Save the NHS Ukuncut action Westminster bridge

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Videos from today’s ‘block the bill, block the bridge’ protest action on Westminster Bridge.

This was 1pm, when everyone lay down on the bridge.

And then this general assembly was held – a lot of discussion here about replicating the US occupations in the UK.

And then the US chant – “we are the 99%.” Not quite where the US occupations are yet, but a useful day all the same. What’s noticeable is that the crowds are changing – more family groups and a wider variety of ages. As more people lose their jobs, these protests can surely only grow.

Ambiguity before revolution

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In post-riot south-east London, people share their views on government and public sector cuts:

On Deptford High Street, I’ve been spending time with a man called Roy*. Roy, 58, is a sociable, articulate and intelligent man – a live wire, even, chatting and giggling as he leads me in and out of shops (“I want to buy a phone which bounces” – he’s dropped a few phones, but has a wad of cash for a new one), rolling and sharing cigarettes, and arguing the insurrectionist viewpoint when shopowners tell him to smoke outside.

He describes himself an anarchist. He’s brilliant at it – he genuinely couldn’t give a stuff what anyone else thinks, or even what sort of mood the high street’s many coppers are in. Every now and then, he shouts out “bring me cannabis! I want cannabis!” for laughs. Whenever he’s asked for his views on government, he yells “for king and country! FUCK-ING CUNT-RY! Get it?” Quite a few people on the street get it and a lot of them like it. The four or five people sharing our cafĂ© table this morning all join in the chant. Roy’s view is that “there is no need for government. There is no need for police.” He wears a whistle on a ribbon round his neck and, from time to time, he stands up and blows it with a lot of enthusiasm. He is a tonic in many respects: a welcome reminder that obliging behaviour is overrated, particularly at the moment. If you’re going to be an anarchist, do it like Roy does. Spread the joy.

Roy is a regular user of public services – the NHS, mostly. He’s just a day or two out of an inpatient unit in one of the big southeast London hospitals and he says that he has to report back tomorrow. He was first sectioned about 20 years ago and has been in and out of inpatient units ever since. He explains that his most recent sectioning came about because he was caught in the middle of Westminster “bashing at the church doors and I was [shouting at them] Let me in! Let me in! Then I went to Houses of Parliament and starting bashing in the doors, bashing on the church doors saying let me in! Then I pretended to shoot at the police.” At other times, he lives in a small flat just a few streets from here. I think it is a council flat, but may be wrong. He doesn’t answer my question about that. He gives me his address and phone number, so I’ll go and see him next time he’s out of the unit.

As for the public sector – we never really get down to it. “There is no need for government. There is no need for police.” Roy thinks that people probably worry too much about government and its direction of travel. He says that Deptford will survive Tories, public sector cuts and whatever else anyone throws at it, because Deptford has always survived and is always there when he comes back to it. “This place is untouchable. It’s no different since the Tories got in.”

A refreshing outlook, as I say – although Roy is the only one at our table who has it. Another older guy we’re with looks to the skies and says “banks are rioters. Government are looters and rioters. They just do it in a much more subtle way. They create a world that we get to live in.”

A young woman who does not want to give her name says she understands that there have been “some strong cuts” to the public sector, but she thinks “they are necessary.” She is “worried for [people who are] teenagers now: “18 and 19-year-olds – those are the ones I worry for. There are no jobs for them. Sending people to university for no good reason – that was a mistake. What is the point of a media studies degree at Greenwich? Nobody [no employer] is going to touch that.”

She isn’t as worried for her own infant daughter, because: “it [jobs and training] will be better when she is older. It will be sorted out by then.”

The public sector she can live without, at least as she has experienced it. “I worked in the public sector for a while and I couldn’t believe it. There were so many people there who wouldn’t be able to get a job in the private sector. They turned the lights off at 5pm and went home. Nobody did any more than they should.” She doesn’t seem thrilled with the private sector, though – or its banking arm, at least: “The bankers? – they have us over a barrel and they know it.” She stops there, because she’s watching Roy. We all watch Roy as he kneels in front of her baby’s pram and tickles the baby under its chin.

