Danny’s Inspirational Speech from Brassed Off 1996 gives us pause for thought, and inspiration to fight.

People Matter, not things…… how does it feel when people have lost the will to live, because of governments?

What’s happening now? Homelessness, poverty, hunger and desperation faces so many, directly because of this current government policies.
While Debt the Ripper stalks Europe, inspiration is needed to fight this class war. Collectively, we can oppose it, the strength of many so greater than suffering alone.

We seek no more internal divisions of the Left, and working class people. The People’s Assembly is uniting the opposition against the Coalition government.

We do not accept that government’s austerity programme is necessary. The banks and the major corporations should be taxed at a rate which can provide the necessary resources. Austerity does not work: it is a failure in its own terms resulting in neither deficit reduction nor growth. It is not just: the government takes money from the pockets of those who did not cause the crisis and rewards those who did. It is immoral: our children face a bleaker future if our services and living standards are devastated. It is undemocratic: at the last election a majority voted against the return of a Tory government. The Con-Dem coalition has delivered us into the grip of the Tories’ whose political project is the destruction of a universal welfare state.

We therefore choose to resist. We refuse to be divided against ourselves by stories of those on ‘golden pensions’, or of ‘scroungers’, or the ‘undeserving poor’.

We do not blame our neighbours, whatever race or religion they maybe. We are not joining the race to the bottom. We stand with the movement of resistance across Europe.

We are clear in our minds that our stand will require us to defend the people’s right to protest, and so we support the right of unions and campaigns to organise and take such action as their members democratically decide is necessary.

We stand with all those who have made the case against the government so far: in the student movement, in the unions, in the many campaigns to defend services, the NHS, and in the Coalition of Resistance, the People’s Charter, UK Uncut, the environmental movement and the Occupy movement.

We do not seek to replace any organisations fighting cuts. All are necessary. But we do believe that a single united national movement is required to challenge more effectively a nationally led government austerity programme.

Read the draft statement in full. 

See The Empire of Things, in memory of Margaret Thatcher