class living standards. It is doing so in parallel with other EU governments – creating every danger of long-term economic depression.
10.45 Registration
This conference is about organising resistance. It will seek in particular to draw lessons from the defeat of a previous Tory government, not that of Thatcher but that of Edward Heath in the early 1970s. Then, as today, the government was seeking to resolve a profound capitalist crisis at the expense of working people. Then, as today, the government was politically divided. Then, as today, it attacked entire regions and communities – Scotland in particular. And then, as today, it was without the war chest of oil monies which financed Thatcher’s attack on the miners.
11.00
In the 1970s the fight-back started with small, relatively isolated struggles. But it progressively broadened its front of allies to outmanoeuvre and outflank the government – creating a mass of new working class activists on the ground, unionising new groups of workers, building links with the community and in Scotland establishing an alliance of forces in the 1972 and 1973Scottish Assemblies that opened the way towards the Scottish parliament. Across Britain the struggle radically transformed the size, composition and objectives of the trade union movement and its relationship to the Labour Party.
1.00
WORKSHOPS a) The EU dimension: building unity against cuts across Europe Panos Retzelas and John Foster b) The People’s Charter and Building Community Resistance Stephen Smellie and Tom Morrison c) Defending Scotland’s social services and economy Steven Boyd and Marc Livingstone
2.15
CLOSING PLENARY Creating Alliances for a Progressive Alternative Bill Butler MSP, Bill Kidd MSP, Richard Leonard, Stephen Smellie
11.15
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OPENING PLENARY Organising Working Class Resistance: national and international perspectives John McDonnell MP, Cllr Jim Bollan, Pat Stuart, Panos Retzelas
12.30 LUNCH
The Star’s Autumn conference will examine how, how in today’s circumstances, to build an alliance that can defend the welfare state, the public sector and the country’s productive base – and defeat the Con Dem government. It will consider how the Organising Agenda can be used to develop a new generation of trade union activists and how communities can be once more be organised in alliance with the trade union movement on issues of poverty, housing and pensions. It will assess the wider spectrum of civic bodies that exist to campaign on poverty, peace and the environment – and do so within an international context in which working class movements are once more taking the initiative.
C r e a t i n g
CHAIR’S OPENING REMARKS: PAULINE BRYAN
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