The state and local government

³⁰³

Following direct action at the Vestas Isle of Wight wind turbine factory – which was an embarrassment to a government trying to launch a low-carbon jobs revolution – Bob Crow, the general secretary of the RMT union speaking to the Vestas workers on 23 July 2009 said:
The Vestas occupation, and the action at Visteon earlier this year, show that workers under attack can develop tactics that drive a coach and horses through the anti-union laws rather than just bending at the knee and accepting their fate. Occupations are immediate, focused and high profile and can force a dispute right into the headlines at short notice.³⁰⁴
Thus trade unionists and greens have now formed an alliance to spearhead the fight for green jobs.³⁰⁵

A recent report by the Campaign against Climate Change trade union group proposes a National Climate Service (NCS) employing a million direct workers, but creating about one and a half million jobs in all in related industries at a net cost of £20 billion, which could be paid for by increased taxation of the rich, borrowing and subsidies.³⁰⁶ A large proportion of these new green jobs would be in manufacturing – wind turbines, marine turbines, solar power, power lines, building materials, boilers, heat pumps, low carbon appliances, electric buses, electric cars, rolling stock, and the parts and materials for all these industries. There would also be work in redesigning and renovating factories so they are more efficient, and in building new, more efficient machines and factories.³⁰⁷ ‘This is a new idea’, as the report emphasises:
Up to now, government policy has been to use subsidies and tax breaks to encourage private industry to invest in renewable energy. They also plan to give people grants or loans for part of the cost of renovating their homes. Their idea is to encourage the market. We want something more like the way the government used to run the National Health Service. In effect, the government sets up a National Climate Service and the new NCS employs staff to do the work that needs to be done. That way we can be sure it is done...Most of us…would like to see almost all of these workers employed by central or local government. We are aware this may not be politically possible, and part of the work will probably be done by contractors. But we want the government to control the project – so that we all know they are making sure it happens – and not simply rely on the market. And we want jobs with proper wages, pensions and trade union rights.³⁰⁸
The report also argues that
the great advantage of a widely known national plan for a million jobs is that workers can fight to be a part of it. Car factories are shrinking or closing all over the world. Those car workers can demand that the government rescues their jobs and they retool to build electric buses or cars. Building workers facing the sack can demand insulation work. Factory workers can demand they be funded to retool and make low energy washing machines. This means we can fight for a million climate jobs as national government policy from the top down. But we can also fight for climate jobs from the bottom up, workplace by workplace. That will make national campaigning stronger. And if we have workers in different parts of the country occupying at the same time and fighting for their jobs and our planet, the resonances will be global and the pressures on the government immense. It may take even more than that to move the government of the day to employ a million workers. It may take a national strike by one union, or by several unions. We should be prepared to do that if we have to.³⁰⁹
And that:
We need to move out beyond unions to the whole of society. We can ask local councillors to support a million climate jobs, and then…whole councils.³¹⁰
In 1931 a Labour government fell because it decided that the cure for the crisis of capitalism was to cut public spending – in particular, benefits for the unemployed.³¹¹ Similarly, today there is a consensus across the three main political parties and within the mainstream media over the need to cut public spending and wages. New Labour budgeted for a huge programme of cuts and privatisation with a Welfare Bill that would have introduced workfare. And, according to a confidential report commissioned from the consultancy firm McKinsey and Company by the Department of Health, the NHS workforce in England would have been slashed by 137,000 under New Labour.³¹² The CBI had also called on the ex-Chancellor to ensure his Pre-Budget Report balanced the public finances by 2015-16, two years earlier than planned. They said £50 billion would be need to be found between now and 2013 to allow for a slower economic recovery than the government was predicting, and a further £70 billion would be needed after 2013 in order to balance the budget by 2015-16, rather than by 2017-18 as set out in the April Budget.³¹³ Whatever remains of the public sector after all these cuts should, they say, be subject to outsourcing and privatisation with ‘wider use of co-funding’³¹⁴: ‘the polite word’, as Polly Toynbee notes, ‘for making people pay for services that are at present free’.³¹⁵ To justify this, the CBI again misused Office for National Statistics figures to "prove" that public sector productivity is falling far behind the private sector. But, as Dave Prentis, general secretary of UNISON – responding angrily to the CBI’s plans – said:
Here we have the bosses’ union jumping on the cuts bandwagon and, in effect, saying the public services must pay for the failings of the banks….Cutting spending will prolong and deepen the recession, leading to many more thousands of jobs losses and misery for families across the country.³¹⁶
Similarly, Reform – a motley collection of right-wing academics and former advisers to the Thatcher and Major governments masquerading as an ‘independent and non-partisan’ think tank – maintained before the general election ‘that the public sector workforce needs to reduce by at least one million people (15 per cent of the total) if the structural deficit is to be eliminated, over a period of years’.³¹⁷ But, as UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis stressed
this is typical of Reform – it wants to use the current economic recession as an excuse to attack the public sector. What Reform needs to do is go back to the drawing board and find a way to get the bankers, financial institutions and tax avoiders to pay their fair share of taxation.³¹⁸
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber added that the report, financed by investment bankers and corporate executives
shows just how damaging public-spending cuts will be. Reform's proposals are appalling, but they show the choice is between a fairer tax system or cuts that will hit the many”.³¹⁹
Therefore in the context of the wider crises of housing and large scale unemployment the coming period will see further conditions created – if the political will is there – for a new active unity between community groups and unions to defend wages, jobs and public services as they come under attack from cutbacks on an unprecedented scale: because the leaderships of the main parties prefer to slash public services rather than tax the super-rich and monopoly profits.

Leaders of Tory local government – who were even more explicit about cuts than David Cameron and Nick Clegg before the general election – were preparing radical proposals for a minimum 10 per cent cut in spending.³²⁰ For example, the Conservative leader of Kent County Council and chair of South England Councils, Paul Carter, stated that £5 billion, or 10 per cent cuts were feasible in the south-east and other regions.³²¹ Carter’s proposal for the localisation of benefits with lower rates where it is easier to find work was endorsed at a New Local Government Network conference held on 27 January 2010 by the then Tory shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury (now Transport Secretary in the new cabinet) Philip Hammond who regards local councils as pivotal for public sector deficit reduction.³²² This would lead to a United States-style welfare system with deeply entrenched poverty in the areas paying lower rates and the loss of economies of scale³²³; and struggles similar to those in twentieth century inter-war Britain under the Poor Law (see Chapter 5). Council officers, as previously indicated, thought the drop was likely to be 10-15 per cent and were making contingency plans for a decrease of 30 per cent. This would have meant cuts of 40 per cent for some services because of the need to protect others. Hence, as Professor Tony Travers – Director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics – stated:
It is a very daunting picture. Services will certainly fall in real terms and it is a situation which will continue for at least seven or eight years.³²⁴

Gordon Brown promised to sell off £3 billion of government-owned assets (including the fire sale of the Tote, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the student loan book, the Dartford Crossing and the government's 33 per cent stake in Urenco, a consortium supplying equipment to the nuclear industry) over the next two years, plus another £13 billion of council-owned assets (including the sale of more council housing, business parks and industrial estates.³²⁵ Brown, as an editorial in the Morning Star pointed out at the time, was:

trying to finish off what Margaret Thatcher started and Tony Blair continued – a scorched-earth attack on all public assets and public services. That's what new Labour's ideology has always been about.³²⁶

Council leaders – who did not consult UNISON, GMB and Unite representing 1.6 million local government workers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (two thirds of whom earn less the £18,000 a year) before announcing a pay freeze from April 2010³²⁷ – also expressed anger that they were not consulted. Local Government Association leader, Conservative Cllr Margaret Eaton, said:
It is disappointing that councils were not consulted about an announcement that could have serious ramifications for the state of their tightly-managed budgets…If a council does not believe that a specific asset should be sold how do we avoid protracted legal wrangling that would cost the taxpayer money?³²⁸
Birmingham City Council, which has a share in Birmingham International Airport, rejected the call for it to consider selling. Chief executive Stephen Hughes told the Birmingham Post newspaper: ‘All assets owned by the city council are managed for the long-term good of the city and its people, and government cannot dictate to us how we manage them.’³²⁹ Wolverhampton, Solihull, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Birmingham councils own 49 per cent of shares in Birmingham International Airport Ltd. Manchester, Luton and Newcastle also have major airports owned or partly owned by local authorities. Brown's announcement of a wave of Government asset sales dwarfed those recommended by advisers, including Sir Michael Lyons. Paul Lester – chief executive of VT, the shipbuilder turned service provider – warned before the last general election that public services will be contracted to the private sector “with a vengeance” after it.³³⁰

