I’m watching with interest. I knew Ed as a student. Along with future Green Party stalwarts Tim Andrews, Andy Spring, Maya de Souza and others, we were members of a university group called Green Action.

I was already interested in green politics though my experience of it was limited to growing up with parents and parents’ friends interested self sufficiency and food issues. An Ecology Party manifesto found its way into the house circa 1983. Green Action helped crystallise many of my impulses and give them a more coherent framework.

A lot of the impetus came from Tim who invited speakers like Sir Julian Rose, a leading light of the organic farming movement, and Brig Oubridge who came from Teepee Valley in Wales to speak to us. It was an exciting group to be a part of. There were demos against Chernobyl, green forays into student elections, attempts to educate college kitchens about catering for veggies and vegans. Ed was very much a part of it.

That said while most of us were looking towards the newly renamed Green Party, Ed was a Liberal/SDP alliance type. Ed never made any bones about it. He was a little bit square, very much ‘out’ about his politics and we were broad minded enough not to give him a hard time. But in an important way he was also ‘one of us’.

Then, as you do after university, you lose touch. I ran into Ed briefly at Westminster in the run up to the 2001 election. I’d read that he’d been somewhat surprise to be rushed into parliament in the upheaval of 1997. He still seemed faintly surprised four years on.

Now he’s Energy Secretary and taking over from a man who had a reasonably good rap amongst campaigning groups. I’m interested to know how ingrained an impression those formative years of student environmental activism left. Ed, as I’ve said, was never a political Green but he did clearly understand just how critical environmental issues were.

The big question, for me, is whether he has the clout to take a stand on issues like climate change, renewables and the democratisation of energy when he’s surrounded by a bunch of brutal uber sceptics.

Chris Huhne (who stood as a local parliamentary candidate for the Alliance while Ed and I were at uni) earned a reputation of having given as good as he got from his Tory ‘chums’. But then Huhne always came across as ambitious, self assured and slightly ego-centric even 25 years ago. Ed Davey on the other hand was quiet and thorough and not quite exciting. However he always struck me as a decent guy and a nice guy.

Huhne showed what was possible even in the nest of vipers that is the present cabinet, Ed Davey has known most of his life that the things for which he’s now responsible really matter. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect miracles, we certainly shouldn’t tolerate lame excuses, but let’s see how he does.

Now normally I manage to resist the urge to rise to a Daily Mail article I disagree with. But for this one:

‘Well that’s gratitude! We give India £1bm in aid, THEY snub the UK and give France a £13bn jet contact’

I’ve made an exception.

The article refers to a contract awarded by the Indian government to the French firm Dassault Rafale to provide 126 military jets to the Indian air force, over British firm BAE systems. This is seen to be an affront given that Britain’s aid package to India is 15 times larger that that of France. The contract was given to France ‘despite Government claims that the UK’s £1billion aid package to India would help secure the order’.

It has always been known that ‘aid’ is often understood by governments to be payment for favourable trade terms, a supportive vote in the UN, or money expressly to be used to hire foreign firms, but it is not normally put quite so clearly (by press or government). The outrage is almost refreshing.

The reason cited for the decision to buy the jets from France is one of cost – and this seems to be what has put a few noses out of joint. We give India money, they should spend it on buying our planes, regardless of cost, quality or suitability, the logic goes. This has happened countless times througout the past decades – Indonesia’s Suharto using British loans to buy weapons to persecute thousands of Indonesian civilians is the classic example.

Aid is aid; to give money expecting a lucrative arms deal to come out of it as a result is bribery, plain and simple.

Democracy noun, a form of government in which the people have a voice in the exercise of power; typically through elected representatives.

Origin: Greek demokratia, from demos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule’

- Oxford English Dictionary

Recently, I found myself sitting in the public gallery during a meeting of the City of Edinburgh Council, where I heard something which has been bothering me ever since. During a debate, one of the Conservative councillors criticised three of the other parties for making decisions based on ideology and the views of their constituents. According to the Tory councillor, this was an inexcusably irrational and populist; when it comes to major decisions affecting constituents’ lives, it is cowardly to consider this through the lens of either the values you campaigned on during an election, or the opinions of those constituents.

