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UK anti-war campaigns to join labor unions in strike

Press TV – November 27, 2011

British anti-war campaigns have thrown their weight behind the nationwide strike against the government’s cuts in pensions and welfare services, urging the government to cut warfare not welfare.

Stop the War Coalition (SWC) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament announced that they would participate in the November 30 strike action organized by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) to call on the government to cut war and Trident spending not pensions.

The campaigns stressed that the government’s spending cuts have only been applied on jobs and public services, while spending on war is mounting without interruption.

Britain spent at least £1.5 billion on the Libya war, and spends about £5 billion per year on the Afghanistan war, SWC revealed. The campaign also said that the overall costs of the war on terror to the US are $3 trillion.

It is estimated that over three million public sector workers will participate in the pension strike across Britain, to defend their pensions against the government’s austerity measures.

The anti-war campaigns proclaimed they would support the strike action of 28 unions, believing the Tory-led government’s wrong policies would boost poverty and misery for the poor people.

“The budget deficits in the US and Britain have been caused in part by the rising cost of wars. Governments have borrowed money to pay for war. They are now asking people to accept cuts and austerity to pay for them,” SWC convener Lindsey German said.

Suggesting an alternative to the cut plans, German said the government could “cut spending on war and the Trident nuclear submarine system and use the money to fund welfare.”

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), also condemned the government’s war policies. “The war in Afghanistan and the war in Libya are wrong. They are misjudged; they are not about what people claim they are about. And we should actually find a way out of those pretty quickly, not make the situation in those countries worse as well as at the same time take valuable resources that could go into schools and hospitals,” he said.

November 27, 2011 - Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism

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