Central government funding to local councils is being slashed by 27% over four years. More than 200,000 job losses have been announced in local authorities.
Whole services are being destroyed. Many of the severest cuts are in traditional Labour areas which already have very high unemployment- 1,500 jobs to go in Leeds, 1,500 in Liverpool, 2,000 in Manchester, 1,000 in Camden, and many more.
Labour councils have, without exception, voted to wield the axe handed to them by the government. Any Labour council that chose instead to defend local communities would have been hugely popular.
Councils say that have ‘no choice’ but to implement the cuts – but that just isn’t true.
If any council was to stop acting as collaborators with the Tory axe wielders, and instead want to stand up and fight, they would discover there were a thousand ways to defy the cuts: To name a few, councils could:
- Stop homelessness rocketing: by refusing to evict council tenants who fall into arrears because of housing benefit cuts. They could also use their legal powers to threaten compulsory purchase orders against big landlords who evict tenants suffering from housing benefit cuts.
- Halt the destruction of state education: by using councils ‘schools monitoring powers’ to build a campaign against academies and free schools by organising, for example, parents’ ballots on the issue.
- Stop 16+17 year olds being thrown out of education: by continuing to pay EMA to local students, as the Welsh Assembly has done. Any council which continued to pay it would win the support of a whole generation.
