Working on a bit of stuff at the moment and will be back shortly with it.
In the meantime, head over to the Lewisham council talk forums and give Sir Steve Bullock your views on his proposals for service cuts. My own opinion on Sir Steve’s cuts may be found in the post below.
We puddle now through the rain to Lewisham Town Hall, where local Labour centrist legend Sir Steve Bullock is due to hold a cabinet meeting on service cuts.
Sir Steve’s cabinet is positioning the ax (with a perverse enthusiasm, some say) over services the council could cut to fund its £3m share of the government’s in-year demand for £1.16bn local government savings.
But that, alas, is not all. Weirdly keen to shine in this first leg of the coalition’s local government service-slaughter challenge, Lewisham council has bullocked ahead and forecast a budget gap of up to £60m for 2011 to 2014 (although it’s still in the dark about government plans for key grants). It has already instructed officers to identify services to push up front for this second phase of the massacre. There’s little evidence the council is fighting for alternatives to keep the poor in this deprived borough afloat – moderate council tax increases in the top bands next year (the council is not compelled to accept Osborne’s incentives to keep increases down) or halts to the capital and PFI programme.
‘It would be easy to declare our opposition to the cuts the coalition is proposing,’ Bullock said in his May AGM address, as he piddled on any notion of combat with the government.
It is easiest of all to embrace the cuts ethos wholeheartedly. Lewisham cuts targets include a mass of jobs in the children and young people’s service, adult social care jobs and care packages, and daycare support for people with learning disabilities. Increased charges are proposed for services like meals on wheels and non-residential care (the complete hitlist is here).
It’s all very Hammersmith and Fulham when you get down to it. H&F Tories partly financed their much-celebrated lowered council tax by charging elderly and disabled people more for services like meals on wheels and homecare – the council ‘sacrificed free home care on the altar of a council tax reduction for which there was no legal requirement,’ Lord Justice Sedley said when three local people sought a judicial review of the Hammersmith charging decision.
The three didn’t win their review, but they drew attention to the truth of Hammersmith’s low council tax. I know that Labour readers will thrash me for comparing one of their councils with H&F’s Tory basketcases, but I’ll do it anyway, and will welcome a proper discussion when everyone calms down. Alternatives to cuts on the Lewishams scale must be found. After all, we’re supposed to be in this together. We’re not if local solutions are about piling costs on the poor.
I digress. Back to Lewisham town hall, where the NUT fronts a healthy-sized rally as the cabinet prepares to meet:
I dip a toe in the rally, where I find that it is indeed Bullock and Lewisham Labour that people want to scrag. The coalition government gets a pass to quite an extent. The PCS is here, as well as the NUT and NASUWT, which means it’s just like the good old days, before the Tories got in – leftwing unions outside a town hall, screaming bloody death at the local Labour in-crowd. I waft round in an odd wave of nostalgia.
I speak to Kathy Duggan, a local primary school teacher, and NASUWT’s Lewisham secretary. She talks about the council’s response to the cuts agenda, and Gove’s plans for schools and academies, as you’ll see. She’s also furious about Mark Elms and his £200,000+ salary – boy, the unions came down hard on that one:
I also speak to Karen Jonason – a soon-to-retire deputy headteacher at Lewisham’s Pendragon school for children with learning disabilities. She’s circulating a petition to keep Crofton Park library open (Sydenham, Blackheath, Crofton Park, Grove Park and New Cross libraries are tagged for closure on Bullock’s list). She’s also a longtime Labour party member. She makes no excuse for this, even though I ask her to. ‘You fight from within.’
She thinks targeting Crofton Park library is ridiculous – ‘it’s always full of people, with kids always on the computers.’ Elderly people are regular library visitors, which Jonason believes saves the council money – ‘there’s a direct relationship between people staying active in the community and being able to live independently and look after themselves.’ The council believes that its libraries proposal would save about £750k – an amount Jonason feels is small beer.
Jonason’s argument is with council priorities – if money must be found, building and refurbishment work should be postponed ahead of cutting ‘small services’ like neighbourhood libraries.
I couldn’t agree more. There’s big money in these parts, but you need to know where to look for it. The council’s dreadful, and dreadfully expensive, PFI contracting process to date would be an excellent place to start – the National Audit Office has just rapped Lewisham’s knuckles for allowing its Brockley Housing project costs to increase from £44.6m to an extraordinary £115.91 million. Osborne’s spending review will assess PFIs, and the NAO is keen to hear more about their value:
As part of planned assessment of PFI housing through the 2010 comprehensive spending review and in view of a period of restraint and efficiencies in public sector spending, the department (for communities and local government) should consider PFI in the context of its other housing investment programmes, assess the different types of project used and ensure that value for money is a primary focus in terms of the selection of PFI as an investment option.
That’s where the real money is. Jonason knows, and I know, and we all know that these immediate service-slashing economies are false economies. Bullock’s huge list targets people we (literally) can’t afford to target. Makes you wonder what will happen when we really need to save.
An amusing little update: in another Gillian Duffy moment (time Labour politicians were shown the off-switches on their microphones) Sir Steve calls his concerned constituents fucking idiots. And me paying Lewisham well over £100 a month in council tax, too. How rude.
Lord Justice Sedley continued:
‘The object of this exercise was the sacrifice of free home care on the altar of a council tax reduction for which there was no legal requirement.
Updated 11 July 2010. Information on cuts lobbies and organising groups at the end of this blog.
Have started to spend time in Hackney, with people likely to be affected by public sector cuts. Will post interview extracts here while I work on a longer piece with video, and go back to people to see how they’re getting on:
Anthony Rhoden:
I meet Anthony Rhoden at a Saturday afternoon Hackney Unites clinic for people who need free workplace and employment advice. Two Russell Jones and Walker solicitors are there as advisors, as well a TUC and local union rep.