From the gallery, the arrogance of the councillor’s speech was obvious: our views are correct – so correct that we don’t need a mandate to justify them. The idea that the Tory councillor hadn’t based her own decision on ideology is vaguely ridiculous, but this is the type of argument that is being used to justify austerity measures. Rather than a moral or ethical choice, we are seeing decisions about the economy and government spending framed as issues of technical correctness, which politicians claim should be protected from the biases of… other politicians. The supposed neutrality of this stance is nothing more than rhetoric: the views of a political party are by definition ideological – they are the opinions of a group of people.

Thankfully, the Conservatives don’t have anything approaching a majority on the Council, and no one else was willing to adopt this point of view, but hearing it stated in the debating chamber of a democratic institution made me distinctly uncomfortable. Aren’t ideology and constituents’ views exactly the kind of thing that elected representatives are supposed to take into account when they make decisions? I’d always thought that this was how representative democracy worked.

What I heard in the Council Chambers a few days ago echoes what is happening across our political establishment: the main parties at Westminster are forgetting that representative democracy relies on them providing representation in order for it to be democratic. While only the most naïve would expect politicians to keep every single one of the manifesto promises, many of us feel betrayed by the outright lies that the current Westminster government told during their election campaigns. Nick Clegg signed pledges to abolish tuition fees, then helped to triple them; David Cameron had billboards announcing that he would “cut the deficit, not the NHS”, which has turned out to be wrong on both counts. Quite simply, they are not representing the people who elected them based on their stated views in May 2010.

When politicians take this attitude towards representation, it undermines our trust in them as individuals, but, more importantly, it makes it difficult for us to put any faith in representative democracy. This is a system which is based largely on trust: we’re supposed to trust politicians to represent us, according to the particular ideology of the party which got the most votes in their constituency. If they aren’t prepared to do that, then how can we say that they are a more legitimate form of government than an unelected ruler?

Unlike the Tory councillor, I’m not so arrogant as to claim that I have the one empirically correct answer, but I do think that we need to encourage serious debate about how we organise our democracy. If we admit that the current system doesn’t work as a means of allowing the general population to govern, then the first thing we need to decide is whether representative democracy just doesn’t work; or whether it can work, but we’re doing it wrong. I don’t think I’m ready to give up on representative democracy yet, but the current arrangements provide so little effective representation that we need radical reform at the very least.

University of Birmingham’s scenic campus is a lovely place for a demonstration. Most of the buildings in the picture have been occupied at some point including the clocktower in 1977.

Students at, the University of Birmingham have called a demonstration to fight the controversial “ban” on protests. The injunction has been widely condemned as censorious and regressive by groups including Amnesty International.
It is clear that it will take more than strong words to make the university remove the injunction. So now student groups including the national campaign against fees and cuts, the education activist network and the student broad left are uniting and calling for students across the country to mobilise for a massive demonstration on the University of Birmingham campus on February 15th.

Fighting the injunction is far more than just protecting our “rights”, we are also fighting for the conception of the “university”. Traditionally the university as public institutions are more than just education “machines”, they are bastions of free debate and the homes of radical new ideas. Increasing corporatized universities couldn’t give a damn about free speech. Fighting for free speech to be restored on campus is a fight to protect one of the key tenets of what makes a university a university.

Further to this is not just about the injunction. One of our own – Simon Furse – is facing expulsion for taking part in an occupation. He will be having his disciplinary hearing at the same time as the demonstration. He is the only student in the country to face a disciplinary for taking part in the wave of occupations last term. So now that same wave of occupations is coming to call on the University of Birmingham.
Accommodation is available in Birmingham for anyone coming down to the demo, in case you need to stay overnight, so make sure you bring a sleeping bag with you!

