Mark Evans, Branch Secretary Carmarthenshire County Unison
A recent press release from public sector union Unison highlighted that councils across Wales face a collective funding gap of over £200 million in the next financial year. But this figure is likely to be a gross underestimate after Jeremy Hunt gives his fiscal statement on 17 November.
According to the Daily Telegraph, he is going to fill what the BBC estimates is a £50 billion budget shortfall with a combination of tax increases and cuts to public spending. These cuts, coming as they do after over a decade of Tory austerity, will devastate council services, jobs and lives.
This is horror without end for council workers, who worked through the pandemic at significant risk to keep vital but already depleted services running. They have then been hit, like other working-class people, with the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. Now its Tory austerity mark two.
Council funding has been in crisis since the Con-Dem government’s austerity starting in 2010. By October 2021, the Guardian was reporting that 25 local authorities were on the verge of receiving S114 notices (technically bankrupt) with three councils – Slough, Northampton and Croydon – going through this process.
Rising inflation and increased demand makes the situation now even more bleak. While it has so far been English councils going over the brink, the situation for councils in Wales is little better, despite us having a Labour Welsh Government for over twenty years.
The harsh reality is that the Welsh Labour Government and councils, many of them Labour or Plaid Cymru (as in the case of Carmarthenshire), have put up very little resistance to these attacks on working-class people and the public services we use. As a result, the Tories will see councils as fair game for major cuts.
But we can end the horror – we can defeat these attacks. We call on the Welsh Labour Government to refuse to do the Tories’ dirty work. It should set a ‘no cuts’ budget, including properly financing local government and the NHS, and then call on councils to do likewise. It should call on councils and the trade unions for support in mobilising a mass campaign to stop the cuts. This would get tremendous support from working-class communities across Wales.
The Tories, faced with such mass opposition to austerity and the current strike wave of trade unions, could be forced to back down, as they have been many times, and be forced into calling a general election.
What we need, in the Welsh Government and in local councils, is leaders who are prepared to fight the cuts, not just bemoan them and then effectively do nothing to oppose them.
- This is an edited version of a press release from Carmarthenshire County Unison
Can you fight the class struggle in elections?
Come and discuss at SOCIALISM 2022
tickets and info at socialism.org.uk