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Southwark evictors

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On the weekend, I attended a community conversation event and spoke to (Labour) Southwark council leader Peter John about his council’s appalling proposal to evict people convicted of taking part in August’s riots. No Labour councillor should ever champion eviction:

I’d start by saying that senior local Labour people like Peter John are so dangerous because they seem so innocuous. They have made inoffensiveness an art. Eviction is a filthy idea, but John – one of local Labour’s smooth, practised communicators – looks to take the heat of out it by discussing it with decorum. This decorum – the niceness, the eminent reasonableness that the centre-left insists on if it is to be talked with – is the centre-left’s transport for its rightward shift. The idea is that you can water any topic down by talking it down. In this environment, just raising your voice is the social equivalent of crapping on an altar. In this environment, authority feels perfectly justified in ending a discussion the second an opponent forgets to behave “reasonably”, whatever that means.

So it is that Peter John and I have a heated discussion about evictions, without the heat. He never raises his voice, or allows his smile to leave it. He clearly expects others to forget the rules, though – he’s got protection today. From time to time during the morning, the “meet the public” kiosk he’s stationed in outside Dulwich Sainsbury’s boasts as many coppers and security guards as it does hoi polloi. This is not unusual for Southwark in recent times, of course. As regular attendees of meetings and protests know, the town hall is often closely attended by dressed-all-in-black security guards and coppers who are just waiting for someone to raise a fist, or even a voice and bullock past “reasonableness.” You could argue that there isn’t a lot for people to be reasonable about in Southwark, though. The council made cuts to the tune of about ÂŁ50m in February this year. It banned protestors who weren’t allotted special tickets from hearing debate on those cuts (like other London Labour leaders, John took much criticism for not fighting the Tories harder for better local government settlements. He argued that the council petitioned government as well as it could). There is considerable poverty and unemployment in Southwark, and there is unrest. I was caught in the riots in Peckham in August, so saw some of that myself.

In the middle of it is good-looking, evenly-spoken, evenly-mannered Peter John, oiling Labour’s grubbier parts with reasonableness. John says he understands why some “might say the [evictions policy] was headline-grabbing,” but he thinks that is unfair to the council. He wants people to see evictions as merely one part of a reasonable council package of post-riot responses. He tells me that this package includes the development of a youth fund of about a million pounds a year for three years. Other money will be made available for university scholarships for about six youngsters.

Reasonable people would see those as two reasonable – if small (John concedes the money is a “drop in the ocean”) – responses. I wonder, though, why a reasonable Labour council would tack eviction on to a reasonable package. Resource has been found for the concept: John says about 50 tenants have already had face-to-face interviews. So. Eviction is the sort of pure-evil, punitive idea which runs, as you’d expect, through Tory boroughs like shit through a goose. It isn’t funny in Wandsworth and it sure as hell isn’t funny in Southwark, where there are already about 15,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list (John says 20,000 when we talk). Getting thrown out here would leave you nowhere, or, at best, at the end of a very long list. That is not a position from which you and yours would be likely, or able, to rethink your contribution to community.

John steps in smoothly: he says I must remember that the council’s post-riot eviction pledge was really only a re-statement of existing council tenancy clauses. Tenants can already be evicted for antisocial behaviour and breaking the law. “I think Greenwich announced that they would seek to evict people who were involved in the riots and the media contacted us and said would you use your powers [like that] and we said Yes…. it was nothing new.”

Cynics would say that the part which was new – or, at least, a bonus for centre-ground politicians – was that the riots allowed Authority a free hit at those it has abandoned. John has a prettier line: “[Evictions] was one of the ways that we as a local authority said that we weren’t going to tolerate riots.” He tells me that a wonderful old man came up to him in Rye Lane after the riots (wonderful old people often approach politicians after a crisis) and the man told John that because of the riots, he was “afraid to put a foot out the door,” for the first time in his many years in the borough. Thus the evictions response, John smiles. The council had to do something to reassure people, “apart from just putting police on the streets.”