A longtime (now unemployed) chef and restaurant worker, Rhoden says that he is a Unite organiser for bar and restaurant employees -‘there’s a lot of problems in the catering industry – there were lots of problems even before the recession. It happened to me all the time – wouldn’t get paid, or wouldn’t get all my pay. People don’t know they have rights. You get bullied all the time.’
In a recession, though, people count themselves lucky to have a job, even if they’re abused in it. That’ll be nowhere more the case than in Hackney. Hackney’s unemployment figures are already the worst in London, with a June 2010 TUC analysis putting the ratio of people claiming jobseekers’ allowance to available jobs at 24:1.
‘There’s no work anywhere,’ says Rhoden. He looks at me oddly when I put to him the coalition’s idea of moving the unemployed to areas where there are jobs. Like me, he’s not sure such a place exists. It ain’t in an obvious vicinity, that’s for sure. Joblessness will be even worse in Hackney, and in places like Lewisham and Deptford, if the public sector is hit as badly as the coalition proposes to hit it. Councils and the NHS are the biggest employers in these areas – there’s almost nowhere else to go.
Rhoden says he wants to start his own catering business, but that he signs on for now. He lives in temporary accommodation in Wigan House (he’s lived there for three years, waiting for his old block to be rebuilt) and relies on a housing benefit to meet his rent of about £100 a week.
The conversation takes a turn for the disturbing when we get to the subject of this housing benefit and the government’s targeting of it: Rhoden refuses to believe that housing benefits will be cut. He doesn’t talk about campaigning against the cuts – he says that he never ‘gets involved in the politics. I’m not a political person. The politics never changes anything and it never helps us.’
Now I’m looking at Rhoden oddly. Very. I wasn’t expecting this – I was as primed as ever for anger and a tide of anti-Cameron obscenity, but had nothing up the sleeve for denial. I tell Rhoden that George Osborne has housing benefits very much in his sights, and that if Osborne wins, Rhoden may find his housing benefit entitlement takes a ten percent hit.
Rhoden shakes his head. He says again that ‘there’s no way that they’ll cut the housing benefit.’ I say I hope he’s right and that I hope he knows something I don’t. The truth is that I suspect that Rhoden is exactly the type of guy Osborne is after – and exactly the type of guy Osborne wants the everyone-on-welfare-is-a-scrounger brigade to get after – because he’s been collecting JSA for more than 12 months. If he continues to collect JSA, which he may have to if his catering business idea doesn’t fly, he could be looking at losing ten quid a week, even as a council tenant.
‘There’s no way that they’ll cut it,’ Rhoden says firmly. ‘There’s no way they will do that. They will leave housing benefit alone.’ I has absolutely no idea how to interpret this confidence. It could be innocence – if Rhoden doesn’t follow politics, he may not know that Osborne is after housing benefits. That’s hardly a happy thought – he’s unlikely to be the only one. I suppose it could be the misplaced hauteur the right forever bangs on about – Rhoden isn’t worried about benefit cuts, because he’s confident the state will forever pick up his various tabs.
Of course – he wouldn’t be the only one. There are plenty of people with high expectations of handouts. One of the Russell Jones and Walker solicitors makes this point when she tells me that her firm was involved in a lot of final deal negotiations for well-placed City staff when the banks crashed.
‘The reality is that it didn’t hit them very hard,’ she says. ‘They negotiated good deals to leave, and then not very long after they left, they were negotiating good deals into other jobs.’ She says that by comparison, it can be very difficult to negotiate reasonable deals for people leaving the public sector.
She and the other Russell Jones and Walker solicitor say that from their perspective, very little has changed in the banking industry. They say that people are still awarded bonuses, but they just have them deferred so that they appear to be collecting nothing, or a lot less right now. ‘They like it like that. It looks like they’re not taking very much now, but they will just collect it all in the future.’
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I wonder if the grassroots is up for a fight for public services, though. I want it to be, but that’ll hardly make it happen. Who would lead such a fight? Public sector trade unions? Hah. The PCS may put up a geniune fight, but Unison won’t.
I attend a meeting of Hackney locals and trade union members which is led by Brian Debus – a man who is walking testimony to Unison’s hatred of popular pro-public service, leftwing activists. Debus is one of the four Socialist party activists Unison has banned from office for demanding that Unison stop funding the pro-privatising Labour party. There is a great deal of difference between what Unison does and what it says.
This meeting of about 50 people knows that. It agrees that unions are too weak and too slow to organise effectively against the coalition juggernaut.
Union membership is low. Strike action is notoriously difficult to organise. Solidarity strikes are illegal. Legal strike action is painfully hard to achieve: unions must ballot, then request permission to strike from industrial action committees that are made up of people who’d prefer to make history as negotiators, rather than pinkos. If strikes go ahead, they may backfire. The Murdoch media hates the public sector and strikers, and will doubtless happily publish coalition press releases that claim public services were easily delivered on days when half the public sector workforce was out.
The meeting decides that the fight for services has to be rooted in communities, like the poll tax resistance. I think of Rhoden at this point, and wonder what will happen when he works out that the money is about to go.
Lobbies and meetings this week:
Camden TUC meeting to organise against cuts on Monday 12 July
Lewisham council: lobby against council cuts at Lewisham council buildings, Catford, Wednesday 14 July 5.15pm. Organised by the NUT.
News of cuts at Lambeth, and proposals to try and keep local people in employment.
Southwark Unites will hold a meeting against the cuts on Monday 19 July.
More to come.
The great Doug Stanhope on abortion, with the greatest closing line of all time: