Nick Chaffey, Socialist Party regional secretary southern and south east
The chief target of Tory cuts since 2010, local councils are facing a new onslaught from Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s brutal austerity budget. Public services, fought for over past decades, are vital for working-class communities, providing low-rent council housing, education, refuse collection and basic infrastructure.
For those unable to pay to go private when families need care and children need support, council services represent a lifeline that has been severely weakened by cuts.
Four out of five councils face being unable to meet the government requirement to balance budgets, facing technical insolvency, according to the County Councils Network.
As the squeeze is set to tighten, two of the largest county councils, Tory run Hampshire and Kent have written to the government, warning: “Our budgets are now at breaking point. We have gone as far as we can to close the budget gaps we have faced to date, and there is nowhere left to go in future without severely impacting some of the most vulnerable people in our society”. What hypocrisy from the advocates of austerity!
Decaying services
What they now fear is electoral meltdown as voters face higher council tax bills and decaying services.
Rising costs and rising demand for services have led to a £2.4 billion funding gap across all councils in the last year, not to mention the billions more cut over the last decade. Hunt’s budget won’t plug that gap, but it looks likely to give permission to councils to charge more council tax. To fill the funding gap, the Local Government Association says councils would have to increase council tax by over 10%. Paying more for less will solve nothing, collapsing services and pushing working-class families further into poverty.
Labour retains a key political position in local councils, running over 100 councils controlling a combined budget of £80 billion, with over £15 billion in general fund reserves and additional borrowing powers.
Unite the Union policy follows that advocated by the Socialist Party, that councils should use their reserves and borrowing powers to set balanced no-cuts budgets and mobilise council trade unions and the working class in a fightback to demand central government funding.
Facing a weak and divided Tory government, and with a strike wave already building, the potential for such a fightback exists. If Labour councils surrender without a fight, council unions Unite, Unison and GMB must launch a campaign, including coordinating strike action against cuts to jobs and services, and prepare to stand trade union anti-cuts candidates in next year’s council elections. The fightback to defend council services has to be linked to a socialist alternative to the economic crisis, to make the 1% pay for their crisis by nationalising the banks and monopolies that dominate the economy, and plan production to meet the needs of all.
