Our chance to change britain's future

If the tiny class of super-rich bankers and corporate monopolies that run this country mean to get away with another five years of ramming "austerity" down our throats they need to make sure of a few things first.

Government policy - attacks on working people, the theft and privatisation of our national resources and public services, undermining trade unions, taking from the most vulnerable and ripping the heart out of local communities - is simply the self-enrichment of the few at the expense of everybody else. But people can be expected to resist such schemes.

So our rulers need to ensure that people think anything to do with the economy or the capitalist crisis is far too complicated for them to understand. That we need to leave it to the "experts" - the bankers, economists, media pundits and politicians whose system created this God-awful mess in the first place.

They need us to think that even though we are suffering, cuts and unemployment are "inevitable" or "necessary," and that anyway there's nothing we can do about them.

They need to ensure that all the parliamentary parties are on side - singing from the same hymn-sheet, even if some are singing at a slightly different tempo.

And they need division. They need workers' responses to the austerity regime to be fragmented and dislocated, so the attacks on pay, pensions, rights at work, employment, benefits and public services are seen as separate industrial battles which are fought individually - not as what they are, various strands of an integrated class attack on everything British workers have won over the last 70 years.

So they sow artificial divisions. Public and private-sector workers. Industrial and service workers. Men and women, north and south, black and white, British citizens and migrants, those in work and the unemployed.

Most crucially they need trade union struggle to be separate from "community" struggles, even when they involve the same individuals.

Anyone who questions their mantra or argues for a coherent alternative is an unrealistic extremist, or accused of spreading "the politics of envy" - quite a charge from those who whip up jealousy and hatred against workers for having marginally securer pensions than others or for receiving housing benefit to help pay astronomical rents.

Every day our rulers unrelentingly pursue this agenda. Every day their mouthpieces in Parliament and the media pump out the same old stuff, designed to confuse, obfuscate, threaten, divide, ridicule and browbeat us into submission.

Working people are under a full-frontal assault in Britain as in the rest of Europe and beyond. In this country particularly we are deprived of a political voice, with our supposed representatives lining up to prove their "credibility" to the City of London.

So it's a great thing that trade unions, anti-cuts groups, radical campaigns, community organisations and political parties are coming together for a People's Assembly on June 22 this year.

This assembly against austerity is a response to calls from trade union Unite, the Coalition of Resistance, the People's Charter and many others to mount a serious challenge to the bankers' agenda.

The People's Assembly is a reassertion of the strength of the working class and its need for a political voice. It can help build a movement that might just turn the tide.

Will those taking part agree on every dot and comma of the way forward, in terms of objectives, tactics and strategy?

No - and that's a good thing because if they did the assembly would not reflect the complexity and variety of views within the working class.

There will be, must be, real debate and argument - but in a process designed to unite and ignite the labour movement and deliver an outcome.

It should lead to stronger and more united trade unions determined to take on the battle in a strategic, co-ordinated way and to put themselves at the heart of communities seeking to defend themselves against the cuts.

And it should help promote the radical alternative that the People's Charter calls for - a people's Britain, not a bankers' Britain.

This week a steering group will be looking at how to prepare the ground for the People's Assembly in national and local work. The People's Charter has already suggested that its local work with trade union councils over the next few months should be incorporated into a wider front of activity in the run-up.

It's vital that the assembly be representative of all sections of the British people and does not become the property of any political party or group.

So delegates will be coming from every corner of Britain and from across the spectrum of organisations, some long-established and proven in struggle, others which have burst onto the scene since the current crisis hit in 2008, shaking up the movement and bringing it new life.

Some representatives will be those who as yet are not organised at all, but are struggling to put together a defence for a hospital, a library, a school or old people's home.

Let's not be dismissive or cynical about our chances of success. And let no group decide that it's only worth taking part if it can dominate the process.

Only by seizing the opportunity to work together as a broad, democratic movement can we maximise our potential.

We need a movement that reaches into every town, city and community in the land to draw in people who don't think of themselves as activists or even as in any way political.

We need to identify all those with common cause against the current masters of the universe, the finance-capitalists and in Britain their proxy, the Con-Dem government.

And this will include organised workers, those in precarious work, in self-employment, who run small businesses - we're all under the cosh of finance capital in crisis.

We have four months to go before the assembly meets in Central Hall, Westminster. Four months to make "People's Assembly" a household term when it takes place, and to ensure it becomes a central part of our movement for the future.

Let's seize the moment.

• Bill Greenshields is People's Charter trade union officer.
• Register for the People's Assembly click here