Lambeth fights cuts

The Con-Dem cuts coalition was quick off the mark to announce big reductions in council services: £537 million from grants to local authorities, £311 million from funding for schools, £309 million from transport budgets. If you want to see how this billion pound bomb could impact on your town, take a look at Lambeth in south London.

Ironically, Labour increased its majority on our council in May, winning seats from Tories and Lib-Dems. But Labour immediately repaid its working class voters by imposing nearly 500 job cuts. In addition, it pressed ahead with plans to invite residents to “run their own services” in return for a council tax rebate in Britain’s first “cooperative council”.

The biggest cuts are to Children’s and Young Persons’ Services (215 jobs), Adult and Community Services (about 70 jobs) and Housing (about 125 jobs). Unison Convenor Andy Tullis told a 50-strong meeting of CYPS members, “Everything that is not a statutory requirement, like youth clubs, adventure playgrounds, on o’clock clubs, is being shut down.”

Our Unison branch has responded swiftly, energetically and with a good fighting policy. Meetings in the most affected areas have met with a good response; workers have joined or re-joined the union and at least three new stewards have been elected. In my school, which is not yet affected, we unanimously passed a motion of “solidarity with all those whose jobs are threatened up to and including industrial action”.

The branch committee followed this up by opposing all cuts – be they vacant posts, voluntary redundancies or agency workers’ jobs. This was important because an initial branch officers’ bulletin appeared to restrict its fight to the demand for “no compulsory redundancies”. Lambeth Activists, which is a militant grouping of rank and file Unison members, thought this made it more difficult to recruit agency workers and would lead to many cuts being unopposed, increasing the burden on those of us remaining.

We also agreed to call on the Trades Council to set up a broad anti-cuts committee with all the public service unions and community groups, and to prepare for a council wide ballot for strike action through a membership drive and workplace meetings. A full branch meeting has been set for 5 July, while we agreed to protest on the Town Hall steps in Brixton at 6pm on Budget Day, 22 June.

These cuts are the tip of the iceberg. David Cameron has said the Comprehensive Spending Review will launch a £70 billion package of austerity savings – the biggest since the 1940s. We must link up all the unions and working class service users in a fighting united front against the cuts:

• Oppose all cuts: no redundancies, voluntary or compulsory, no laying off agency staff
• Launch anti-cuts committees with delegates from all public service unions, other unions and community and campaign groups
• For co-ordinated action, up to and including an all-out indefinite strike, to stop the cuts.