Organise! Our rights are under attack – War on Want webinar

Our rights to assemble, to organise, and to fight for a better world are under threat from the UK Government. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill 2023 seeks to undermine hard won workers’ rights and silence those who challenge the UK government’s broken economic policies. The ‘Policing Act’ and the Public Order Act will impose huge restrictions on the right to protest in the UK. The proposed anti-Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions law aims to stop public bodies from making ethical decisions about their investments, purchases and procurements.

The UK government are introducing these bills because they know that strikes, protests and boycotts have historically been effective tools for change. The last few years have seen an upsurge in mass action for social justice — from demonstrations demanding racial justice, led by the Black Lives Matter movement, to large scale protests by climate justice activists, to hundreds of thousands of people of conscience throughout the UK taking to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians. And in the past few months, unprecedented public sector walk-outs in the face of rising inequality and real term pay cuts have underlined the vital role of unions in representing and fighting for workers’ rights.

These crackdowns – on our right to strike, right to protest and right to boycott – are a genuine threat to our civil liberties that seek to arrest our collective power. But they also signal how powerful our movements can be.

In the first in this webinar series, we hear from experts working on the opposition to all 3 bills as we work to build a collective movement to protect our rights.

Speakers: – Keith Ewing — President, Institute of Employment Rights (IER) and Vice President, Campaign for Trade Union Freedom (CTUF) – Ryvka Barnard — Deputy Director, Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) – Kevin Blowe — Co-ordinator, Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol)

Professor Ewing’s contribution can be viewed between 25.05 and 36.32.

Webinar: Monday 13 March 2023. Watch here: