"People are enraged. It's fantastic. They're not prepared to take it any longer."
It is less than ten weeks before local council elections across England on 2 May. In London every council seat will be up for grabs. The elections will be a chance to challenge New Labour and the other main parties.
Home Secretary David Blunkett unveiled New Labour's latest crackdown on immigration, asylum and British citizenship last week. He won rapturous praise from Tory MPs for attacks on the ability of immigrants to speak English and on British people marrying partners from the Indian subcontinent.
"A new foreign policy" is how the Guardian's Martin Woollacott described George W Bush's chilling speech threatening war across the globe. Woollacott and fellow Guardian commentator Hugo Young are just two of those who backed Bush and Blair's Afghan war but are now shocked by the US's new global war drive. Even former Tory minister Chris Patten has spoken out.
Hundreds of workers queued in the rain and biting wind outside the Caterpillar factory in the Durham town of Peterlee on Thursday morning of last week. They waited patiently, then one by one stepped forward to formally sign a declaration of "no confidence" in the managing director.
The demonstration was supposed to begin at 5pm in Porto Alegre's market square. There were groups with banners at various corners, but they seemed dispersed and separate. But at seven that evening, when the summer showers had ended, 40,000 people flowed into a single column. They were young, old, black, white, men, women, Latin Americans, Africans, and a European contingent that included 1,500 Italians full of the enthusiastic spirit of Genoa.
Decisive battles are set to take place. They are part of a hidden war waged by the New Labour government. It is a war to destroy one of the pillars of the welfare state-council housing. New Labour is out to privatise three million council homes. In Birmingham tenants will begin to vote on 18 March on whether their homes are handed to private housing associations.
"I know many of our union's members will be concerned about what the government is doing. Don't all rush to send motions to the union conference about the way we use our political fund. I can tell you the leadership of the union will be suspending funds for Labour unless there is a substantial change in policy." That was the message to union reps from John Keggie, the union's deputy general secretary, last week. He was speaking to reps from all over Britain. They had gathered the day after a ballot had overwhelmingly backed a national postal strike over pay.
The movement against capitalist globalisation is alive, growing and truly global. Some 70,000 people here in Porto Alegre, Brazil's southernmost state, are giving the lie to Clare Short's dismissal of the movement as well meaning white middle class people who have no support in the Third World. The World Social Forum first met in Porto Alegre a year ago. Then, between 15,000 and 20,000 people took part.
The debates at the World Social Forum have underlined the polarisation that is beginning to develop within the anti-capitalist movement. Undoubtedly Porto Alegre has witnessed a determined effort to co-opt the movement.
'Everywhere we went we bumped into a funeral. We went to the town of Salfeet in the West Bank. Many houses had been bulldozed just two days before we'd got there. They'd built a little hospital. It has four beds and two doctors for 60,000 people. People from Ramallah have to use the hospital as well. There are lots of stillbirths.
Pay is suddenly a major issue-and not just for striking rail workers. Official talk of an economic boom in Britain, while much of the world slides into recession, has sharpened the feeling of millions of workers that they are being left behind.
