‘Our candidates challenge Tory austerity, silent Labour, and racist right’
by Nancy Taaffe, Waltham Forest Socialist Party
This election is characterised by a groundswell to remove the Tories. People are absolute in what they don’t want, and they don’t want the Tories.
And within this need to get rid of the Tories, there are also voices and candidates who are articulating the unspoken rage of the fightback.
Young people, who are victims of housing greed. Workers from the recent strike wave, struggling for decent pay. Others are being scapegoated by the establishment politicians, and blamed for crises caused by austerity and capitalism.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is fielding candidates to give an electoral expression to this mood. I’m standing in Walthamstow as a socialist, because the time to boldly raise socialist policies is not just ripe, it’s rotten ripe!
Rotten
And rotten is an apt word to describe the decrepit Tories, and their cousin opportunists in Reform. Keir Starmer has warned us, from his silence on the bombing of innocent people in Gaza, to the chaos in privatised utilities and his failure to call for renationalisation, that he’s not going to stand up for working-class people and challenge the greed of the bosses. We don’t want our class being disorientated by the racist right, we must stand.
In Walthamstow, the supporters of our TUSC election stand are the people who have campaigned against the Labour council closing libraries, cutting youth clubs, and privatising services.
We’ve spent eight years trying to stop a monster block from being built, which will do nothing to alleviate the housing crisis. We have been the ones trying to prevent victims of social cleansing being evicted, and shunted hundreds of miles away. We are the ones who have been on picket lines, supporting striking workers.
We need big changes to solve society’s problems, particularly for young people. Rent control and building council homes would raise the living standards of millions.
Only those with a record of fighting back, and not bending the knee to austerity will be seen as credible, as time passes. Socialist Party members standing for TUSC have that record.
- Nancy Taaffe is standing for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) in Walthamstow
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