I’d like Labour to stop drooling after that handful of swing voters who believe a crueller world is a safer one. John misses no beat: he tells me that the Southwark exercise “was never just going to be the mindless eviction of people who were caught up in this…we won’t do anything until there has been a conviction, which is different from Wandsworth.” He even says that in the majority of cases, eviction is unlikely to happen (although I personally wouldn’t abandon the protesting yet). Which begs the question: why bring the possibility up at all, unless your aim is to put the fear of god into council tenants and scoop up a few swing-voting tenant haters along the way? John smiles and reminds me nicely that it’s about context. Wandsworth, he says, has not started a youth fund like Southwark has. Wandsworth is not having community conversations like the one we’re at today. That, he says, is how you tell the difference between Tories and Labour.

The other way to tell is to keep following Southwark to see if anyone is convicted, or evicted, and why. It’s impossible to tell where things are headed just by looking at Peter John’s innocuous face. I ask if he minds if I write our conversation up on my blog. “Sure,” he says expansively. That’s the thing in a nutshell right there – a mind that sees political advantage in a vicious platform like evictions, packaged up like a reasonable guy.

See harpymarx’s report from the same event – she spoke to a rather defensive Veronica Ward.

Barnet council attacks

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From Barnet Unison:

“This morning, UNISON members have all received a letter from the Council threatening staff that if they take strike action tomorrow, they will be deducted a full day’s pay regardless whether they work until 1pm. Furthermore, Unison is hearing that staff are being told that there will be managers on the gates of NLBP to check staff in. If staff do not sign a register stating they will not be taking half day strike action, they will be sent home.

The council is trying to impose what used to be called a ‘Lock out!’

It was agreed by all Unison members that they would take half a day in strike action and therefore lose half a day’s pay. That is what most reasonable employers would have deducted under these circumstances. However, the council’s actions are neither proportionate not reasonable.

The lateness at which the council has given this letter demonstrates they fear that Unison members will all walk out tomorrow.

Barnet Unison can confirm UNISON will make up the cost of any financial loss up until 1pm on Tuesday 13 September.”

More on why Barnet staff are striking tomorrow here.

More on the propaganda war against Barnet council strikers here and moves against Unison here at Rog T’s.

Abortion rights press conference September 6 2011

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Was at today’s Abortion Rights press conference on the Health and Social Care Bill abortion counselling amendments tabled by Nadine Dorries and Frank Field. The amendments will be debated in parliament tomorrow and should be voted down, although there were concerns expressed today about some MPs wavering.

Here are some videos of the speakers. There are a few more to come.

Ann Furdei, chief executive of BPAS:  “I can’t describe to you how offensive and insulting it has been to our staff to be described as almost salesmen of abortion services, when they are genuinely pro choice.”

 

Julian Huppert, Cambridge MP

“Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? I see no problem. There’s no suggestion the current system doesn’t work well.”

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Mr Mustard and Future Shape

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Mr Mustard offers a forensic examination of Barnet council’s Future Shape claims and very interesting it is, too. See how he compares the council’s claims for Future Shape with its results to date.

And the outstanding Mrs Angry itemises the council’s shambolic contracting systems as the council heads into another audit committee meeting. Just the council you want in charge of a Tory mass-privatisation programme. Might go for a contract with them myself. No paperwork and a great little earner.

Barnet strikes

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Update: 13 October 2011: council workers will strike again on 18 October in protest at the council’s mass-privatisation plans. This is the second strike action in a month. The story below explains why staff have been striking.

On 13 September, 400 Barnet council staff plan to strike in protest at Barnet council’s fatally misguided plans to mass-outsource council services to the private sector.

If the council goes ahead with its plans to outsource (and Barnet Unison has reported that people in 24 out of 25 services have been told they will be moving to the private sector), workers stand to lose jobs and/or hard-won conditions of employment. They’ll no longer work in a sector which puts need ahead of profit, either.

Nobody wants it. Nobody ever wants it. Involving private companies in public services yields appalling results. Costs spiral out of control so regularly and so spectacularly that you wonder why nobody involved is in jail. Private companies poke round for contract loopholes which allow them to press councils for extra funds. Staff – especially low-paid staff in services like care – are forced to take appalling salary cuts as their private sector employers shift cash from workers to shareholders. Staff suffer and services suffer. And at Barnet, the council’s internal auditors have raised serious questions about the council’s ability to manage big contracts. The council’s plans, at least as they are outlined in council reports, are incoherent, or even non-existent: teasers like “it is recognised that all activity required to deliver the benefits of the programme cannot be anticipated at this stage” pepper report pages. On the council bullocks, though. Privatisation is the only game around.

