This is a slideshow (by the fabulous deptfordvisions) featuring users of the soon-to-be-closed Grange centre for people with disabilities in Shropshire. These are the people Shropshire council did not want us to interview.
My life, My Choice is Shropshire council’s tag for its adult social care programme. The Grange centre users modified it. I’ve used the modification for the title of this post.
This was the day after the Grange’s Christmas party – thus the hats.
So…
I’ve been forwarded an email by a number of people who are desperate to protect the Hammersmith library service from cuts, and jobs and service downgradings.
The email exchange is between a local union rep and H&F Tory councillor Greg Smith, cabinet member for the (deliciously-named) Residents’ Services department and the councillor responsible for the libraries ‘restructure.’
In the email, the rep pleads with Smith to visit staff at the very popular, but-soon-to-be-disbanded, home library service (this dedicated service, which is run centrally from Barons Court library, will be devolved to other Hammersmith libraries. They’ll have to find time and staff for home deliveries – at a time of cuts and staff downgradings).
The rep suggests that Smith join home library staff on one of their rounds to the housebound people who rely on the service for delivery of library books and DVDs (at any one time, there are 6000 books on loan to service users).
Smith’s answer – a resounding No Thanks – turned up just 12 minutes after the rep sent the original.
I reproduce the email here – not just because it demonstrates the airy Tory dismissal of service users and staff that speaks – if you will – such volumes, but because it points up the worrying lack of interest in consultation that I’m finding more and more. Continue reading
There will be a short break in transmission during the Christmas-New Year week. Back soon.
This is a post about the efforts two Northwest Tory councils have made to stop me reporting on public sector cuts:
My visit to the soon-to-be-closed Grange daycentre in Shropshire hit the skids before it started.
The Grange daycentre is an adapted community facility used by people with severe physical disabilities. Their conditions include multiple sclerosis, severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Many have had debilitating strokes.
Last week, they asked me to visit Shropshire to record their views about Shropshire council’s sudden decision to close their daycentre. So off we went, my photographer and I: skidding and crawling (in a car) across the snow and treacherous ice between Manchester and Shropshire, only occasionally breaking the silence to scream as lorries greased past on black ice, etc.
Turned out the drive was a minor inconvenience compared to the rest. The real obstacle was the Shropshire Tories. It emerged that the council had banned journalists from entering the daycentre. We were allowed no further than the foyer. Furious centre-users – some in wheelchairs, some needing physical support – turned up to say that nobody was allowed to talk about the centre, or its impending closure, because the council had ruled that talking might upset people (upset the service users, that was – not the press or the frigging council. I’ve talked to a council spokesperson since. He agreed that was the council’s line).
The centre users didn’t feel the council had the right to tell them who they could and couldn’t talk to. Who over the age of five would? Physical disability hardly disqualifies adults from conversation. Centre users Chris Alvison, Andrew Millarkie, Donald Gibson, Anne Lee, Victor Baylor, Eddie Davies, Terence Jones and Trevor Brian Steadman (all in their 40s) said they were prepared to move outside into the snow to talk if I wasn’t allowed through the doors.
The council backed off in the end, although needed a good slapping first. Local disability rights campaigner Nicky Clark (who has two disabled daughters herself) intervened on everyone’s behalf and shouted the council down. She was a while on the job: she spent the better part of half an hour on the phone to council management (council managers are due to talk to me in the next day or two about their decision to ‘protect’ people with disabilities). In the end, we were able to set up the cameras and recorders inside the Grange.
Meant to put this up earlier, so apologies if you’ve seen it elsewhere…
People who filled in the volunteer (aka London Games Maker – love that) application form received emails like the one below from the London 2012 office last month.
Apparently, a lot of people had trouble completing the form’s crime-history/background check questions, because the questions were a little dense. I have to admit that I had to read the first couple several times before I got the drift. Sobering up didn’t help. It took quite a mental effort, even when you allow for the fact that I’m an antipodean halfwit.
Wondering if this confusion means there’ll be unusual number of perverts and security risks at the Olympics? Might actually watch it if it does.
Kate Hall (by @skinnyvoice)
This week, Manchester city council drew one of Eric Pickles’ many short straws – Manchester is one of the northwest councils that faces Pickles’ ‘maximum’ 8.9% cut to ‘spending power.’
That 8.9% sounded all right. Pity the real figure is nothing like it. The truth is that the cut to Manchester’s grant is a cracking 21% and its revenue loss next year around £68.9m. Pickles’ sly maths has gone down like a cup of the cold proverbial in this part of the country – “thinks we’re too thick to count” was a line I heard several times this week as I travelled around the northwest. The 8.9% includes transferred (and ringfenced) NHS funds for adult care services, and council tax, which councils must – and may fail to – raise themselves. A consistent council tax take might be more of a challenge if fewer people are working and able to pay.
And fewer people will be working: hundreds of Manchester city council staff are already in line for redundancy, as are hundreds more at nearby Rochdale, Bury, Oldham and Stockport boroughs. The notion that they’ll all slot into private sector jobs is a fancy one. Unemployment in the northwest is running at 8.1% and rising nationally on the back of public sector job losses. A Wigan job centre worker told me the figures would worsen as seasonal adjustments were made for temporary retail jobs over Christmas. The government has scrapped the northwest development agency and nobody seems to know how and if replacement local enterprise partnerships will work.
For what it was worth (not a great deal, in my view), northwest MPs signed a letter to the Manchester Evening News this week which accused the coalition of politically-motivated attacks on the northwest’s poorest (and generally Labour-voting) boroughs. Dark mutterings too – and rightly so – about the near-free passes given by government to affluent southern boroughs like Dorset and Surrey. With real-scale grants cuts of around four and six percent, well-appointed Conservative boroughs have largely escaped the scythe.
