Everyone who can to join in should demonstrate their anger over the economic crisis and call for global action to build a better world
TOMORROW (Saturday March 28) I’ll be marching in London from the Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park. With me will be tens of thousands of people from the largest array of organisations assembled for many years – larger even than the Make Poverty History coalition from 2005. I hope that every Tribune reader who can will join me.
From the Salvation Army to Philosophy Football, from Oxfam to LabourStart, from the Muslim Council of Britain to Pants to Poverty, people have come together to tell world leaders to “put people first”.
The Put People First platform was assembled at breakneck speed to protest about the global economic crisis ahead of the London summit of world leaders which will take place next Thursday (April 2) with Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the chair. We want to make sure that those leaders know we want urgent action on the economy, on global poverty and on climate change. But that urgent action can’t just take us back to business as usual. We need a new way of running the planet – to address the global poverty and environmental damage that scarred the planet even before the banks started collapsing last year.
The unemployment figures in Britain alone demand resolute action. Many people not yet affected fear for their jobs, homes and communities. Faced with that sort of economic crisis, the Government was right to bail out the banks, because their collapse would have made things even worse for all of us – and bank workers are among those who have suffered swingeing job cuts.
Ordinary people are paying for a crisis they didn’t cause – paying with their jobs and paying through their taxes. The trouble is that contrasts with the continuing big bonus culture at the top of the banking system, where people simply don’t seem to be paying the price for their own rashness and greed. And that apparent impunity has made people very angry.
People should demonstrate that anger by coming on Saturday’s march. But this crisis isn’t made in Britain and it can’t be solved in Britain either. That’s why our call isn’t just for action by our own Government – more regulation of city fat cats, hedge funds and tax havens; and more public works, especially those promoting energy efficiency and green jobs.
We also want action at a global level. We need a co-ordinated boost to the economies of the world, including the developing countries which will suffer most, and who need help in the form of higher levels of aid and debt relief. We need global regulation of the finance sector. And we need action, above all, on the carbon emissions that are slowly strangling the planet – making poverty permanent for developing countries and causing more and more climactic disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Australian bush fires.
We need governments to put people first, not markets. We want to see the resurgence of the active state, addressing the shortcomings of free market fundamentalism. This is a huge agenda, designed to deal with huge challenges. But the scale of those challenges should not daunt us.
The world has addressed many of these problems before – after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s for example. And after the Second World War, governments and peoples rebuilt a shattered Europe, built the Bretton Woods institutions that underpinned the global boom of the 1950s, and in Britain created the National Health Service. We can do it again, if we have the vision that Put People First has set out, if we bring people together to make common cause, and if we are bold enough to do something different.
So, although anger will be a potent mobiliser for Saturday’s march, I don’t want that to be the only emotion on show. We must also demonstrate resolution in the face of an economic and environmental catastrophe, and hope that we will build a better world on the rubble of the current crisis. I’ll see you on the march.
Brendan Barber is general secretary of the TUC. Put People First: March for Jobs, Justice, Climate is on Saturday March 28. Assemble from 11am on the Victoria Embankment, London SW1. March to Hyde Park for a rally from 2:30pm-4:30pm. More details at www.putpeoplefirst.org.uk
