Me at the newleftproject, describing Unison’s viciousness towards great grassroots activists and why I’m struggling to see Dave Prentis as the workers’ saviour.

At the back of Mel Richards’ adapted housing association flat on Grassmarket is a flight of stairs to magnificent (and magnificently central) Edinburgh castle.

This juxtaposition does the heart good. Most council or HA flats I’ve seen so far have been stuck at the butt-end of town, but these guys have killed on Location. This is mixed residence at its very best, in the bricks-and-mortar sense: a great castle rising from Castle Rock at one end of a flight of stairs and a small block of housing association flats at the other. Paul Dacre would detonate at this evidence of the poor shoehorning themselves into a fancy tourist address on housing benefit, but let’s leave him to blow for now. It’s cheering to find these flats in such a beautiful part of town. It’s also uplifting to know that they’d get right on Dacre’s tits.

As would some of the people inside the flats, I imagine, although I wonder if he’d know how to class them.

The woman I’ve come to talk to – Mel Richards, a one-time British-Australian journalist who has a degenerative and disabling nerve-damage condition – is a rightwinger. “I’m definitely from the right – I’m not a Tory, but I would describe myself as from the right.”

She is, however, fiercely opposed to the government’s benefit cuts proposals. This is partly because she relies on state support (and will continue to do as her health deteriorates – “come back in ten years and I’ll still be on benefits”) and partly because she believes that there is such a thing as welfare entitlement. She says that government and media rhetoric about Scroungers and The Workshy should have no place in an adult discussion about give-and-take taxation.

Continue reading →

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.

—–

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.

Continue reading →

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.

—–

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.

Continue reading →

It’ll come as no surprise that a game old bird like me is down with East Acton youth.

I found out that fighting political rapper Lowkey was speaking at a small Hammersmith meeting this week from the 17-year-old son of an East Acton friend. This kid finds Lowkey thrilling. I do too, even though I should be past it. He looks very good, which always helps, and he writes the sort of anti-American, anti-imperialist lyric that a young Iraqi with a big mouth could feasibly disappear for. Certainly, East Acton youths get their collars felt for less. The 17-year-old kid and his friends are stopped by coppers all of the time.

Anyway. Here is the man himself in Hammersmith this week, bigging up militant protest and praising students who engage in it (to no small applause). Yoof love him, as well they might. He’s one of the few people on their circuit at the moment who is making any sense.

He even makes sense to an old girl like me. I like a man who deals in simple equations. And the youth equation is simple: there are no jobs for young people and they’re being priced out of education. Little wonder that they’re keen to rumble – apart from anything else, they’re probably bored out of their minds. I thought the same thing when I watched plunging fire extinguishers and Millbank window-smashing last week. I mean, really – what else do people expect? Personally, I couldn’t give a damn about the rights and wrongs of kicking in windows. Kicking in windows is not the point. The point is that the next generation has nothing to do and no money to do it with. Pity that point didn’t get as much coverage as the fire extinguisher.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – this would be a very good time to legalise pot.

In praise of militant protest, then:

and the second part. He is eloquent, all right.

I posted on Sunday about my plans to stop shopping with retailers whose senior managers publicly champion George Osborne’s cruel, ideologically-driven spending cuts.

I thought that post would go the way of most women-and-shopping stories (and indeed of women-and-anything stories), but things went better than that. Thousands of people turned up to read and rightwingers went into tailspin – two very good reasons to push on.

The chance to hit pro-cuts businesses where they’ll feel it is the other good reason to push on. Consumer boycotts can be effective, especially in an online age where reputation control is painful for corporates.

Only ten days after business leaders signed a Telegraph letter backing Osborne’s cuts, consumers are redefining their notions of ethical business on the local scene. Ethical business cannot, by definition, cheerlead a widely-criticised cuts programme that threatens jobs, economic recovery and retail and local commerce. Companies with brandnames that become synonymous with unethical business have good reason to feel the fear.

Ethical consumer groups point to – with considerable justification – a proud history of successful buyer pressure.  Centuries-old anti-slavery sugar boycotts, the anti-fur trade campaigns of recent decades, consumer boycotts of battery-farmed animals and eggs – ultimately, all had profound effects on public perception and corporate reputation. A sulky corporate response goes down like a cup of the cold proverbial in the viral era. Continue reading →