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:

More photos from the event

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.

So.

During the recent election campaign, I attended a packed parliamentary candidates’ hustings meeting in Lewisham-Deptford, my home manor. I bring it to you now as evidence that anyone relying on the political class to fight for public services should head out now to lie down on the M4 (the middle class does seem prepared to sacrifice the poor).

The meeting was just so appallingly civilised.

Five prospective MPs sat before the voting public in the middle of a recession, an expenses scandal, a public services funding crisis and – lest we forget – a war, and people just sat there and politely heard all five out. I found it hard to credit.

Perhaps we were looking at a crisis of representation. The audience was overwhelmingly white (which Lewisham-Deptford is not), apparently well-appointed, and inclined to kowtow, as the middle class seems fated to when presented with a lineup of wannabe service-cutting zealots. Well-mannered people asked civilised questions about MPs’ expenses, and touched on the recession and topup fees. Their prospective overlords gave answer in turn. I can say for a fact that I’ve been to less cuddly key parties. Middle class foment was as wedded to the horizon as it ever has been.

Things almost picked up about 20 minutes in when a commotion kicked off down the back, but alas – nothing useful was allowed to come of it. A young, local black man made his way into the meeting. His name was Tony Hambolu and he told us that lived on Deptford’s Tanners Hill estate. Straightaway, he got stuck into incumbent and prospective candidates about his cramped living conditions, and unemployment, benefits and social problems on Tanners Hill. He had to shout to make himself heard over a suddenly-ranting, one-issue long-hair – a bloke who had the face to tell Hambolu to shut up and stick to relevant topics, as you’ll see in the video below – but he stuck with it for as long as he could.

Hambolu saw the problem with the meeting – and indeed with millennium politics – immediately.

‘When they’re sitting in your face, you don’t want to tell them the truth!” he yelled at his fellow audience members while pointing at the candidates. ‘There are people in council flats that have got six children, living in a three bedroom flat, living on benefits every two weeks. What do you want to do about it? Please tell me. How are you going to help people? How are you going to help people?’

‘Let’s stick to the issue,’ the ranting socialist said. ‘Let’s stick to the real issue, which is environment and technology.’

Hambolu didn’t think environment and technology was the real issue, particularly. The yelling went on for a while. ‘You’re all full of shit, man,’ the kid said in the end. He stomped out. That, unfortunately, was that. Nobody on the platform, or in the audience, asked him to stay, or went outside to call him back in, or insisted that the candidates dealt with the points that he raised.

A commentator on a Deptford blog later put it this way:

“Tony had a point, but talked over everyone, lost his temper and ended up effing and blinding. His emotions got the better of him – a real shame because he really had something to say.”

There was an uncomfortable truth in there somewhere: that people may participate in democracy, but they must toe arse-tight etiquette lines while at it. Raise a difficult point in a loud, angry voice, and you’ll be abandoned on the grounds of taste.

I had a camera, so followed Hambolu out of the meeting and asked him to expand on his views.

‘They’re putting money in irrelevant things,’ he said. ‘You’re characterising the wrong things. Housing, benefits issues, work, lots of people are out of work. The safety of our children…they are not tackling those problems, and they expect us to vote for them. All these MPs, they don’t look for the real people, the real voice, the people that actually have problems. All these people work. They don’t know about the real issues going on in society.’

PS – please excuse the ghastly standard of the second part of the vid. Have improved since then.