12th May What’s On

Saturday 14th May

The play “Dare to Be Free”, will be performed on Saturday 14 May, 2pm in the Inspire Centre, 747 Stockport Road, Levenshulme Entrance is free.

The play is set in a cafe in 1908, and in a fast food outlet in 2016, with both sets of workers fed up with their working conditions and pay. Linking the two eras is Mary Quaile, come to help out her modern-day sisters because the issues she fought on 100 years ago are back with a vengeance…Mary came from an Irish working-class background and left school at 12. She rose from being a waitress in a Manchester cafe to one of the most well-known women trade union organisers in Britain in the 1920s. She spent four months in the Soviet Union in 1925 leading a delegation of British trade union women and was on the General Council of the TUC during the General Strike. She died in 1958.

The play has been written by Jane McNulty who has written for Eastenders and other television series, and is performed by four professional actors. Mary Quaile is played by Catherine Kinsella (recently seen on television in The A Word , while the waitresses in 1908 and 2016 are played by Rebecca Brown, Rachel Priest and Catarina Pinto Soromenho.

The play has been sponsored by a number of trade unions and also a number of individuals, including actors Maxine Peake and Christopher Eccleston.

More information https://maryquaileclub.wordpress.com

https://www.facebook.com/events/1135672369785723/

Wednesday 18th May

Manchester Autonomous Drinkers

Come and join us at the next Manchester Autonomous Drinkers!

Autonomous Drinkers is a social event that aims to bring together Plan C members and like-minded folks for a chance to socialise, catch up and make plans.

This time we’ll kick off with some short discussions about the various things Plan C has been up to, including the nation-wide #PicketProfiteers action against NHS privatisation.

We’ll be in the large room up the stairs from 8 pm onwards. If you want more info just message us. xxx

8.00pm Upstairs at The Britons Protection, 50 Great Bridgewater Street, Manchester

https://www.facebook.com/events/107999559614769/

Saturday 21st May

Spring Conference on the “A Discussion on the Future of the Left”

10.00am-7.00pm at People’s History Museum/ £10 Tickets

http://www.manchesterspring.org.uk/events-2/

Wednesday 25th May

Radical Mental Health Meeting

A couple of years ago some of us met up to discuss a radical left wing approach to mental health might look like. Over the next few months we discussed the relationship between psychology and neoliberalism; mental health to work; the lessons we could learn from past movements around feminism, racism and attempts to reform or replace psychiatric institutions.

Over the course of our discussions and afterwards one of the things that came up again was the question of what we can do: how to go from defending services threatened by austerity to seeking their replacement with something better, how to bring issues around mental health to the fore in existing campaigns and how to practically provide support.

We never quite got there but it’s a process we want to continue and involve more people in. We want to help make a space where the issues around mental health can be discussed but which also produces actions and practical solidarity. We’ll continue to publicise and support other initiatives, events and ideas but really want to start taking more of an initiative ourselves.

If any of that sounds interesting to you and if you have any ideas for what you’d like to do please come along and get involved.

Here’s a few links to some of the ideas and groups that influenced our discussions and what we want to do: http://psychologyandneoliberalismmcr.tumblr.com/readinglist

Partisan Collective have offered to let us use their space for this meeting. For more on what they do have a look at their page here: https://www.facebook.com/partisancollective/

7.00pm at Partisan Collective, 3space, Mount Street, Manchester, M2 3NN

https://www.facebook.com/events/991519364288318/

Friday 27th May