IT’S AMAZING, isn’t it, the lengths some councils will go to in avoiding a real battle with the government? Manchester city council (yes, that’s right, the one about to make 2,000 people redundant), has launched a petition against government cuts!
Paul Gerrard, Salford
The local paper, the Manchester Evening News, has backed the campaign and you can sign the petition on its website. When I checked it out it calls for the government to give Manchester back ‘its fair share’.
What does this mean? Give us back just enough so that we can make the cuts without going bust? Then you click on a button against your council (there are ten in Greater Manchester: Manchester, Salford, Oldham etc) – but you can only tick one, so, if you tick the one where you live it’s like saying ‘stuff the rest’!
But guess what? The next thing was that the Tories and Lib Dems agreed to sign it as well! Is this what is meant by a ‘broad alliance against cuts’?
Everyone knows that deprived Labour authorities have taken the brunt of the cuts, while some Tory authorities have had hardly any. But this special pleading is getting us nowhere. In Leeds the Labour leader of the council is even complaining about the supposedly favourable settlement that Manchester and Liverpool got! What a shower!
This is no way to fight the Tories. The best petition you can sign is the one from the National Shop Stewards Network, calling on ALL Labour councils to refuse to implement the Con-Dem cuts. And you can deliver the message in person too, at the demo outside Labour’s local government conference on 5 March!
