Despite choosing the slightly more family friendly title of “Why must our children pay? Invest in their education” SSY members, particularly those still in high schools support the EIS teaching union’s campaign against cuts. Whilst many other unions have either decided to accommodate to cuts, or fight them solely through industrial action the EIS are opening another front and trying to win over public support. The logic of their argument is clear – cuts in education are due to a financial crisis not of teachers or students making, and will result in poorer education for a generation of young Scots.

These cuts are being made at the same time that almost a billion pounds, £900 million is being cut from university funding across the UK, with SSY members being involved in anti-cuts campaigns like ACAN at Glasgow University.

The EIS site outlines the cuts below,

Already cuts are taking place in local council education budgets.

* 2,500 fewer teachers in classrooms than 2 years ago
* Teacher support numbers reduced
* Books, paper and photocopying materials etc. reduced
* The decision to cut the number of students to train to become teachers.

In the future this will mean

* Teacher shortages
* Increased class sizes
* Impact on teaching and learning, including the new Curriculum for Excellence
* A cut in equipment (including computers) and materials in schools
* A reduction in specialist provision, e.g. classroom assistants, learning support and music instructors
* Fewer opportunities to access further and higher education

They are also being proposed is the same time that its been revealed that inequality has increased under the Labour government – David Cameron and his Eton pals might have a chance to escape public sector cuts for his kids, but ordinary working people will see less teachers and therefore less attention for their children. In both high schools and further education, there is an attack on funding which will attack jobs and young peoples right to a decent education.

The SSP supports a “20’s plenty” campaign, for a maximum of 20 children to each teacher in class. Following this programme would have kept enough teachers employed to stop any of Labour’s previous cuts of Glasgow’s schools. The SSP was recently involved with the Save Our Schools campaign, which fought hard against these cuts.

Support the campaign against cuts in education, turn up to the rally,

THIS SATURDAY – MARCH THE 6TH

ASSEMBLE KELVINGROVE WAY, KELVINGROVE PARK 10.30AM

MARCH AT 11, RALLY AT 12 AT THE SECC

Remember 1998? It was the year of Titanic, it was the year Google was founded and it was the year George Michael was found doing naughty things in a toilet. It was also the year in which The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, published an article that seemed to show a link between the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccination and autism. The world went mental. Suddenly the papers were filled with headlines about how your healthy toddler was almost certainly going to develop this disorder the second the needle went in. In 2002 alone, 1257 articles were published about the scare. Thousands of worried parents stopped their children from getting the jag, deeming it to be too great a risk. What happened? By 2008, the country was in the grip of a mumps epidemic and measles was declared endemic in the UK for the first time in 14 years. What must have been a very difficult decision for parents to make could have been made a lot easier by this week’s news. The report was rubbish.

The Flawless Logic Behind the MMR Scare

The Lancet has made a full retraction of the article, the report’s lead researcher, Dr Andrew Wakefield, is facing a General Medical Council tribunal and the newspapers’ ten year run of scare stories has been made to look a bit silly. While the medical community has known for quite some time that there is absolutely no evidence of a link between MMR and autism, the newspaper scare stories kept the fear alive. Why? Because fear sells papers. Never mind the potential damage to people’s lives, the babies killed by measles, the old lady who dies because she’s scared to take her blood pressure tablets – readers are scared of what vital information they could be missing by not buying the paper. Pick up any copy of the Daily Mail or Take a Break and turn to the health section. Every day something different is giving you cancer, a different medication is apparently unnecessary or a new treatment is going to kill you. Its irresponsible reporting and it can damage lives. These articles aren’t written by doctors, they’re written by journalists and cobbled together from hearsay, taken out of context and bent to suit their message. No-one wants to hear about the 19,999,999 people whose lives were saved, let’s hear about the one person whose hair fell out! (and whose life was also saved, but that bit isn’t important) This is what capitalism is about: make money at any cost. Its easy to get taken in by newspapers and magazines pretending to care about your health but they just want you to stay scared enough to keep buying their rag. The whole MMR scare could have been over years ago if it wasn’t for the fact that it sold papers. Check out kill-or-cure.heroku.com for a full list of what the Daily Mail says will either cause or cure cancer and you’ll soon see that either they aren’t to be believed or we’re all going to die pretty soon. And don’t forget that if you ever do worry about biscuits causing cancer, the best person to ask is your doctor or pharmacist. If only That’s Life magazine asked them, some more kids might be alive today.

