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West Yorkshire Police's anti-white hiring policy says the quiet bit out loud. Former cop Paul Birch says those in the police have known this has been going on for years ? and the public doesn't know the half of it.
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Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for 31 months over a tweet during last summer's riots, has again been refused leave to spend time with her daughter and sick husband in a move said to "confirm" she is a political prisoner.
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offsite link Reform Needs to Get its Act Together if it?s to Become a Serious Party Fri Apr 11, 2025 11:00 | Tom Jones
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The Irish water charges movement

category national | bin tax / household tax / water tax | opinion/analysis author Wednesday January 25, 2017 21:44author by Laurence Cox - MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism Report this post to the editors

Theorising "the social movement in general"

A working paper on the water charges movement now available online for comment and discussion.

This paper uses participant narratives and Marxist social movement theory to analyse resistance to water charges as the driving force of Irish anti-austerity struggles – or “the social movement in general”. It locates this movement within the history of working-class community-based self-organisation in Ireland. Contemporary resistance to metering and refusal to pay are not “spontaneous”, but articulate long-standing local rationalities.

The current situation has seen the crisis of other forms of working-class articulation: union dependence on a Labour Party which enthusiastically embraced austerity in government; the co-optation of community service provision within “social partnership”, under attack from the state since the mid-2000s; and the collapse of far left initiatives for shared parliamentary representation and resistance to household charges. New forms of popular agency are thus developing; community-based direct action has enabled a historic alliance between multiple forms of working-class voice and unleashed a vast process of popular mobilisation and self-education.

Finally, the paper relates the Irish movement to the wider loss of consent for austerity on the European periphery, and asks after the political prospects for effective alliances “within the belly of the beast”.

The paper can be viewed or downloaded at the link below. Activist and researcher comments welcome.

Related Link: https://www.academia.edu/31075937/The_Irish_water_charges_movement_theorising_the_social_movement_in_general
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