UCU represents academic and what’s known as academic related staff – that is IT support, librarians etc. – in both higher (HE) and further (FE) education. Higher education is then often, and indeed in the case of pensions, split between “post-92″ and “pre-92″ institutions (post-92 referring to the polytechnics and colleges that were awarded university status in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, pre-92 naturally referring then to older universities). Staff in pre-92 institutions are members of a pensions scheme called USS (universities superannuation scheme), which is a private pension plan with a dedicated fund from members and universities as employers. Staff in FE and post-92 HE are, instead, members of TPS (teachers pension scheme), which is a government programme also covering school teachers.

Both schemes are currently in the process of being altered in ways which will increase contributions from staff, increase the retirement age and leave members with smaller overall pensions. (To go through all the changes being proposed would take too long, so I’ll simply advise the interested reader to see here and here.) Changes to both schemes have also seen industrial action over the last year – first in March of 2011 over USS changes, then again in June of last year and finally on November 30th in coordination with other public sector unions.

That action forced some (small) concessions. The government’s “final offer” to the unions in December, which covered the TPS dispute, but not USS, offered a slight improvement in the accrual rate (the amount earned each year), an 8% increase in the “cost ceiling”, the maximum that the government is willing to spend on the pensions, and some protection for people near retirement. At approximately the same time the universities employers association offered to restart negotiations over USS. However, the changes to USS were already unilaterally imposed last Autumn and the new negotiations offered were for reviews of two specific areas that have been changed. Firstly, new entrants to USS are now placed in a different scheme than current members; current members have a “final salary” pensions where what they get in retirement is proportional to their final salary, new members have a “career averaged” (CARE) pension, which is proportional to a weighted (and inflation uprated) average of your salary. One review would consider the CARE pension and hopefully ensure that it ends up being no worse than what is offered to people in TPS. The other review would consider the abolition of the right for staff over 55 to take an unreduced pension.

This month a meeting of UCU’s national executive committee voted by a margin of 3 to 1 to reject the government’s offer over TPS and to continue industrial action in coordination with other teaching unions. The largest school teaching unions the NUT, NUSUWT and EIS have all also rejected the offer.

Which all brings us pretty much up to this week and the special conference for USS. Despite the general consensus that the offer for new entrants in USS is worse than the current offer for new entrants into TPS and the clear decision to keep fighting over those changes, our national negotiators recommended going into the meeting that we accept the offer, suspend action and re-enter negotiations. At the meeting three broad positions were laid out: accept the the negotiators position and suspend all action; return to negotiations but time-limited and whilst continuing our current work-to-rule action; or reject the offer and immediately escalate strike action.

Sadly, the delegates at the meeting voted (66 to 41) for the first of those options, suspending all current industrial action. There were, as slight amelioration, several amendments to that decision however. First, a commitment to ‘respond quickly and decisively’ with further action ‘if the review does not deliver improvements for our members in a timely manner’. Second, that by June of this year we have agreement on an accrual rate no worse than in TPS and full pensions for those made redundant. And thirdly, that Andrew Cubie, who chaired the original negotiations prior to the imposition of the agreement and used his casting vote to force the changes through, despite supposedly being independent of the two sides, should be immediately excluded from the negotiations. (It’s not clear at this stage what the result would be if the employers refuse to exclude him – would this lead to further action now? or would we just accept it?)

Personally, I think this is a serious mistake. The reviews will have as much management participation as the original negotiations which forced through these changes, and when the changes are already in place a settlement is really a victory for management – they have no need to negotiate except to stop us taking industrial action, which they have already succeeded in doing. At a time when other unions are taking further coordinated action, when we have momentum by making them offer ‘something’, on the back of November 30th it seems poor strategy to back down now whilst offered no independent arbitration, no guarantee of any improvement and almost certainty that anything that does come from the reviews will still be worse than what we had to start with, before these changes happened. Come June it will be too late to do anything which substantively disrupts management till the Autumn and there will be no chance to not mark exams (a tactic for which there is evidence from previous disputes of success) till the end of the year.