Barnet council steams ahead

Some Barnet council departments have been working to rule for months in protest at the council’s plans to mass-outsource services, but people want an all-out fight now. They want that fight because the council has shifted its plans to move services to private companies to high gear.

In June, the council agreed to proceed with a “support and customer services project” – a project which will involve the council engaging a private company to deliver council estates, finance, human resources, information systems, procurement, revenues and benefits and project management services.

This will be a nice little earner for whichever private company wins the contract to deliver those services – the council has set aside ÂŁ750m for that partner. It won’t be such a laugh for workers on the frontline, though. Unison estimates job losses of between about 190 and 250 as a result of this outsourcing and “efficiency savings.” Unions say workers are stretched to deliver those services as it is: there is simply no room for further cutting.

Clouds gather over other council services, too.

The council is planning to move adult social services (learning disability and physical and sensory impairment services for adults) into a profit-focused, local authority trading company – a company designed to create an annual surplus for the council of 8% by year four – “which is not,” as Unison reports rightly observe, “justifiable in terms of social justice, nor sustainable for the services concerned.”

That’s because the surplus will very likely be achieved through the standard methods of salary and service cuts, once the council shunts responsibility for both to an arms-length LATE company which it does not control. TUPE protection will mean as little for staff as it usually does. When companies take council services over and get control of staff and salaries, they dismantle “protected” salaries and employment conditions whenever that’s viable. Little wonder workers want to strike. There’s not much to lose if they do.

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A history of rubbish

Like many councils, Barnet has played with weird and not-so-wonderful ideas for service provision for years, and paid an awful lot of money for external advice about them.

Its mass-privatisation project began life several years ago as a contorted proposal called Future Shape. I normally wouldn’t bore you with the details, but they could be useful on this occasion, because they’ll give you insight into the sort of ill-thought-out, unproven garbage that council “thinkers” flubber piles of your money away on even as they cry poor and yabber on about reduced local government grants.

The idea behind Future Shape – it’s an idea which has been on the circuit for years and always sounds brilliant in theory – was to set up a sort of council-centred, one-stop-public-services-shop which would give residents a single point of access to different public services.

The idea is usually called something like “One Public Sector” – “proposals to work more closely with other public sector partners to provide residents with a single point of entry to public services in the borough,” was the way Barnet put it at the time. The aim was to involve private companies in this construction (unions felt the council’s aim was to outsource services to private companies and reduce the council to a small base which administered contracts) and to allow residents who wanted to jump the queue for services to pay to do that, as you might on easyJet or RyanAir.

There was also a lot of weird chat about fashioning in-house service “hubs” and “bundles” – or “proposals for more cross-service work with skilled hubs of in-house experts supporting services through the council” and “….services will be presented as “bundles” related to clearer outcomes”, as the council had it then. The idea – as far as anyone could grasp it from the council’s impenetrable language on the topic – seemed to be that knowledgeable council officers could advise the rest from little in-house pods. You’d think that was what they did anyway, but the “hubs” and “bundles” language cast the structure in a new-age light.

Anyway, both ideas proved less than brilliant in reality. It’s easy to understand why when you think it through. To make a one-point-of-entry public services idea work, councils need to convince PCTs (while they exist, that is), schools, the police and other councils and public sector organisations they want involved to abandon their existing locations, IT and HR arrangements and contracts, and hoof staff and even services to mutually agreed territory somewhere.

The thing would be a logistics nightmare. What if, for example, the local police had their own longstanding arrangements for IT provision? What if schools had already signed ten-year contracts with HR companies? What if the thing was simply too expensive to consider? What if democratic representation was lost when services were merged – would the anti-democracy minded argue, for example, that three councils were no longer required if they were all providing services out of one company and one location? What if the idea was patently absurd?

