UP TO 200 WRP and YS members and supporters marched through East London yesterday on the 43rd anniversary of the News Line daily newspaper and the 72nd anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
Among the slogans they shouted were: ‘No cuts no closures – Kick the coalition out! TUC get off your knees call the general strike! No privatisation defend the NHS! Stop hospital closures – Occupy now! Capitalism is collapsing – Socialism now! Youth demand a future – Youth demand jobs! What do we want EMA – When do we want it now! We won’t pay tuition fees – Education must be free!
The demonstrators also shouted against the actions of the imperialists, shouting: ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free! One state Palestine! Hands off Syria – Imperialism out now! Hands off Libya – Imperialism out now!
One of the marchers, Andrew Deakin from Sheffield, told News Line: ‘I am marching today because I read the paper and like what it is about – socialism.
‘Socialism is fairer for young people, so that they can get jobs and a future’.
Charmane Low from Hammersmith added: ‘I am fed up with seeing the injustice, all the cuts and closures of the hospitals and the youth centres.
‘Tuition fees are going up and youth are being made scapegoats.
‘I want to get rid of this government. I am for a general strike to bring them down.
‘I want a workers government. A fair government will give everyone an equal chance. We are entitled to a future and that is socialism’.
Jason Jonson from Walthamstow YS told News Line: ‘I am for youth having quality education and a decent well paid job.’
WRP assistant general secretary Jonty Leff told the rally: ‘In celebrating the News Line we celebrate Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.’
He added: ‘Without that revolutionary outlook and method, which is our guide to action, we would never have been able to achieve our daily paper, nor maintain it and develop it, to the point where today this paper is going to be the organiser, educator and propagandist of the British revolution.’
He said of Trotsky: ‘He showed how in supposedly backward Russia the working class, small in number but concentrated in huge factories, would put itself in the leadership of the peasant masses and overthrow the Tsarist feudal regime, before going forward to workers power.
‘He saw before anybody else that this would be the start of the world socialist revolution, to replace capitalism and imperialism with world socialism, and that the revolution would continue until this is achieved. It would not be able to stop halfway.’
Leff continued: ‘Today workers in country after country are being assaulted by austerity programmes to make them pay for the capitalist crisis.
‘Everywhere they are fighting, and everywhere the labour and trade union bureaucracy is betraying them and stabbing them in the back, to try to force them to accept ‘socialist’ austerity programmes run by traitors such as Miliband and Balls.
‘In many countries, South Africa is one, and the UK is another, the workers are refusing to accept their old sell-out leaders and are demanding a revolutionary leadership. This is what we, the sections of the Fourth International, have to build and provide.
‘The giants, Marx and Engels, never lived to see the socialist revolution. Lenin and Trotsky led its first great victory.
‘We are lucky to be alive in this revolutionary period, when this enormous crisis of the capitalist system demands and drives forward the world socialist revolution.
‘The completion of the world socialist revolution and the establishment of the world socialist republic – These are the tasks that have been placed on the immediate agenda of humanity, by the depth of the world crisis.’
