Last weekend saw the far-right racist Tommy Robinson lead masses of people through the streets of London. Manipulating people’s anger about their struggles and fears for the future and legitimising abhorrent racism and fascist rhetoric, the aim of the likes of Robinson are to stoke up division, drive hatred through our streets, and make scapegoats of migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum.
This weekend will be different. We will be fighting back and reclaiming our streets: and saying that the far right does not speak for us. We won’t allow them to divide our communities and manipulate us into doing the bidding of people like Elon Musk, driving inflammatory rhetoric in an attempt to distract us from the fact that the rich keep stealing from us all. We can see through them as they push an agenda funded by billionaires and Big Oil – they don’t care about the interests of ordinary people. Ultimately, we know that the only minority driving harm are billionaires and the super-rich.
Make Them Pay is about tackling the real root causes of the issues that so many of us are facing here in the UK today. The public services we all use and depend on are in crisis from decades of underinvestment. While fossil fuel companies rake in billions in profits, people across the country struggle with rising bills and communities suffer the devastating impacts of air pollution. Corporations funnel profits to their rich shareholders, while Trump lobbies for our ability to tax and regulate US tech corporations to be taken out of our hands. We risk becoming a billionaire’s playground if this goes on any longer: but it doesn’t have to be this way.
It can be easy to feel helpless, but we have power and we need to use it to fight back and expose the truth about who is really to blame for the struggles we’re all facing. On Wednesday we saw the power of communities fighting back against Trump and the authoritarian politics he represents as Stop Trump mobilisations took to the streets, drawing people from all walks of life.
We must keep this momentum up. This Saturday, we at Make Them Pay are mobilising to demand our government make the super-rich and polluters pay up for the horrific damage they are inflicting on our society. We are mobilising around three key demands: for the UK government to tax the super-rich, for our economy to work in favour of the ordinary workers who keep it running – not the rich elite – and for our government to make polluters pay for the damage they continue to inflict on our planet, day by day.
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