Public sector expert Dexter Whitfield once described this public services hub idea to me as “rubbish” (that was several years ago when I was a trade union activist at then-Labour Hammersmith and Fulham council. H&F councillors had started to yap on about building one of these regional public sector hubs. We brought Dexter in to shoot their plans down, which he duly did. He is good and it wasn’t hard). The hub idea has proved expensive rubbish for some councils, too. Bedfordshire county council, for example, had to pay millions a few years ago to break its partnership with HBS. One of the reasons that relationship bombed was that HBS failed to deliver promised public services hubs, or regional business centres as they were called then.

Barnet council quietly dropped the public services hub/Future Shape/whatever idea last year sometime – having blown ÂŁ3m or so (estimates vary) on consultants and advice for the project (money is no object in the austerity era – it’s only a problem if you want it for services). The council also took a very public smacking for its failure to produce a business case for Future Shape.

The council was soon back on the horse, though. By the end of 2010, it was championing a loopy proposal called One Barnet, which it continues to plump for today. With One Barnet, the council aims to provide public services by setting up consortia/strategic partnerships with private companies which will, somehow, help do the providing. As we have already observed, the council has agreed a pricey starter in the form of that ÂŁ750m support and customer services project.

One Barnet will also dole out smaller contracts to other private companies to help deliver…other things. The details can be hard to pick from the council’s own torturous descriptions. “One Barnet is a medium-term transformation programme providing the framework to enable future phases of projects to come forward,” comes one report.

“The council will provide a more sophisticated customer-centred service, will provide information and services in a more convenient manner and will offer residents more choice. In return, we expect residents to do what they can for themselves, their families and the community,” reads another.

Unions are pretty clear about the council’s intentions. Barnet Unison branch secretary John Burgess describes One Barnet as a mass-privatisation and cuts project.

“Their [the council’s] aim is to move services to private companies. They will transfer the cuts work to private companies – private companies will cut services and salaries after they have been transferred.”

Which brings us to the strike action council workers will take next week. That ÂŁ750m support and customer services project would see a private company take charge of delivering these council services: trading standards and licensing, land charges, planning and development, building control and structures, environmental health, highways strategy, highways network management, highways traffic and development, highways transport and regeneration, strategic planning and regeneration, cemeteries and crematoria, parking services and revenues and benefits. There is good reason to worry.

Bring on your fear and loathing

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A few thoughts on and from Cameron’s post-riot London masses:

The tone was set for the weekend, and probably for the rest of August, at about 5.30pm on Friday when I turned into forecourt of the Westminster museum and saw a group of five young men yelling and shrieking at two of London’s finest. One of the men – a fair-haired, heavyset guy of about 20 – was advancing on the two coppers, waving his arms and bawling “you should be ashamed!” and perhaps even “you should be fucking ashamed!” The men were red-faced and furious and at least one member of their group was bawling filth.

I thought I might as well wait around to watch the arrests. Only four days had passed since the riots and it seemed likely that swearing in a copper’s face and advancing on him would end in a night (at least) in captivity for someone. It certainly looked as though we were on when another couple of coppers moved in.

We weren’t. The men saw the incoming policemen, probably figured the new odds, and turned around to leave.

“Fucking unreal!” they bawled when I asked them what had happened. “They (the police) told us to get out. We weren’t even doing anything. They came up to us and told us to go on. Fucking unreal! UNREAL.”

They said that they’d been in Westminster Cathedral and that the police had closed in on their group as they left.

“They [the police] even asked the security guard if we’d been trouble [in the cathedral] and he said No. It is fucking outrageous. What the fuck are they doing?”

It was pretty clear what the police were doing. They were winding a group of young men up, then sending them down the road out of their minds with rage – a course of action which seems, on the whole, unlikely to make the world a safer place. It does, however, make the world a stupider place. Even Theresa May’s maths ought to guff out that result.

——

Walking the dog through Deptford at 10pm, I saw the Met with its post-riot dick out: a flashing convoy of five or six large, black hummers and six or seven riot vans on a victory lap round New Cross, Lewisham and Peckham. It gave late-evening drinkers something to look at, I suppose. Aside from a couple of open-mouthed shopkeepers, my staffie and I and a few pub-goers were the only ones on hand for a police parade on Brookmill Road at that hour.