By suspending action we choose to disarm ourselves for no substantive gain. It baffles me that lay trade union delegates would vote to do that, but that is what they have done.

In fact, several other petitions have been much more successful. These have included those on serious issues like the release of documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster and for compulsory financial education in schools. While our first reaction will be to celebrate the sobriety of the British people, we should examine why it is that the socially conservative right got so much attention for this. It also tells us something about the way in which the right is successful.

A while ago there was a ‘status update’ doing the rounds about how trade unions had brought us the weekend, the 40 hour working week, dramatically safer workplaces and annual holidays. It’s true, and it’s a reason to support collective action. But it also tells us that it’s been so long since we achieved those things that people need to be reminded.

Instead, it’s the right that have delivered a series of massive gains for the rich over the past 40 years. They’ve destroyed the economy through casino banking and pinned the blame on public services, driven investment out of public services and into luxury goods, slashed marginal taxes and created a boom in the number of billionaires.

By contrast we have been busy defending the gains made by the labour movement up to the 1970s. These are gains important, the fight has often been valiant, and we have sometimes succeeded. But we need to be more positive. We need to define a vision that is equal to that of our forebears. For those who worked for 12 or more hours a day, the 8 hour day must have seemed unrealistic. How much more impossible must an extra day a week off have seemed?

The right are committed to campaigning for a society in which people are killed by the state, the rich prosper at the expense of the poor and bankers who destroy lives and the economy should be rewarded with seven or eight figure bonuses. They may not win every battle, but they’re doing a fantastic job of winning the war. And it’s their very willingness to go into battle and lose that makes them so much more successful. We need to match that willingness. We need to fight unwinnable fights in order to win a war on everyone but the very richest.

While Paul Staines is off-message with his culture war approach, it moves debate towards the right. The plan may be to hammer the poor, then come back on issues like reproductive rights, LGBTIQ liberation, race equality and other areas where the right has lost over the past half-century, as has happened in the US. But Staines is helping to pull the debate towards the right, and is helping the right to win on the rest of its platform.

Today’s campaigns are for a living wage for the worst paid workers, to get the very richest to pay the tax that they owe and for a stay of privatisation of government services. These are good things to campaign for, but they’re all essentially defensive campaigns. And that’s what makes them so different from the campaigns of the early and mid twentieth century.

Until the 1970s radicals pushed for change, and mostly they won. They delivered the weekend, the 40 hour working week and so much more. The right defended the privilege of capital and mostly they lost. But over the past forty years those roles have almost totally reversed. It is the right that pushes for change and radicals that defend the status quo.

The one thing we should learn is that it is those with the positive vision, the programme that win. If you don’t run they can’t chase you. We need to stop running.

Many or most of us make choices based on ethical concerns every day – whether it’s avoiding brands linked to sweat shops or opting for fairtrade coffee; but we don’t always apply this principle to where we bank and therefore what our money is used for.

A new campaign is launching today: Move Your Money argues that we should acknowledge the impact of our decisions and recognise our own power in changing the banking sector for the better by pledging to move our money away from HSBC, Barclays, RBS, Santander and Lloyds to ethical alternatives.

These banks patently have not learnt from the behaviour that led to the worst recession in living memory. Casino capitalism continues, as do excessive bonuses, while lending to small businesses continues to fall. They have few qualms about making unethical investments in dictators, weapons manufacturers and environmental exploitation across the globe.

Banks continue to fund environmentally destructive projects, feigning ignorance about their role in supporting pollution, soil degradation, climate change, extinctions, and disruption of indigenous peoples’ livelihoods.

