Occupation against cuts at Sussex University

It seems that an occupation has begun at Sussex Uni as part of an anti-cuts campaign there. The initial statement of the occupiers reads:

We have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex, Brighton. There are 106 of us.

The decision to occupy has been taken after weeks of concerted campaigning during which the university management have repeatedly failed to take away the threat of compulsory redundancies and course cuts.

We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us.

The room we have occupied is not a lecture theatre but a conference centre. As such, we are not disrupting the education of our fellow students; rather, we are disrupting a key part of management’s strategy to run the university as a profitable business.

They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere – and not only in the universities. We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone else fighting the pay cuts, cuts in services and jobs which will multiply everywhere as bosses and states try and pull out of the crisis.

But we are the crisis.

Profitability mean nothing against the livelihoods destroyed, lost homes, austerity measures, green or otherwise. We just heard we’ve increased ‘operational costs’ – they’d set out the building for a meeting and now they’ll have to do it again

We’ll show them “operational costs.”

Occupy again and again and again.

NO CUTS ANYWHERE.

THE UNIVERSITY IS A FACTORY. STRIKE. OCCUPY.

-All the occupiers of the 8th of February.

More info at the Stop the Cuts blog here and the local Socialist Party blog

News from Sri Lanka

Months after the bloody climax of Sri Lanka's civil war, there are still hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians interned in camps. Even the government estimates that there are 275,000 displaced persons so the number is probably higher. The camps, where people are supposedly being held while the population is "screened" for Tamil Tiger (LTTE) sympathisers, lack basic facilities and are conducive to the rapid spread of diseases.

In a worrying development, the chauvinist government of Rajapakse may be planning on a settlement program in the predominantly Tamil north. The newspaper of the United Socialist Party states:

"The USP has learnt that the Rajapakse government is planning a new settlement of Sinhala people in the east and north, where Tamil-speaking people have been in a majority. It aims to build several strategic military camps before it allows the Tamils to return back to their homes."

The USP stands for the united struggle of the Tamil and Sinhala working class to overthrow the Rajapakse government and achieve the national aspirations of both peoples, based on an egalitarian socialist system.

Cambridge Socialist Students will be holding a Tamil Solidarity meeting on October 29th at 7.30pm, in the Latimer Room, Clare College. Uthaya who is the co-ordinator of the campaign in Britain will be speaking.