Thousands rise up against austerity plans in the UK

London – Activists and trade union leaders have called for a general strike and a mass campaign of civil disobedience to bring down the country’s new right-wing government as hundreds of thousands took to the streets of London and other cities to protest against austerity and public service cuts. Organisers said a quarter of a million people had joined Saturday’s march from the Bank of England to the Houses of Parliament, with smaller protests also taking place in Glasgow, Liverpool, and Bristol, and pledged the event was only a beginning.

“We’ve got to get rid of this government quicker than five years. This government can’t last the full term,” Sam Fairbairn, national secretary of the People’s Assembly, the anti-austerity campaign group that organised the march, told a rally in Parliament Square.

“Today is just the start of a campaign of protests, of strikes, of direct action and civil disobedience up and down the country. We’re going to organise the biggest mass movement this country has ever seen, and it’s that mass movement that’s going to kick David Cameron out of office.”

Cameron, the British prime minister, was re-elected last month after his right-wing Conservative Party gained a small parliamentary majority despite winning just 37 percent of votes cast, and claiming the support of less than a quarter of eligible voters.

In an article yesterday in the Sunday Times newspaper, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith, the government’s finance and work and pensions ministers, said they would announce measures next month to reduce the UK’s welfare expenditure by 12 billion pounds ($19bn) a year.

“It took many years for welfare spending to spiral so far out of control and it’s a project of a decade or more to return the system to sanity,” they wrote.

Marchers carried banners: “They cut, we bleed” and “Homes not Trident”, a reference to the UK’s nuclear deterrent which is due for renewal next year at an expected cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Addressing Saturday’s rally, union leaders called for a general strike to “stop austerity in its tracks”, and also issued a warning to the government over its plans to restrict the rights of trade unions to strike.

“A majority in the House of Commons [for the Conservatives] will never legitimise the ravishing attacks on the disabled, the elderly, the sick, those in precarious work and those out of work,” said Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, the UK’s largest trade union.— Al Jazeera