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TUSC was set up initially to enable socialists and trade unionists to contest elections, although it has increasingly become a political party that campaigns all year round, as in Rugby.

 

The members of the Coalition at present are the Socialist Party, the railway workers union the RMT and the Socialist Workers Party.

 

It also has the support of a number of left trade union caucuses, including the NUT and PCS, and, in a personal capacity, a number of leading individual trade unionists including the Prison Officers Association General Secretary and the PCS Vice-President. The national chair of TUSC is Dave Nellist, the former Labour MP and Coventry Socialist Party councillor.

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Being a Coalition means TUSC can only act when all its component parts are in agreement, which happens over most issues and has not caused any problems. But that does not prevent its component parts from promoting their own positions in addition to those agreed by TUSC as a whole.

 

What helps to unite us is a shared aim of building a new, mass socialist party.

 

TUSC is organised at national level through Annual Conferences and a National Steering Committee which consists of representatives of each component part. TUSC has begun to open out and organise more democratically at local levels. It has been TUSC policy for three years for there to be local steering committees or branches and there are currently over 25 local TUSC groups up and down the country.

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Individuals can join TUSC through their local branch or nationally.

 

You don’t just see Rugby TUSC at election times. We regularly knock doors and hold stalls to talk about issues people are concerned about. 

 

Recently, Rugby TUSC has campaigned against

 

• Cuts to welfare benefits

• Local schools becoming academies

• The closure of libraries, youth clubs, care homes, and cuts to street lighting

• Reduction of facilities and privatisation at Rugby St Cross hospital

• Closures of fire stations across Warwickshire

• The introduction of Universal Credit, the flagship Government welfare reform, piloted in Rugby, forcing claimants into even deeper poverty

 

Rugby TUSC believes there is no need to cut our public services. There are political alternatives:

 

• A 5% wealth tax on the richest 10% which, alone, would resolve the debt

• Reclaiming the £120 billion per year of unpaid tax that rich individuals and companies avoid or evade

• The banks, building societies and financial institutions, which make massive profits, should be nationalised, with profits used to maintain and improve our public services