SSP Aberdeen Open Meeting: This Tuesday, 7pm, Belmont cinema upstairs meeting room.
Building on the messages and activism of our election campaign, Aberdeen SSP is holding its next meeting this Tuesday 18th May at 7pm in the upstairs meeting room in the Belmont cinema. We will be welcoming to the meeting both new members and people who are thinking of joining and want to have some discussion with us, so if you agree with our politics and want to get involved, then now is the time.
The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are now in coalition together and are holding an emergency budget within 50 days to agree stringent cuts in public spending to cover Britain’s budget deficit, in effect forcing the majority of the population to pay for a crisis in capitalism not of their making. These cuts will deepen over the next Parliament and beyond, with pay cuts, job losses, benefit cuts, public services scrapped or privatised, and life made harder for millions of people across the country.
The Labour party and the SNP both accept that these cuts ‘have’ to happen, that there is no other way of dealing with this economic crisis. They are and will pass these cuts on through both the Scottish parliament and local councils. Just today NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde announced it would be cutting over 1200 jobs over the next three years, with more job losses likely in the Lothians. This is the tip of the iceberg, with 100,000 public sector jobs set to go in Scotland over the next few years, as you can read here.
During the election the Scottish Socialist Party has argued that this does not have to happen, and we have put forward a socialist alternative to the economic crisis. The richest 1,000 people in Britain have a combined wealth of £335 billion, an increase of £77 billion in the last year despite the recession, and this is just under half of the entire debt of the British government. We are a country of fantastic wealth which is generated by the work of millions of people, but it is concentrated in so few hands, when it could be used to make life better for everyone. 
Therefore we have argued that we need to tax the rich as an alternative to punishing the poor. Rather than taking over the bad debts of the banks and letting them continue to make massive profits as normal, why not also take their assets into public ownership, worth trillions? Why not increase income tax on the super-rich, increase corporation tax, close tax havens, bring the troops home from Afghanistan and scrap Trident? Then instead of the coming ‘age of austerity’, as Conservative chancellor George Osborne has stated we are about to enter, with cuts that are ‘more savage than under Thatcher’ according to Labour ex-Chancellor Alasdair Darling, why don’t we use these measures to pay off the debt and increase public spending to the benefit of all? Why not take transport, energy and finance into democratically-run public ownership, and meet people’s social needs with free transport, and affordable energy and housing, rather than private companies making profits from people struggling to make a living?
That is the socialist answer, meeting the social needs of people, not serving the needs of private profit, and together building an economy and society which protects the environment, rather than the insatiable need for capitalist expansion and profit leading to ecological catastrophe.
In order to resist the cuts, and state the case for a Scottish socialist republic, the SSP will be putting these arguments out at every opportunity across Scotland. If we can build a mass movement against the cuts and offer a socialist solution, then we will not simply resist the cuts, we will defeat and reverse them, making life better for millions of people. If you agree with this message and feel that you want to get active and do something about the situation we face, then now is the time. You can contact us via facebook, our website, or contact@aberdeenssp.
Our next branch meeting is on Wednesday, 27th October in the bar downstairs at the Belmont Cinema. We will be following a similar agenda to last meeting, with the discussion focusing on our future activities- the day school planned for December; the upcoming Scottish Election campaign; and our involvement in local campaigns such as Tripping Up Trump and Union Terrace Gardens. We are also keen to have a discussion on Osbourne’s spending review and what this means for the people of Scotland. Anyone is welcome, and if you have anything you wish to add to the agenda, please get in touch.