Meanwhile, the decision by the executive committee of the transport union RMT not to support a trade union and socialist coalition in the 2010 general election had illustrated once more the difficulty of offering a left-wing alternative to neoliberalism. The decision followed discussion on the No2EU involvement in the European parliamentary elections, in which RMT played a key role (see above). And since the Communist Party of Britain had said that its participation was dependent on trade union involvement, it was inevitable that it too would not take part. The CPB contested six seats under its own name and in Leicester supported Avtar Sadiq of the Unity for Peace and Socialism coalition which it set up with overseas communist parties' members domiciled in Britain (see Chapter 11). It also supported some other left-wing candidates standing against New Labour – while stressing its overall preference for a Labour victory over the Tories – such as Respect candidates Abjol Miah, George Galloway in east London, Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas in Brighton and the 29 left Labour candidates supported by the Labour Representation Committee.³³¹ For, as John Haylett had emphasised before the general election, while it was ‘essential to back non-mainstream candidates offering an alternative to the policies of wars overseas and a banker's agenda at home favoured by all three major parties’, it was also ‘vital to ensure that the small number of socialists already in Parliament’ were ‘backed in their re-election campaigns and to keep pressure on all Labour candidates through campaigning on the People's Charter to win support for alternative progressive policies’.

Moreover, as Haylett added:

While engaging in today's struggles, the left must also look ahead. The experiences of the past 13 years indicate that the largest trade unions will continue, despite occasional criticism, to fund the Labour Party even as a Labour government kicks them in the teeth. However, a number of unions are unaffiliated for a variety of reasons and they may find that electoral involvement one way or another is forced on them by government policies.³³²
For example, the PCS at its 2010 annual conference ‘voted overwhelmingly towards making the union’s support for independent union candidates – including candidates standing in the name of the union – official PCS policy’.³³³ Though, as Robert Griffiths asserted before the general election, ‘the worst Labour government will still be more amenable to labour movement pressure than the best Tory one’; and we ‘may succeed in influencing Labour's manifesto and preventing a Tory victory.’ On the other hand:
Labour's defeat might finally produce the drive necessary to reclaim the Labour Party for the labour movement. Or a wide range of forces in the trade unions and on the left, inside and outside the Labour Party, might begin the process of refounding a mass party of the working class in Britain.³³⁴

However, now

we urgently need a people's front approach to defending our public services based on trade unions and trades union councils but drawing in as many local community and voluntary bodies as possible….the People's Charter for Change is the best such proposition on the table. Its demands for public ownership and economic controls represent a fundamental challenge to the prerogatives of monopoly capital in the interests of workers, their families and the environment. Formal trade union support needs to be made concrete, with broad-based local committees also springing up to take the charter into shopping centres, working-class estates and workplaces.³³⁵

Chapter Fifteen
Ruling Class Offensive – the Con-Lib Dem challenge to the Left and Labour Movement
This final Chapter maps the contours of the current ruling class offensive and challenge presented by the Con-Lib Dem coalition government to the Left and Labour Movement, which are as follows:

• 
  The bogus "Big Society" concept
  
• 
  The present parliament, which is the most socially unrepresentative since the 1930s
  
• 
  The reality that we are not "all in this together"
  
• 
  The fallacies of the Canadian approach adopted by the coalition government to deficit reduction
  
• 
  The likelihood that 1.3 million jobs will be lost in the next five years
  
• 
  The trade union critique of monopoly capital's "special pleading"
  
• 
  The projects worth £10.5 billion that have been cancelled or frozen
  
• 
  The "budget of the rich, by the rich, for the rich"
  
• 
  The poorest being hit six times harder than the richest by the budget
  
• 
  The highest number of homeless people in Britain for more than 30 years
  
• 
  The two-year pay freeze across the whole of the public sector
  
• 
  The proposed cuts, which are more than twice the real cuts of the first Thatcherites and deeper than in Greece
  
• 
  The increased chances of a double-blip recession
  
• 
  The growing implausibility of official forecasts that the private sector will generate two million jobs by 2015
  
• 
  The reasons why a government that represents the capitalist class as whole – and monopoly and finance capital in particular – is willing to sacrifice sections of that class
  
• 
  The reality that health is neither "ring fenced" or liberated
  
• 
  The opportunities for the private sector, which "are at their highest level in two to three years"
  
• 
  The IMF and OECD, which are questioning the government's cuts even though they are still 'too keen on premature deficit-cutting'
  