Environmental consequences seem irrelevant in the pursuit of profit. Banks often make empty gestures, attempting to ‘greenwash’, but Barclays, RBS and HSBC have recently been named and shamed by the Ecologist for involvement in some of the world’s most environmentally damaging projects, including mega coal fire power stations and open-pit gold mining. In part for their involvement in funding the coal industry, Barclays, RBS, and HSBC all grace the list of top 20 ‘Climate Killer’ banks .

And why would they change their behaviour when they have the implicit ‘too big to fail’ guarantee of our government evidenced by the ￡500bn UK taxpayers have given over to the banks in the form of bailout and guarantee schemes? Why would they change when the vast majority of people unhappy with their banks still haven’t left?

While our money continues to sit in these banks, we’re providing a cheap source of credit and tacit assent to continue down their destructive path.

Remove your consent to these practices and choose an alternative so you can be confident your money isn’t working for something you would never condone.

There are alternatives who care about people and the planet: credit unions, ethical banks and building societies so learn more about the choice you have and pledge to Move Your Money today.

Royal Avenue, Belfast’s main city centre thoroughfare, mixes classic architecture with more obviously new arrivals. On the corner of Royal Avenue and North Street lies a grand, art deco building that used to house a branch of the Bank of Ireland and the (long-gone) Belfast Stock Exchange. Having laid silent and bare for over a decade, it has been given new life after members of Occupy Belfast seized the building in a ‘repossession’ action, branding it ‘The People’s Bank.’

Since announcing their presence in the building on January 16^th, the Occupiers have had a much louder platform than their previous tent-dotted space at Writer’s Square – a short distance away, but without the access to tens of thousands of daily commuters and passers-by that The People’s Bank now provides.

Unimaginative critics say that it is a pointless protest, because ‘it isn’t a bank anymore.’ The point seems deliberately lost on them; the repossession of the bank is symbolic of what threatens many across Northern Ireland – repossession and homelessness. It presents opportunities to create a community space to raise awareness of their plight, while creating a space similar to East London’s Bank of Ideas.

At a rally of support outside the bank, veteran civil rights campaigner Eamonn McCann spoke of how the occupation didn’t fit into the traditional discourse of Northern Ireland politics. To put it another way, the traditional commentators and political parties’ reaction to this has been basically ‘does not compute.’ Their reaction highlights a growing observation that although the Good Friday Agreement delivered the end of (most) political violence, it has failed to deliver any real social justice or a conventional democratic discourse. The Assembly lacks any official opposition and the nationalist / unionist blocs dominate debate. Belfast in particular remains more divided than ever, with over 88 ‘peace walls’ separating diverging communities – more than double what existed in 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Occupy is a cry that many very serious social issues are just not being handled at all by any of the political parties that make up the Northern Ireland Executive.

Others say the protest will have no effect. But just as the influence of Occupy in the US is causing the hitherto unthinkable spectacle of rabid free-marketeer millionaire Republicans slamming each other as ‘crony capitalists’ in the primaries, a sustained public dialogue here about income inequality and the uneven distribution of power and wealth to the rich can only be good. Thus, Occupy has the power to change the conversation.

You might say it’s already having an effect in peculiarly Northern Irish ways. The self-proclaimed ‘Biggest Show in the Country,’ the Stephen Nolan Show, was forced to debate income inequality and the plight of the most vulnerable as it reacted to the occupation. This was a bit of a twist away from the usual (mostly utterly banal) topics of the show.

It has also stirred the awakening of the shared memory and history of housing and land disputes. Most obviously, land and housing (and the deprivation of both), led in part to the start of the modern-day troubles at the end of the 1960s.

Eamonn McCann recalled how in 1968, the squatters in Derry housed more people that year than the local authority. In Belfast through the 60s and 70s, rent strikes were used against unfair increases in rent. Given the large and growing numbers of tenants in NI living in the largely unregulated private rented sector, combined with the exasperation of even the charities concerned with homelessness at the cost of social housing and housing associations, this is the right time to start unearthing some of that forgotten history.

More tangibly, the activists are busy cleaning the inside of the building and plan to open up the bank to the homeless and to local communities.

The challenge now is for the occupiers to use the space to stimulate debate and activism and for the local people to side with them in large numbers to prevent any eviction attempt. If you’re in Belfast, please support them in any way you can.

Here’s a short video on the occupation from the Creative Workers Cooperative.

Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy raised the bar for crime writers the world over. Part thriller, part noir and highly political, it gave us two enduring characters who stepped away from the page and became almost three dimensional.

The first is Larsson’s alter ego Michael Blomkvist. Larsson was a left-wing activist, journalist, the editor of an investigative periodical Expo, a Swedish counterpart to Searchlight and an expert on far-right groups. Blomkvist is co-founder of an investigative periodical, Millennium, that takes on the rich and the powerful and as a result regularly finds itself in trouble.

The second is the extraordinary Lisbeth Salander, one of the most captivating fictional creations in modern literature. Victim of a violently abusive father, she’s thrown into state care after she sets fire to him for beating her mother and leaving her with brain damage. Sexually, physically and pharmacologically abused through her incarceration she remains a ward of the state though she’s in her twenties, and making a living as an investigator through her ability to hack into computers. As the novels unfold we come to know someone who is deeply scarred, vulnerable and yet possessed of an awesome facility for self preservation. Salander becomes a modern avenging angel.

Not did Larsson produce great characters and a truly gripping plot (I read the third volume in a little over 24 hours, stopping only to sleep), but Swedish friends attest to its being beautifully written (though I suspect the translation has rendered it rather more work-a-day). So it’s a series that despite its popularity one would hope a film maker would approach with a degree of respect.

As a result I went to see the English language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wondering just how big a hash director David Fincher would make of it. I couldn’t see Daniel Craig as Blomkvist. Blomkvist may find himself in the role of action man from time to time but he’s an idealistic softy at heart. Craig doesn’t make a convincing journalist. Journalists spend days chained to their computers. They eat doughnuts and drink coffee. They don’t have abs. OK a few have abs but very few journalists are very good journalists and have abs. There isn’t time.

Rooney Mara on the other hand was a surprise. I could believe that her Lisbeth Salander had been systematically maltreated. She managed to capture quite convincingly a combination of low self esteem, fragility and rage.

However my biggest issue was with the directing. The settings, the cinematography, the degree of fidelity to the original story were all commendable. I’ll set aside the fact that the film opened with a striking but meaningless pop-video-like CGI sequence set to a godawful cover of Led Zeppelin’s sublime Immigrant Song.

What really bothered me were the sex scenes. I know that the ubiquity of porn has changed the way sex is shown on screen. Directors parade more flesh – female flesh of course, no penises – and Rooney Mara’s flesh was put on a float and paraded down Main Street.

That’s widely accepted these days if the sex shown is supposedly between two consenting adults. But in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo the sex involves someone who has been profoundly traumatised throughout her adolescence and young adulthood.

In the book when Salander slips into Blomkvist’s bed and the two make love it’s an act of considerable trust on her part, while Blomkvist, who one is led to believe is romantically rather cavalier, seems unaware of just how vulnerable Salander is making herself to him and how big a deal that is. Needless to say Fincher passes on the subtext in favour of straight sex, with the result that it loses much of its emotional power.

If that scene is a missed opportunity then the scene where Salander is manacled to a bed, raped and sodomised by her legal guardian is just plain shameful.

Portraying rape on screen places a huge responsibility on the film-maker. To eroticise rape is essentially to condone it. Not only does it ignore the fact that rape is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, it also validates the act.

Film-makers who want to show rape for what it is show us faces not bodies. They allow us to look into the eyes of the victim and see their suffering, their powerlessness and to identify with the emotional impact that sexual violence has on them.

Fincher shows us Mara largely naked, chained face down to a bed. We never look into her eyes. We only see her face in profile. We see her writhing around.

After the attack, when she limps away, we see her from behind, Rooney shuffling so as to underscore the physical impact of anal rape – but again we don’t see her eyes as she processes what has happened to her. The act is objectified. We watch. We aren’t helped to empathise.

Frankly having sat through what seemed to me the eroticisation of the forced and violent sodomy of a much abused woman I felt not a little soiled and complicit for having watched it.

I’m quite surprised that more fuss hasn’t been made about the scene. It’s all the more shocking because Larsson’s own position seemed pretty clear to me. The depiction of the rape scene in the book was of an act of violence, not sex. The incident was about power and domination and we were never allowed to forget what Salander was going through.

Indeed the Swedish title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is “Män Som Hatar Kvinnor”: “Men Who Hate Women.” At the start of each section of the book is a page blank save for a fact about violence against women in Sweden.

I hope it’s not pushing the point too far to suggest that Larsson was a feminist writer, or at least hoped that was what he was. (Nick Cohen in the Observer disagrees though as he bases his argument on remarks quoted without proper context it’s hard to know if he has a case).

I can’t help but feel that Fincher’s movie was a betrayal of the book’s core values and that we’ve somehow contrived to overlook the fact that he’s turned an explicit protest against violence against women into a spectacle which we’re expected to secretly enjoy.

If there’s one thing above all about big money entertainment that saddens me it’s its apparent determination to pander to the worst in us rather than to appeal to the best.

At 12 o’clock, a group of 15 wheelchair users chained themselves together in the middle of Regent Street using handcuffs, causing a backlog of traffic to build up and bringing Oxford Circus and the surrounding area to a complete standstill.

via @misselliemae

They were joined by over 100 more people who had responded to a call by UK Uncut to meet at Holborn station to ‘shame the government into withdrawing the bill completely’. A crowd of people, including a samba band, gathered there and marched together towards the target, which had been a secret until the wheelchairs were chained in place. Some people said they had travelled from as far as Manchester, Cornwall and Edinburgh to take part in the action, which was called by disabled activists and others directly affected by the bill.

The protest comes after a week in which the bill stalled on its progress through Parliament, with many aspects rejected by the House of Lords. Opposition has been mounting following publication of the ‘spartacus report’ which was written, researched and funded by disabled campaigners, and which claims that the government misled the public and ‘broke its own code of consultation’.

The protesters say that the Welfare reform bill is ‘unfair, unnecessary and unpopular’ and are calling for it to be scrapped. Recent reports have shown that as a result of the bill 500,000 families stand to lose their homes while others will become ‘imprisoned in them’. Nearly half a million people would lose their Disability Living Allowance, including disabled children. People with terminal illnesses would be forced into work, and 3.2 million will be put through demanding tests that have already pushed some to take their own lives. The government’s own research admits that this flagship reform will push 100,000 children into poverty.

The government has defended the bill on the grounds that it needs to cut the deficit. However, the protesters point out that much greater amounts of money are lost through tax dodging by the super-rich each year. In January, Private Eye revealed a further £2 billion tax dodge by Vodafone, in addition to the £6 billion scam revealed in 2010. The most recent dodge by Vodafone is greater than the cuts to Disability Living Allowance, which will affect half a million people.

Rosemary Willis from DPAC said “Maria Miller, so-called Minister for disabled people, has repeatedly stated that we are ‘financially unsustainable’ and we want to ask this government exactly what they mean by that. We will not let this government push through these changes which have already led to disabled people taking their own lives.”

UK Uncut supporter Josie McDermot, 32, said “The welfare reform bill is cruel and and unnecessary, and this protest is an essential way to persuade the government to scrap their plans. It is great to be part of such a broad and powerful campaign against the Welfare Reform Bill and to keep building the pressure that has already been piled on with the Spartacus report.

She added, “It is typical bully tactics by the government to force marginalised people in society to pay for the economic downturn, while letting bonuses run wild and rich companies continue tax dodging to the tune of £25bn”