Coalition of Resistance Conference tomorrow

Tomorrow is the Coalition of Resistance's second national conference at the University of London Union in Malet St London from 10am to 5pm. Speakers will include, Mark Serwotka (PCS General Secretary) Mehdi Hassan (New Statesman) Dot Gibson (National Pensioners Convention) John Mc Donnell MP, Joe Malone (FBU) Katy Clark MP, Alex Kenny (NUT) Barnaby Raine (School Students against the cuts) Lindsey German (Stop the War Coalition) and Ben Hassan Mokhtar (Tunisia Democracy Campaign)

I will be running a fringe meeting entitled 'The Hardest Hit' with speakers from the disability, black and ethnic minority and LGBT communities. The fringe will examine how the cuts are impinging on these communities and the speakers will be Deborah Sowerby, long term disability activist and former Community Development Officer of London's pan disability organisation, Inclusion London, Zital Holborne (from the national executive of the PCS Union and Co-Chair of Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts) and Nathan Sparling, LGBT Officer of NUS Scotland.

I will also be putting a joint resolution to the conference from Green Left and Socialist Resistance. The resolution is as follows:

Conference calls on CoR to support the the "One Million Jobs" campaign http://www.campaigncc.org/greenjobs being run by the Campaign Against Climate Change. Conference instructs the CoR steering committee and national council to support the campaign by promoting it on our website, at our meetings and at every level of activity. The campaign seeks to build a new Green economy which would help us both combat the cuts and harmful climate change.

We are facing a global environmental crisis and a global economic crisis. We need solutions to both - now. Many climate activists, and several national trade unions, have decided to fight to make the government create one million green, climate jobs. The TUC has also supported this policy at its Congress last year.

Sooner or later gradual climate change is going to turn into swift catastrophe. So we need drastic cuts in the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases we put into the air.

This will take government regulation and international agreements. It will also take a lot of work - jobs.

We have to build wind, wave, tide and solar power. We have to renovate and insulate our homes and buildings.

And we have to provide a network of cheap buses and trains. There are officially two and a half million unemployed people in Britain. Many more are not counted in government figures. We may be facing a long recession, or the economy may 'recover' sales.

But the experience from many countries now is that business has to sell a lot more, for a long time, before jobs start to recover. We will have mass unemployment for many years. We have people who need jobs and work that must be done.

A million climate jobs in the UK will not solve all the economy's problems. But it will take a million human beings off the dole and put them to work saving the future. The cuts proposed by the current government will ensure that hundreds of thousands of public sector workers will lose their jobs. The result will be another plunge into recession.

We cannot halt climate change only by action in the UK. Climate change is an international issue - our campaigning and sucesses here will have an impact on campaigners internationally as we have been inspired by mass movements elsewhere - whether it is the Arab revolutions, the Greek and Spanish protesters or the huge mobilisations against nuclear power in Germany.

This will be one of the largest anti-cuts conferences for some time, and although we do not expect it to be as large as the first COR conference last November, which had over 1,000 attend, we do expect it to be large.
Other resolutions will cover working with the trade unions, campaigning against expenditure on war, and organising the structure of COR - including electing a new National Council, for which I will be putting my name forward to represent Green Left. Other fringe meetings will deal with the Crisis in the Eurozone, with James Meadway from the New Economics Foundation and speakers from Greece and Spain, Fighting Privatisation with Tony Kearns from CWU and Clare Solomon ULU President, and Greening the Economy with Peter Allen (Co-Convenor of Green Left) Green councillor Jonathan Essex from Redhill and chaired by COR Chair and Green Party National Campaigns Coordinator, Romayne Phoenix. Looks like an exciting lineup and a good place to get the campaign against the cuts rolling again.