• 
  The Eurozone dimension
  
• 
  The advanced capitalist countries 'are repeating an economic policy out of the 1930s'
  
• 
  The spending cuts are not realistic, either economically or politically, even for neoliberals
  
• 
  The need for a complete break with New Labour's neoliberal dogma
  

The bogus "Big Society" concept

The Conservatives’ 2010 general election Manifesto – in an attempt to distance themselves from Margaret Thatcher’s belief that “there is no such thing as society” – claimed that their "Big Society"
reform agenda is designed to empower communities to come together to address local issues. For example, we will enable parents to start new schools, empower communities to take over local amenities such as parks and libraries that are under threat (from their cuts P.L)....These...‘little platoons’ of civil society will use Cabinet Office budgets to fund the training of independent community organisers to help people establish and run neighbourhood groups, and provide neighbourhood grants to the UK’s poorest areas to ensure they play a leading role in the rebuilding of civic society.³³⁶
But during the general election Tory candidates criticised the concept for being too vague; and a senior Conservative said the "big society is bollocks".³³⁷ Moreover , the idea that "little platoons" of civil activists can achieve what government investment has so far delivered only partially is striking in its failure to recognise the role of the unregulated market in creating the poverty, inequality and alienation, which characterises Britain. New Labour, moreover, only offers a variation of the same neoliberal ideology. For, as Steve Reed Labour Leader of Lambeth Council, said:
For example, imagine you have a piece of waste ground which you want to tidy up. Instead of the council doing it, you give the community the tools and neighbours do it themselves. Instead of costing several thousand pounds, doing it that way will cost £300.³³⁸
And as Professor Tony Travers said: "Nationally the Conservatives have used the idea of the 'big society' and Lambeth's plan does seem virtually the same thing to me".³³⁹

Prime Minister David Cameron re-launched the bogus "Big Society" – now Con-LibDem coalition government – scheme to boost the rich and leave millions of poorer people at the mercy of Victorian-style charity at a carefully staged Con-Dem "community" stunt in Liverpool on 19 July 2010. His plan to "turn government completely on its head" was revealed as nothing but a wholesale destruction of public services and a massive swing to charities, volunteers and privateers. Cameron demanded "communities with oomph" based on "a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy and social action". He claimed:

It's about liberation – the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street....The Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace don't always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face.³⁴⁰

Cameron also announced that a Big Society Bank will be created to supply some cash to charities and voluntary groups, using the pool of unclaimed money held in dormant bank and building society accounts. Conversely, Labour MP Michael Meacher said it was "absolutely ridiculous" for Mr Cameron to claim he wanted to liberate the people. "This will only be liberating for people who have money and power," he added. "It is back to the bad old Victorian days of charitable volunteering".³⁴¹ Keith Flett, moreover, defines the "big society" as: 'Cutting the jobs of those who work hard to provide public services and shoving someone else in to do what they can for nothing'. And concludes that: 'Later, when services fail and human tragedies occur, scapegoats will be found, but not of course David Cameron'.³⁴² Neil McInroy, Chief Executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, also argues that as:

There is likely to be an outsourcing bonanza for private sector deliverers of public services....It is also increasingly likely that this outsourcing will squeeze out the possibility of community and voluntary groups playing a greater role in the delivery of public services. Thus the 'big society' is in jeopardy even before it gets going.³⁴³

For example, in Tory controlled Croydon on 12 July 2010, as Ian Austen reported:

More than 70 protesters packed the Town Hall...as Croydon Council's cabinet approved cuts which saw funding slashed to voluntary organisations. A further 50 demonstrators were left on the streets outside – on health and safety grounds, according to council officials....The anger boiled over during the debate...and...resulted in council leader Mike Fisher adjourning the meeting for ten minutes. As cabinet members left the chamber to boos from the public gallery, there was unseemly jostling between one or two of them and shadow cabinet members. The protest was provoked by recommendations to the cabinet for a reduction in grants to voluntary groups from around £2 million a year to £625,00, leaving 41 out of 47 groups funded at present without any money from the start of October....Vidhi Mohan, cabinet member for communities, announced that an extra £350,000 would be available over the next two or three years to help some of the most seriously affected groups...including Croydon Voluntary Action, and the Black and Minority Ethnic Forum...while they prepare bids to run council services. Labour councillors, however, believe it will do no more than give them time to wind up their operations.