Press enquiries tel: 07415063231 Email: ukuncut@gmail.com Twitter: @ukuncut

Today, UK Uncut [1] will hold street parties around the country that will directly target high profile individuals they see as responsible for the government's cuts, dubbed the ‘architects of austerity’. The anti-cuts group promises that the protests in ten cities across the UK today[2] will take a radical new direction and will not be quickly forgotten or easily ignored by the government, tax avoiders or City bankers.

UK Uncut have said that the street parties are are designed to resist the government's cuts and celebrate the much-needed alternatives to austerity. They plan to block roads and hold street parties that instead of celebrating the Jubilee, will celebrate public services and a future decided by the people, not big business and a cabinet of millionaires.

In London[3], details of the target are a closely guarded secret, but the group has said that the street party will be held on the streets 'of high profile people who caused the cuts'. Hundreds of people are expected to turn out to what the group intends to be a fun and family friendly day out that brings the message home to the 'architects of austerity'. Comedians, musicians, public sector workers and activists concerned about the impact of the cuts on women, the NHS and welfare state are all taking part in the events.

In Sheffield UK Uncut activists will target Nick Clegg's constituency office for his support of the coalition's radical cuts programme and his parties broken election promises. Nottingham Uncut’s street party will target George Osborne who activists claim that despite proclaiming the 2012 budget a ‘Robin Hood’ budget, in fact exposed himself as the Sheriff of Nottingham by choosing to slashing the top rate of tax and announcing deeper welfare cuts. The theme for the party in Manchester is 'communities against corporate tax dodging' and is expected to target the shops of high profile tax dodger Sir Philip Green, whose empire includes Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins, amongst others.

UK Uncut supporter Roger Johnston said “We are being made to pay for a crisis, a crisis that was caused by the banks, through devastating cuts to the NHS, to the welfare state and to our futures. This government of out of touch millionaires have made a choice to do this, yet there are real alternatives like clamping down on tax avoidance or making the banks pay for the crisis they caused.”

“UK Uncut's street parties are about people taking direct action to celebrate the public services that are currently either being axed, cut or under threat, and to celebrate a different future, decided by us. We didn't vote for this government's plan, we will not stand for their lies, and we will not stand for their unfair cuts.”

ENDS

Note to editors: [1] UK Uncut is a grassroots anti-cuts direct action network: http://www.uku:ncut.org.uk/ [2] Street parties are set to take place in the following cities: Bournemouth, Central London, Crawley - West Sussex, Derby, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Nottingham, Sheffield & York. [3] Details of the meeting points for the London Street Party are online here http://ukuncut.org.uk/blog/meeting-points-for-london-action For further details and to arrange interviews with activists taking part in the London Street Party, contact 07415063231

Picture credit: linziloop

Reclaim our streets, reclaim our country! by Ellie Mae O'Hagan

When people talk about British values I’m never quite sure what they mean. Britishness could mean anything from tea and scones with the Queen to drunkenly vomiting outside a Wetherspoons in the wee small hours of a Sunday morning. So somewhere between fish and chips, Harry Potter and overcast skies, I am going to try and explain what Britishness means to me.

I’ve always thought fairness to be a fundamental attribute of British values. When our politicians woo us with platitudes, they talk about fairness. Labour once promised ‘a future fairer for all;’ the Tories’ mantra ‘we’re all in this together’ suggests fairness and equality by its very nature, and the Lib Dems… well. Actually never mind.

But fairness is equally mysterious a term as Britishness. What does it actually mean? To me, fairness means compassion. It means making an effort to understand the circumstances of others before you judge their actions. It means striving for equality, which requires an acceptance that not everyone begins from the same place. It means dignity.

In fact, one of my favourite definitions of fairness is Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights came about as a direct consequence of the Second World War, and it was enshrined in Britain by the foundation of a Welfare State. In post-War Britain, we recognised that everybody deserves shelter, food and healthcare, regardless of how rich or poor they are. That’s fairness – that’s decency. We emerged from a savage and terrible war and decided to define ourselves by civility. That was Britishness.

Now I find it funny that we ask a woman in a hat of jewels to talk about crippling cuts and call that Britishness. Somewhere along the way, we decided to chip away the foundations of British values, or even just human values, and compensate with pomp and pageantry. So now there’s a homelessness crisis, a sharp rise in food banks, and the end of universal healthcare, and we’re throwing a party. We’re spending our money on peculiar rituals, fancy hats and stale traditions to try and force an idea of Britishness because we know that any meaningful definition has been erased. The government has destroyed substance, so it’s compensating with style.

