Campaign news

Building local resistance to cuts

7th March 2011

The late February / early March round of local council budget meetings produced the first demonstrations outside, and sometimes inside, town halls for nearly a generation.

The lack of a rebellious council leadership willing to fight Tory cuts in 2011 should come as no surprise. It was not until the mid-1980s that there was a local government-led fightback against Thatcher.

Many Labour councils were elected as recently as May 2010. Yet when faced with Pickles’ demands for budget cuts were only too ready to tear up the manifestos on which they were elected, their commitments to their local communities, and dance to the tune of the coalition government. We need to build confidence locally to make councillors realise that their primary obligation is to their local community and not to Whitehall.

The national Labour leadership has retreated from advocating “cuts deeper and tougher than Thatcher” but still only offers slightly less cuts over a slightly longer time period. This is hardly the sort of stirring stuff to inspire town hall rebellions.

Nevertheless there has been a noticeable distinction between those councils and councillors that have sought to protect local services – using innovative accounting, dipping into reserves and defending priority areas to minimise cuts – and those that have enthusiastically embraced cuts. This distinction at local level reflects the tensions at national level where the Ed Miliband-Balls axis fights the Darling-David Miliband axis for supremacy. While this distinction is important, it is also illusory – passing on the cuts in whatever form does nothing to help defeat the government’s assault on the welfare state, but rather deflects it.

However, anti-cuts activists must exploit the tension between these positions. The advocates of the ‘dented shield’ cannot sustain their position, because there is no way in which they can even profess to protect local services in years two, three and four of the government onslaught – even if this has been partially achieved in year one (which in most cases it hasn’t).

On top of the planned cuts in future years, we must also consider the increasingly likely prospect that cuts to local government will be increased as the damage of Osborne’s cuts programme impacts on economic growth and government revenues. The ‘dented shield’ is single use weapon. Next year the choice will be cut deep or resist. We have to build a movement that supports councillors to resist.

However, we cannot wait until next year. The cuts this year will mean local services – libraries, day centres for the elderly, sure start centres, local law centres, youth services and more – will cease to exist. Hundreds of people in every borough face losing their jobs. The task for activists is to unequivocally defend their local services, through petitions, protests and occupations – and also to support industrial action wherever local government workers fight.

For those areas that are holding elections in May we must mobilise the Labour vote to send the clearest possible message to the coalition government that their policies are not welcome.

As activists, we need to be working to raise local awareness of the impact of cuts, building links between local trade unions and community groups and ensuring that we elect Labour councillors to resist the cuts in 2012 and beyond.