“Is the government saying it is fair that an elderly person in Manchester who needs a home help should miss out so the Conservatives can help their friends in leafy Surrey?” MP for Manchester Central Tony Lloyd asked in the MEN.
Whether Labour would have said anything different, or come good with savings ideas that spared the most vulnerable, is another story (and one I’m not convinced that Ed Miliband is telling). Hazel Blears was one of the signatories to the MEN letter, which didn’t exactly make you want to invest in it. At least one reader of that letter tends to associate Hazel with a £13,000 capital gains diddle, rather than public spirit.
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God only knows what this will all mean for people who depend on public services. Things are already difficult for them, and the cuts haven’t even taken hold.
I spent an afternoon this week with a young woman who relies on Manchester public services as they exist.
Kate Hall is 24 and has the debilitating Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (a serious disorder of connective tissues) and associated fibromyalgia. These seem extremely unpleasant conditions to live with – even if the prize for them, as Osborne might want us to think, is a life spent relying on benefits.
You’ll find below a press release from Barnet unison’s local government branch.
The Barnet Alliance for Public Services (of which the union is part) has already held standing-room-only public meetings to organise against cuts in Barnet.
Barnet is one of the controversial London Tory boroughs. It’s known as EasyCouncil because of its plans to take money from residents who are prepared to pay move to the head of queues for services. It lost some £27m on bad investments in Icelandic banks. It has spent millions on a yet-to-be-delivered councilwide outsourcing programme called Future Shape. Tonight, the council’s cabinet committee will sign off a budget which proposes massive cuts across frontline services.
Council trade unions and residents from Barnet Alliance 4 Public Services will hold a lobby of a full council meeting tomorrow night outside Hendon Town Hall: Tuesday 14 December 6 to 7 pm.
The lobby should be pretty fiery if the earlier ones are anything to go by.
Manchester, Wednesday 8 December 2010.
To be updated.
On the way to the Manchester occupation, I meet:
Tas, 34, a slate-mine worker at Blaenau Ffestiniog. We start chatting because he has a beautiful, friendly ten-month-old keltie-dog with him – a point of considerable mutual interest. We’re also the only two people at the tiny, freezing Frodsham train station and we’re both trying to find out when and if the next train is due. So, we try to find out by asking each other. Tas and Jay the dog are on their way home to Warrington and I’m heading to Manchester to talk to students who are occupying the university’s Roscoe building.
Tas is thin and pale, has broken, dark-coloured teeth and a small constellation tattooed across his right cheekbone. His face looks a bit red on it in the cold. Mine is also freaking: it’s mostly frozen but my nose is throbbing. It turns out that neither of us knows if a train is going to turn up, or if departure announcements/cancellation news ever make it to Frodders, so we move onto the recession via the dog.
Tas’ story is that he takes the dog for all-day walks in the hills around here on his days off – partly because he loves the dog and wants to do the right thing by him, but partly because he can’t afford to do anything else. He had to take a big pay cut last year to help keep his company afloat. His £11k sometimes-admin-worker sometimes-mine-worker salary was cut to £9k, which he says he accepted because senior management took a cut as well and ‘because I would do anything to keep my job. There’s nothing else in this area. Jobs are dead.’ So. He gave up his car and his holidays and spends all his spare time on the dog. This shows. One look at the dog makes me want to break out in applause – the dog is bright-eyed and lean, with a gleaming hair-job that looks better-organised than Samantha Cameron’s.
Tas is pleased to hear I’m on my way to see students. He thinks the protest bug will spread, no matter how government tries to douse it. Winter is already very cold in this part of the nation and things will get too hard too soon. Tas is particularly worried about Osborne’s plans for housing benefit, no matter that they might be delayed. An annual salary of £9k isn’t enough for optimism. He lives in fear of losing his job. He’d take a pay cut again.
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The University of Manchester occupation is taking place in a vertiginously steep lecture theatre, which I fall into, rather than enter. The room is brightly-lit and the people smart and welcoming. There’s a certain tension in faces: the government votes on tuition fees tomorrow and the mainstream line – at the time of writing, at least – seems to be that the government will take it, albeit narrowly. There are also the logistics of getting big groups of Manchester protestors to London tomorrow in time to hear the vote.
A few thoughts:
One of the teetering Right’s favoured anti anti-cuts tactics is to dismiss UKuncut’s movers and shakers as unrepresentative gremlins.
“I do not see any blacks protesting – wonder why,” one charmer observed under a video I posted of last week’s anti-cuts demonstration at Lewisham council.
The point of that and similar comments is, of course, that the Lewisham protestors were neither local, nor representative, and that actions like the Lewisham one could comfortably be written off as the deviant recreations of a small posse of middle-class Goldsmiths Trots.
Which was wrong.
The videos below are short clips of some of the people who spoke at Lewisham just before the crowd charged the hall. The first was a teacher from John Roan school. The second spoke on behalf of the now rather ironically-named Open Doors. Open Doors is/was a popular, help-to-employment service that will shut its doors in February – a casualty of the cuts programme that Steve Bullock’s council signed off last Monday. The third was a speaker from the local pensioners’ forum.
You’ll note from the clips that there was a range of genders, political viewpoints and ethnic groups at Lewisham. People had a good few things in common, though: extraordinary gratitude to the student movement, fury at public-sector cuts, and a willingness to rush the hall. The Right can shout those things down, I suppose, but that doesn’t quite change the fact of them: