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It’s Time to Decide: The Left, Austerity, and the People’s Assembly By Chris Nineham
22 March 2013 — Counterfire
The Peoples’ Assembly will meet in London on June 22, where thousands of those opposing the Coalition’s cuts will gather to work out a strategy to defeat austerity, and by implication, the government. Waiting till a 2015 election is hardly an option. It would be to allow more irreparable damage to be done. And many people, way beyond the radical left, will be wary of assuming that an Ed Miliband government, without strong pressure from below, will do much to alleviate the collective suffering caused by austerity. Continue reading this...
“On Eve of His Funeral, Debating Chávez’s Legacy” is the headline over 
What a disingenuous piece! I read:
“As everyone knows the anti-war movement didn’t stop the war but it arguably had some important impacts during the invasion and occupation. For example Milan Rai maintains that the increased public scrutiny provided by the UK and global anti-war movements reduced the destruction caused by US and UK forces. He points to the fact that the US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War targeted and destroyed Iraq’s life-maintaining infrastructure – its electricity system, the water supply, sewage systems etc. However, in 2003 this didn’t happen. In addition, the relatively early withdrawal of UK forces from southern Iraq in April 2009 was arguably a response to the anti-war mood at home. “Their continued presence in Iraq was politically toxic” in the UK, Greg Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Iraq, explained in a public lecture at the London School of Economics last year. “Gordon Brown was keen to get rid of them and say ‘that was a Blair problem.’””
The UK’ pulls out’, “relatively early”? SIX years later! This is a response?
Then on Iraq’s infrastructure:
Iraq’s infrastructure had ALREADY been destroyed in 90-91 and ten years of murderous sanctions made sure it never got rebuilt!
Oh how these so-called lefties blow their own trumpets when they don’t even know the tune, let alone know how to play it!
The biggest demo the UK had ever had was the beginning and the end of the ‘anti-war’ movement, ‘led’ disgracefully by the so-called Stop the War Coalition (read the SWP). Another shameful episode in the history of the UK’s imperialist ‘left’.