There was a better public gallery a few days later when the convoy crawled across Blackheath at around 5pm. You get big family groups, labrador-walkers, kite-flyers and boozed-up picnickers sprawling across the fields at that hour. Gangster Peckham and Lewisham (presumably the targets of these hummer trains) may have been sprawled out on the grass as well, I suppose. Everybody likes a picnic. I could hear people saying “What the fuck?” to each other as the convoy rumbled by. It was a pretty impressive convoy on first sighting. Harder to care the second time around, but we need these cues to remind us that we’re living in fear.

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If we don’t live in fear, we’ll live in anger and then we’ll make a genuine mess.

Across London, I interview a single mother who seems almost feeble with fury at her own dwindling status: her mantra, understandably, is “I don’t know what they expect me to do.”

She is in her 50s and on the brink of losing her (rented) flat and embarking on retirement (if she can ever afford to retire) without a home.

She left her reasonably well-off, emotionally abusive partner about ten years ago, because he was awful to her. He liked to withhold money and was manipulative, cold and cruel. He is, of course, still awful to her. He still has money and she still does not – she worked and works part-time so that she could raise their children. He punishes her for leaving him by denying her whatever he is entitled to deny her and leaving her dangling financially from month to month – he’s Cameron and family values at local level, if you will. Their children are still dependants – they’re all under 18. They stayed with her when she and her partner broke up. For the next decade or so, he paid the rent on a house for them all. She got a part-time, unskilled job (she earns about ÂŁ600 a month) to make the rest of the ends meet.

Then suddenly – without discussion, or warning – her partner stopped paying her rent. Just like that. He said he didn’t need to pay any more, because the kids were living with him.

On paper, that was correct, but the reality was convoluted. The kids were living with their father some of the time – but they (particularly the oldest child) often turned up to live with their mother (the oldest child doesn’t always relate to dad and takes to the streets when they fight). The mother needs somewhere to house that child – and herself, which doesn’t count for much with many. She can’t afford the rent on her home on her small wage and her housing benefit entitlement won’t cover it. She isn’t a council housing priority, because she’s been meeting a private-sector rent. Family members have been paying the rent since her ex stopped the cheques and her children (ostensibly) have a home with their father. In the eyes of the state, she needs nothing.

She says she searched for properties on the council Locata database and was advised that her best hope was to move out of London. Moving out of London will solve her borough’s problem, but it’ll hardly solve hers. At her age: “I’m not going to get another job,” in, or out, of London. She needs to hang onto the one she has. She isn’t sure how long her family will be able to make up the rent for her. After that: “I don’t know what they expect me to do.” Shrug. She worked part-time all those years so that she could supervise her kids. The return on that? – no money, no home, a low-paid, low-skilled job and no prospects. I don’t know what they expect her to do, either. Die quietly, perhaps, like a good woman. That is our reward when we’re through.

——

I watched looting in Peckham during the riots. On lower-key days, there is salvaging. On Saturday afternoons at Deptford market, past the Albany theatre, people leave unwanted items in piles on the ground for others to fossick through. There’s mounds of stuff across the pavement: whole and smashed crockery, broken mirrors, burst bags of nails and screws, books and magazines soaked through with rain, bags, stuffed toy body parts, wet comic books, beads, broken DVDs, old vinyls, pens, a child’s cricket bat, balls, chair parts, trolley wheels, candelabra and crushed boxes. There’s even a neckbone – part of a cow, or perhaps a sheep, gnawed through and dropped in the pile.

“People just bring it,” say the Lewisham refuse guys. They sit there in high-vis jackets with Love Lewisham (the name of Lewisham council’s environmental unit) printed on the back until it is time to sweep whatever’s left away.

Until then, people pick through the wet fragments. An old guy and I have a laugh over a flan dish we find – it’s in good condition, but useless, because neither of us can cook. “Put a takeaway in it and I’m interested,” he says. He finds two unbroken tea mugs and puts them in his bag with a few unbroken plates. I suppose our era would encourage us to see this exercise as a healthy recycling of unwanted goods – and maybe it is. It could also be a bunch of not-so-well-off people picking through a wet pile of crap. Certainly, nobody turns up in a Bentley.