About Stephen Hall

I am 50 years old, a lifelong socialist and Trades Unionist and have lived in Atherton most of my life.

Since the mid 70's when I was Secretary of the Leigh Labour Party Young Socialists, I have helped to organise and/or lead numerous campaigns, protest meetings, marches and rallies, etc, in support of working people both in this area and abroad, including the largest ever demonstration (of several thousand) in the town since the 1920's in support of the heroic National Union of Mineworkers in November 1984.

I also have campaigned against youth unemployment, in support of the striking firefighters, steel workers, printers, engineers, nurses, dockers and textile workers.

Indeed, during the epic Miners' Strike of 1984-85 along with others in this town, I was responsible for the setting up of one of the first (and certainly the most influential in terms of the North West) Miners Support Groups in the country, which later became something of a model for the network of support Groups that sustained the two year plus battle to save Lancashire's last remaining coal mine at Parkside in Newton-le-Willows in the early 90s, a campaign I was also heavily involved in, and in which I played a prominent role.
I've also organised mass meetings of local tenants against council house rent rises and for a better repair service, and was involved in the organisation of numerous mass meetings throughout this area against Margaret Thatcher's much hated “poll-tax”.

A former Labour Party member of 25 years (which is considerably more years than the current Labour Candidate!) and local TUC President, I am bitterly opposed to the Labour Party's betrayal of working people locally and nationally, with its pay restraint, paltry minimum wage and state pensions, privatisations of public services including the NHS, its “Private Finance Initiative”. its selling off of Council owned land, its council tax increases, run down of youth services, and the continuing scheme of student loans and tuition fees rather than what existed previously which saw students get grants, and which is the state funded system in fact that was likely enjoyed by every single member of the current Labour Government as well as Wigan Council leader Lord Smith.

I am also opposed to Labour's warmongering in Iraq and Afghanistan and Britain's pandering to the interests of big American Oil and Business corporations like Halliburton and Exxon. Also Labour's uncritical and slavish support for the state of Israel which appears hell bent on inflicting a holocaust of its own on the Palestinian people especially in Gaza.

Labour now cares more for the interests of big business here and in the USA then it ever did for working people. It only retains the support of the majority of the Trades Unions (the FBU and RMT have actually disaffiliated from it!) because the leaders of those Unions care more for the peerages and other patronage they might pick up by abandoning their own members to the interests of Capital.

Locally, the situation is worse, as few members of the Labour Party in this area these days appear to have any principles at all, and just look to getting their snouts stuck in Wigan's municipal trough. They are a shameful lot that need sweeping away.

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