Peter White, who is standing to be elected as a Labour councillor next year, has shocked the world when he told the truth on Facebook earlier this week.

Regarding the Queen’s upcoming Diamond Jubilee in 2012, he stated:

What is the point of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of someone who is born into a position of privilege, she is a parasite and milks this country for everything she can. She has more front than Margate asking for extra money from the civil list. Maybe she should sell a couple of her properties. Maybe if she wants Buckingham Palace to be maintained from public funds she should open it to the public. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a public holiday but let’s have one that means something, rather than celebrating vermin.

Meanwhile, Leftfield were undertaking some investigative journalism, and discovered this shocking undercover picture of Her Majesty rehearsing for her next Queen’s Speech.

The Daily Mirror have continued in their fine tradition of providing us with important information about celebrities as a public service. This time, they’ve broken the news that Daniel Radcliffe, who plays teen wizard Harry Potter in some famous films, might have been caught smoking a joint.

According to other party-goers, he was staggering around saying “I love weed.” and let a girl draw a comedy beard on his face. Hilarious!

He has come out and categorically denied it, though. Aww. We were going to invite him to be keynote speaker at our next Legalise Cannabis event, but it looks like we’ll have to make do with this slightly less famous Harry Potter actor.

The Governments chief scientific advisor, shortly before enjoying a ketamine sundae

Chief drugs advisor to the Government David Nutt has been sacked from his post, after a string of “controversial statements” – the most recent being that LSD and Cannabis were less harmful than alcohol.

He’s already enraged the Government and Tory Tabloids by saying that Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding, and argued that Cannabis should not be upgraded to a class B drug.

The Government clearly are no longer interested in having scientists independent of party politics take part in an informed discussion about drug use in the UK. Ecstasy and LSD like all drugs are harmful, but they are not Heroin or Cocaine.

Most people who use Ecstasy or LSD do so recreationally, and the deaths caused by these drugs and the harm caused to families could be reduced if the Government supported a harm reduction strategy instead of a “just say no” policy which simply has no effect on most users.

Cannabis itself is clearly less harmful than Alcohol or Tobacco and it’s a disgrace that someone is fired for expressing the feelings of what the majority of Police, NHS workers and the general public know – that the abuse of Alcohol and Tobacco is much more widespread and damaging than that of Cannabis.

Leftfield isn’t “pro-drugs”, we are pro-recognising reality – people throughout Scotland and the UK use drugs regularly. Many of them have no intention of stopping because they don’t feel that drug use negatively impacts on their lifes.

Any drugs policy enacted by the Government should take alcohol into account and recognise that folk will take drugs, and do everything they can to reduce the harm it can do to people who do use them. The exception to this rule is Heroin, which is virtually impossible to take recreationally, and should be provided in a pure, safe form to addicts so they don’t die of overdoses and so they don’t commit crime to feed their habit.

Alongside that the Government should start considering why people abuse drugs – in Scotland, especially alcohol – as part of a strategy for people to have healthier lives.

SSY candidate for Drugs Tsar

Despite over 250,000 incidences of racism in schools being reported since 2002, the Manifesto Group have called their report on the issue “The Myth of Racist Kids”.

According to civil liberties organisation The Manifesto Group, young children are being branded racist before they even know what the term means – and playground spats are being turned into full-blown racial incidents.

Little kids might not know what the word ‘racist’ means, but they’re more than capable of having racist views. Try telling this woman that there’s no such thing as a racist kid.

Report author Adrian Hart said:

…such anti-racist policies can create divisions where none had existed…

So, not only is racism is a myth – but by being actively anti-racist, you are creating racism where previously there was none? WTF?!?!

In all of the news reports on this issue, The Manifesto Group are described as a civil liberties organisation. Seriously? Civil liberties for who? White people’s right to be racist? Fuck off!

Ignoring the issue of race does not solve racism – only active anti-racist politics can do that.

Racism is a very real issue for children across the world, and if you don’t believe me, look at the impact racism has already had on the lives of these children.

Special Guest Post Exclusive by Honorary SSY Member Jo Harvie….

So it’s the morning after Griffin got on Question Time. The Guardian and Independent have slammed the oxygen feed to the fascists, the Star has called him a nuttaaaah, and every single telly programme and radio phone-in, from GMTV to This Morning has discussed the merit of allowing ‘Dick’ to sweat, giggle and stutter through an hour of flagship political discussion.