I’m looking forward to UK Uncut’s Great British Street Party, because – to borrow a cliché from David Cameron – I want to put the Great back into Great Britain. I want people from other countries to commend us for having universal healthcare and try and emulate it in their countries. I want compassion to be more than an offering people make on a whim, but something that is institutionalised: a fundamental hallmark of who we are, not just as British residents, but as human beings.

The Jubilee provides politicians with a chance to define Britishness. Well I’m not going to let them. This is my home country, and I reject a notion of Britishness which celebrates the inherited wealthy while the most vulnerable are abandoned. This is an opportunity to reclaim British values to mean the things they did in 1948: fairness, compassion, decency. Those are the values I want my country to have, precisely because they are not simply the values of my country. They are the values of life – the values of humanity.

Ellie Mae O'Hagan is a columnist for Guardian Comment is Free and a community organiser in East London.

Bill Kerry, co-director of the Equality Trust and author and economist Stewart Lansley explain why the UK has such high levels of inequality, what measures we can take to close the gap between rich and poor and how we can build a fairer society.

This blog and interview are published here in support of UK Uncut’s Great British Street Party on Saturday 26th May. On that day people in towns and cities around the country will be coming out onto the streets to show they are ready to be disobedient and disruptive in order to demand a future where they- not big business or a cabinet of millionaires- call the shots.

Inequality in the UK: an interview with Bill Kerry, Co-Director of the Equality Trust



Find out more about the Equality Trust's work and check out their new film 'The Spirit Level' here!



Image credit: False Economy

Why economic inequality leads to collapse, by Stewart Lansley

During the past 30 years, a growing share of the global economic pie has been taken by the world's wealthiest people. In the UK and the US, the share of national income going to the top 1% has almost tripled, setting workforces adrift from economic progress.

Today, the world's 1,200 billionaires hold economic firepower that is equivalent to a third of the size of the American economy. It is this concentration of income – at levels not seen since the 1920s – that is the real cause of the present crisis.

In the UK, the upward transfer of income from wage-earners to business and the mega-wealthy is the equivalent of 7% of the economy. The workforce has around £100bn – roughly equivalent to the size of the nation's health budget – less to spend than if the cake was shared as it was in the late 1970s.

In the US, the sum stands at £500bn. There a typical worker would be more than £3,000 better off if the distribution of output had been held at its 1979 level. In the UK, they would earn £2,000 more.

It is this consolidation of economic power that is preventing recovery. While consumer demand – the oxygen that makes economies work – has been choked off, the winners from the process of upward redistribution – big business and the top 1% – are on strike.

Britain's richest 1,000 have accumulated fortunes that are collectively worth £250bn more than a decade ago. The biggest global corporations are sitting on near-record levels of cash. If this money had stayed with the bulk of wage-earners, we would now be out of this crisis. Instead we have paralysis.

The economic orthodoxy of the past 30 years holds that a stiff dose of inequality brings more efficient and faster-growing economies. It is a theory that has been proved badly wrong. While the wealth gap has soared, UK growth and productivity rates since 1980 have been a third lower and unemployment five times higher than in the postwar era of ‘regulated capitalism’. The three post-1980 recessions have been deeper and longer than those of the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the current prolonged crisis.

The outcome of the post-1980 experiment has been an economy that is much more polarised and much more prone to crisis. History shows a clear link between inequality and instability. The two most damaging crises of the last century – the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Crash of 2008 – were both preceded by sharp rises in the income gap.

There are two key reasons why excessive concentrations of income end in economic collapse. First, allowing wages to lag seriously behind output growth dilutes purchasing power. Consumer societies lose the capacity to consume and eventually seize up. The political solution to mass deflation over the last two decades has been to pump in debt.

This kept the global economy going for a while, but it was a time bomb with a slow fuse. It merely delayed the inevitable meltdown. Secondly, extreme levels of concentration create bubble economies. In the build-up to 2008, rising corporate surpluses and burgeoning personal wealth led to a giant mountain of footloose global capital. The cash sums held by the world's rich (those with cash of more than $1m) doubled in the decade to 2008 to a massive $39 trillion – three times the output of the US economy.

Only a tiny proportion of this sum ended up in productive investment. Far from creating new wealth, a tsunami of ‘hot money’ raced around the world in search of faster and faster returns, creating bubbles – in property, commodities and business – lowering economic resilience and amplifying the risk of financial breakdown.

The central lesson of the crisis is that a widening income gap and a more productive economy do not go hand in hand. An economic model that allows the richest members of society to accumulate a larger and larger share of the cake will eventually self-destruct. In contrast, more equal societies generate a much smoother economic cycle. Greater equality is not just a matter of social justice. It is also the key to economic health.

Please join with those taking action on Saturday 26th May to call for a fairer and more equal society.

Stewart Lansley is the author of The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality is Essential for Recovery, Gibson Square, 2012.

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