Berkay Kartav, Socialist Party National Committee
Zack Polanski’s speech at the Local Government Association (LGA) was an opportunity for the Green Party leader to lay out a clear plan and strategy for how Green councillors can confront the Labour government, fight austerity and end the housing crisis, issues which have motivated the tens of thousands of people to join the Greens after his leadership election.
He correctly mentioned how after a decade and a half of austerity, council budgets are squeezed. “Combined with the enormous financial demands of social care and SEND provision”, many councils are in financial crisis.
Many people who have had enough of the lack of affordable homes, disrepair, high service charges and the never-ending nightmare of trying to find a secure affordable home, would welcome Polanski’s remarks on housing. He said houses will need to be built to meet needs and that we need homes people can actually afford to live in, rather than luxury developments.
He said that a Green government will end rip-off rents, launch a new generation of council house building and give councils stronger powers over long-term empty homes.
Green councils
These are all policies that Green councils can implement now!
Polanski unfortunately did not use his speech to explain how the 21 Green-led councils and over 1,300 Green councillors can take action today to deliver on their election manifestos and build local and national campaigns to win the money and resources local communities need: to deliver on pay, jobs, housing and services.
Keir Starmer’s Labour was smashed at the last local elections. Many people voted for the Greens hoping that they would be different. The Greens now have the opportunity to work with local communities, trade unions and youth organisations to draw up ‘people’s budgets’ that meet the needs of local workers, residents and young people – and begin preparations for a coordinated fightback to win the funding local councils need.
Unfortunately, this has not been the approach of Green councils so far. Polanski mentioned the record of Green-run Bristol council in his speech, but he did not mention that it has made £51 million cuts last year, while adding more money to reserves.
On the question of housing, Green councils can immediately freeze rents for council tenants, introduce a compulsory register for all private landlords and make rent controls a requirement of registration. They can implement a mass programme of council house building and take over empty homes to house people on council house waiting lists and more.
Green-controlled councils in London, and Aspire-led Tower Hamlets, are taking legal action against Sadiq Khan over his attempt to cut London’s affordable housing quota from 35% to 20%.
Good. But it would be far more effective if these councils in London could join up in the first instance to take joint action against monster private housing developments and show in practice how councils can fight for working-class people and build the pressure on Khan and this Labour government to deliver rent controls and council homes – by doing it themselves!
Greens can also take up Labour’s new leader Andy Burnham on his pledge to build council homes – he has given councils the green light to build now and send the bill to Westminster.
At the LGA, Polanski claimed that councillors are limited by the resources and power that councils have. He said to them: “Your hands tied again by national legislation”.
We would disagree. When the Tories were in power, many Labour councils and councillors simply blamed Westminster austerity, and did not use their powers to win the resources taken from them by the then Tory government.
If Polanski sends the same message to Green councillors, who got elected with a promise of ‘doing politics differently’ – to repeat this failed strategy – then they will suffer the same fate, as have other European Green parties who carried out brutal cuts and faced collapse in support.
Any council or even groups of councillors willing to fight cuts by using all the tools available to councils, including using reserves and borrowing powers to build a mass working-class campaign and send the bill to Westminster, would potentially harness an enormous amount of support from trade unions, community groups and radicalised young people.
The Liverpool road
This is what Liverpool’s socialist council – led by Militant, the predecessor to the Socialist Party – did in the 1980s and won £60 million of extra funding from Margeret Thatcher’s government, building thousands of council homes in the space of a few years alone.
We need socialist councillors who are prepared to stand up for their communities to build council homes, create jobs and fund our services – not more excuses about why we have to wait.
Polanski should publicly commit that the Green Party leadership will be fully behind any Green council, or groups of councillors who do take that fighting stance.
The Green victories in the last local elections are a sign of how popular anti-austerity ideas are. But to end austerity and the housing crisis, working-class people need a voice of our own, a party based on trade unions, where our class can have a say and have control over the actions of elected representatives. That is the kind of party the Socialist Party is fighting for, join us in that fight.
Eye on the Greens
What’s your experience of Green councillors, or young Green campaigners on campus? Email: editors@socialistparty.org.uk