There’s been a mixed bag of views shared. A few surprising celebrities have argued passionately that there should never have been a place for the BNP on a programme like Question Time. Everyone on Twitter loved Bonnie Greer’s intellectual wasting of Griffin’s idiotic view of history. All the panellists agree he looked stupid.

But from the people phoning in, there’s an overwhelming feeling that it was a sin for him, the poor kid who hadn’t done his homework being hounded by a whole gaggle of strict teachers. One phoner-upper to The Wright Stuff actually likened Griffin to “Joan of Arc tied to the stake”. Well, I suppose he insists he can trace his ancestors back to William the Conqueror, making him, by his own standards, French.

NIck Griffin is no victim. From the second it was announced that the BBC had invited him onto Question Time he couldn’t lose. He looked inarticulate. He looked nervous. The bloke who made the South Pole joke made him look a total tube. But he was there. He was on our tellies, sitting opposite the ‘political elite’ he purports to despise so much. He touched Bonnie Greer’s arm several times. I hope she’s burnt her jacket.

And again, and again, last night and across all channels this morning, it’s been repeated that none of the politicians could answer the question about ‘the problem of immigration’. Labour, LibDem and Tory argued it out last night about who it was who’d let too many people in, and who would let in less in the future.

The argument I’m hearing today is that the mainstream parties are ’scared’ to debate immigration. That’s nonsense, they talk about immigration all the time. It’s just that they’re all saying the same thing – ‘we have to find ways to stop people getting in’. Between them, they have shifted the language on immigration so far to the right that they’re all living next door to the BNP.

Let’s hear the other side for a change. Britain is not ‘full up’. If the UK’s population is rising slightly (Scotland’s, on the whole, is not) it’s because middle class people are living longer.

The number of people making a new application for asylum in the UK rose, very slightly, this year, after dropping over the last five years. Not because people are looking to live comfortably on our benefits – our government forces people to live in absolute poverty, on £35 a week, while they wait for a decision on their asylum claim – but because Western armies have clattered through their countries spreading terror and chaos. People seeking asylum come, overwhelmingly, from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Tory Baroness Warsi challenged Griffin’s use of the term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ – I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the term challenged on TV – because it’s an invented slur. There are no bogus asylum seekers, every human on the planet has the right to ask for sanctuary. Yet her party would still seek to limit the number of people to whom we offer that sanctuary, would send families back to the killing fields of Sudan and Somalia, to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

They argued over the number of people who arrived from Eastern Europe. So what? People came, they worked, they paid taxes. And when rich white people screwed the whole world’s economy, lots of people went home to try to work and pay taxes there. Like the British young people who troop off to work their way round Australia, then come home when they’ve had enough adventure.

Britain’s unemployment rate is soaring – not because of Poles or Romanians or Somalians, or even Australians, who are in fact the most regular visa overstayers in the UK – but because of an economic system that bleeds every profit it can from working people of every race, then dumps them when it’s expedient.

Griffin is bleating today about his beating last night. And as very, very funny as it was – ‘he’s not in the violent Ku Klux Klan’, ‘I’m frightened of men kissing’ – until we get voices on Question Time who don’t just pay lip service to the bounties of immigration, ‘yay for curry and Dizzee Rascal!’, but who say clearly that all political parties must stop pushing fear of the other, and really tackle poverty, unemployment and exploitation of all people, then the fascists keep winning.

We all know that the Daily Mail are idiots.

I’d like to be able to say that they’ve exceeded themselves with their latest exploits, but in reality it’s just more of the same pish. Unless you’re a middle class, middle aged, straight white man, the Daily Mail hates you – and it hates a big proportion of the people in that bracket, too.

What’ve they done this time? Stephen Fry said it pretty well with this:

I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.

Exactly. Some idiot has written a lovely article about how Stephen Gately being dead is proof that gays are evil, civil partnerships are depraved, and happy gay families are a myth. Fuck off!

When, quite rightly, there was an outcry, the author published a response, stating:

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Well, we at SSY have always taken pride in being mischievous and will continue to do so.

You can make a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission  here.

The Conservative Party are angry about the recession. Really, really angry. Not at global capitalism and the ruling classes who caused it, though. No, they’re angry because they don’t think enough of the rising number of people who are shoplifting food are being put in prison.

