Sam Morden, Tyne and Wear Socialist Party
Greens Organise (GO), a left grouping within the Green Party, organised a meeting in Newcastle on the 20th June around involving communities in council budget spending; roughly 30 people attended, with a mix of ages. I and another Socialist Party member went along. There was a presentation led by a council officer from Islington Council, a GO member.
The discussion centred mainly around the methodology of getting local communities involved in decision making on how to spend set, limited pots of money. Emphasis was put on “not promising more than we can deliver”, with a paternalistic tone when talking about involvement of local communities, rather than approaching them as equals and involving them fully in all levels of decision making. There was no mention of workers (let alone council workers), the working class, or trade unions.
The four Green councillors in Newcastle before this May’s elections voted with Labour to pass the council’s most recent budget, which included £37 million of cuts, 75 job losses and a 4.99% council tax increase. Now, with Labour’s vote collapsing and the Greens seen as a credible left-wing opposition, the Greens hold 24 seats. Lib Dems lead the council with a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement from the Greens.
The meeting included space for questions and, following that, break-out groups which later fed back to the rest of the meeting. When we were able to contribute, we raised the need for no-cuts, needs-based budgets, where what is needed is discussed first, in complete lockstep with local communities and local workers and unions, with council workers central to this process. We gave more information of how this could be done, by using reserves and borrowing powers to pass balanced no-cuts budgets, while building a mass campaign in order to win money from government, using the past example of the Militant-led Liverpool council in the 1980s. We asked the speaker and the room whether this is an approach they support.
Though there was support for the idea, many in the room, including the speaker, dismissed it as “too difficult”, saying that “things are harder now since the 1980s”. Others disapproved of using their influence on the council to campaign for this approach rather than focusing on politically convenient ‘little wins’ within individual wards for local and national grant funds. One person raised that they only had one third of the council, so could do nothing like what we were suggesting.
Are we using our power?
In my response, I brought attention to the excellent documents on the TUSC website which laid out how such needs-based no-cuts budgets could be organised and carried in the current period; and challenged the ‘settling’ within the limits they had set themselves. What, I asked, were they using that one-third of the council for? Were they setting alternative no-cuts budgets? Were they working with council workers and their unions to oppose austerity and job cuts? Were they raising campaigns with local communities to protect and restore services? Were they spreading the news of these actions with the people they represent?
One Green activist claimed that they were doing all of those things. We haven’t seen any evidence to support this claim yet.
