Youth

Issues for young people

Schools: we’ll strike each month

Eleanor Buffery is a year 8 school student in Gloucester who organised the local youth strike for climate. She spoke to Maisie Sanders. I found out about the strikes in the local and national news and I thought it was really important. I read more about it, talked to my friends and we decided to take action! I got in touch with Youth Strike for Climate nationally, set up a social media page and got started organising our own strike. In my school we spent lots of time making posters and adverts. We spoke to the Head of Year, who helped spread the word by sending out an email to students letting...

Why we joined the anti-Brexit march

In the run-up to the huge anti-Brexit protest on 23 March Young Labour member Alex Fernandes replied to NEC youth rep Lara McNeill’s article “I’m Labour’s NEC [National Executive] youth rep – and I won’t be at the People’s Vote march”. In her latest article on LabourList, Lara McNeill recycles the right-wing lie that Remain sentiment belongs to the “liberal middle classes”. I’m sure that will come as news to the working-class residents of Merseyside, Manchester, Glasgow, London and other Remain-voting areas. I’m a member of Young Labour, and as such McNeill claims to speak for me, at least on...

Students go for system change, not climate change

The best guess is that one and half million students, in over 120 countries, struck on Friday 15 March to demand that their governments start emergency action on climate change. In London, the central rally of school students in Parliament Square was 4,000 or more. Everyone we talked with said there was no ongoing organisation in their school for the walkout. They’d found out about it on social media and come with their friends. There were also sizeable groups of university students at Parliament Square. The National Union of Students had officially supported the action, but did nothing to...

The kids are coming (don't say you weren't warned)

Occasionally, just occasionally, there are weeks full of silver linings. The one that saw Britain's first nationwide schools climate strikes was definitely one of them. When Greta Thunberg began her lone climate protest outside the Swedish Parliament last August she was not to know that, within 6 months there would be 70,000 pupils a week, across 270 towns and cities worldwide, who would be joining her. Their message was simple: "Wake up! There's a climate emergency." If you had followed the week's debates in Britain's Parliament you wouldn't have guessed. Politicians had been given plenty of...

Schools climate strike: build now for 15 March!

Tens of thousands of young people joined the Youth Strike for Climate school walkouts on Friday 18 February in town centres and outside schools across the UK. It was organised as part of the Fridays for Future school walkouts started by Swedish school student Greta Thurnberg, which have now gone global. Students from Australia, Austria, Belgium and Germany have also taken part. School students in France walked out on Friday 18th, too. Over 3,000 people attended the London rally in Parliament Square, ranging from sixth-formers to primary-school-age children with their parents. The atmosphere...

Australian school students strike over climate change

Lilly Murphy, a year 9 student in Melbourne who was involved in the 30 November Australian school students’ strike for climate action, talked with Workers’ Liberty Australia. At my school a few of my friends knew about it due to social media. There were a few signs around school. So a friend asked me because they knew I was quite politically active, wearing a “Victorian Socialists” top [“Victorian Socialists” is a local left electoral coalition]. I found out more about it. And then we were all thinking of going to it. We [six students] had a maths exam on the Friday when the walkout was on. So...

Model motions for Labour Clubs from Workers' Liberty Students

October 2018 Left Antisemitism This Labour Club believes antisemitism is an ideological poison which, by seeking to explain the world in conspiratorial terms and pose as a politics of resistance to the powers-that-be, is particularly and specifically toxic for the left. Antisemitism has existed on the left historically in the form of conspiracy theories attacking “Jewish bankers”, which conflate Jews with finance and capital. This was rightly denounced in the 1890s as “the socialism of fools”. In more recent years, antisemitism has also manifested on the left through a conspiracist conception...

Protest against Israeli shootings: For an independent Palestine alongside Israel

The Israeli army has killed 44 Palestinians, and injured hundreds more, after Israeli Defence Force (IDF) snipers opened fire on demonstrations on Israel’s border with the Palestinian territory of Gaza, on Fridays between 30 March and 27 April. One protestor, 18-year-old Abdel Fattah Abdel Nabi, was shot in the back as he turned to flee IDF fire. Another victim was Gazan journalist Yaser Murtaja, killed by a bullet to the abdomen underneath his bullet-proof vest clearly marking him out as a member of the press. While the bulk of both demonstrations have been peaceful and unarmed, some...

"There is a world beyond the campus" - Vote Sahaya James for NUS President

Students don’t live in hermetically sealed containers, undisturbed by the oppression and exploitation around the world. Yet too often student unions behave as if they do. We constantly hear the rhetoric of the “average student” concerned only with the costs of printing and nights out, as if campuses aren’t implicated in the injustices which define our society. When institutions like Oxford and Cambridge invest millions in offshore funds to develop deep sea drilling, climate justice is an issue for our student unions. When institutions act as border guards, monitoring the attendance of...

National Policy Forum row

The 17 February meeting of the Labour Party National Policy Forum (NPF) saw a row over electing a new chair. Created as part of the Blairite process of blocking internal democracy, the NPF substitutes itself for the fully demonstratic policy-making conference that is needed. Abolition of the NPF as one of the aims of the democracy review would be a welcome step. So what was the row? Former National Executive Disputes Committee Chair, and previous member of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance slate for the NEC, Ann Black looked like she had the votes in the room to become the chair of the NPF...

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