Police recorded 320,846 incidents of shoplifting in 2008/09 – a 10 per cent rise on the previous year and the highest level under Labour’s time in office, according to Home Office crime statistics.

Leftfield says: Is it a crime to steal a loaf of bread to feed your family? No. And nor is it a crime to steal cakes and wine to feed yourself and your pals.*

According to the Daily Telegraph, this “growing problem was highlighted in a report by the Conservative Retail Crime Commission, set up amid concerns that retail crime is not a priority for the police or ministers.

The study also suggests theft of basic food has increased during the economic downturn.”

Well, boohoo.  In the past six months, Morrisons  made a profit of £449million, Sainsbury’s made £543million, Asda made £442.9million and Tesco’s profits for this year are expected to exceed £3billion. Remember, this is pure profit! So I think they can afford for poor people to be slipping a few extras in our bags.

The Conservatives don’t think so, though, they think that stealing is bad bad bad. So what are they going to do about it? Maybe if they were in power they would create jobs and increase wages so no one would have to shoplift? Maybe they would freeze food prices and ensure that healthy nutrious food is accessible to everyone? Nah, that would make too much sense for the crazy Conservatives. No , they just want to lock shoplifters up and throw away the key.

Philip Dunne, Tory MP and chairman of the Commission, said: “Despite all its tough talk, Labour has ignored retail crime, which is on the rise as the recession bites.”

James Brokenshire, the shadow minister for crime reduction, said: “Shop theft has been largely ignored under Labour with police forces being told to de-prioritise it. Offenders receive little more than a slap on the wrist when they are caught.”

Well, as Labour said in their retaliation to the reort, since 1997 the number of people sentenced to immediate custody for shoplifting is up by 50 per cent.  The fact is, shoplifters are more likely to go to prison than sex offenders.

So, Conservatives, please get your facts straight. If you think shoplifting is so terrible, remember it is  only a symptom of our shitty capitalist society and the only way to get rid of the symtoms  is to get rid of the underlying cause.

*This remark is meant to be taken humourously, Leftfield do not condone shoplifting or breaking the law,blah blah… – bullshit! We absolutely encourage shoplifting as much as possible. What we don’t condone, however, is getting caught.

Shoplifters, this is for you.

Knobheads Korner is back! After spending the summer holidays sitting about watching cartoons and eating instant noodles, it’s time to get back to work, pointing out knobheads and putting them in korners.

So who’s in the korner today?

No, not Jordan.

Just every other fucker who’s been using her as a punchbag over the past few months.
Katie Price has gone from being the nation’s sweetheart and Celebrity Mum of the Year to being attacked and spat at in the streets; branded ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’ by most newspapers and magazines; accused of not caring for her children; and of the few people that believe her when she talks about having miscarried, been abused as a child and raped multiple times as an adult – most of them treat her like it’s her own fault.

And what did Katie do to deserve this barrage of hatred? She got dumped by her husband. And instead of becoming celibate, she got back on her feet and started meeting new people. What a scandal!

No woman deserves to be blamed or disbelieved when talking about rape. The fact is that 1 in 4 women have experienced rape or attempted rape. No woman is immune to this fact – it doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, ugly or beautiful, virgin or not.

Katie Price’s former career as a glamour model and her reputation as a ‘promiscuous’ woman are absolutely irrelevant when it comes to discussion of her rape. Current or former glamour models (or indeed sex workers of any kind) can be raped in just the same way as any other woman. Agreeing to be photographed naked or to have sex with someone in exchange for financial or any other benefit does NOT mean that you have now automatically consented to all and any sexual activity in the future.

Most of us know how devastating it is to be dumped – I think Katie Price has been amazingly brave just being able to get on with life in the public eye after a blow like that, let alone being able to be strong in the face of people disbelieving or blaming her for having been raped.

It’s an awful fact, but the majority of rape survivors (if they even do report it – it’s estimated that 75-95% of rapes are never disclosed) do have to face being disbelieved or blamed for their ordeal. In Scotland, a 17 year old girl committed suicide after the humiliation of her interrogation at the trial of her rapist.

Katie Price deserves our support at the moment, and all the journalists, editors and people on buses, school canteens, student unions and staff rooms across the country who’ve been vilifying her belong in KNOBHEADS KORNER.