Councils could refuse to make cuts and spearhead a fightback
Sarah Sachs-Eldridge, Socialist Party executive committee
“A national, cross-borough anti-austerity cuts campaign, demanding that local council funding is fully restored, so that we can deliver the essential services – from youth clubs to adult social care.”
This commitment in the Hackney Green Party manifesto for the May election struck a chord. The Greens went from having two councillors to winning 42 of the 57 seats! Labour on Hackney council was destroyed by a revolt against austerity at the ballot box.
The Green surge in May was not the first attempt to find a way to fight austerity. Since the banks were bailed out after the 2007-8 world economic crash, workers and young people have sought avenues of resistance.
There was a one-day public sector general strike in November 2012. In 2015, a surge into Labour elected Jeremy Corbyn as an ani-austerity leader, and his anti-austerity general election manifestos in 2017 and 2019 won more votes than Starmer in 2024. Half a million signed up to the Enough is Enough initiative of the trade union leaders in 2022 during the strike wave. Last summer, 800,000 signed up to an appeal for a new party from Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.
With which vehicle to fight austerity is not a settled question. The Greens were seen by many as a means to fight the austerity establishment in May’s elections. But their vote fell by 90% in the Makerfield byelection in June when Andy Burnham presented himself as the best means to get rid of Starmer, pledging to end 40 years of neoliberalism.
Burnham
Unfortunately, Burnham’s ‘vibe’ has not found any meaningful expression in policy. Instead, we have his new chancellor pledging more cuts. A struggle is still needed.
Hackney Green Mayor Zoe Garbett pledged in May that: “A Green-led Hackney Council will host a summit of anti-cuts councils to coordinate a nationwide campaign to pressure the central government for overhauled local government fiscal powers and funding that truly meets need.”
The Emergency Anti-Austerity Summit, taking place on Wednesday 9 September in Hackney Town Hall, could be an important moment in the battle against austerity and the cost-of-living crisis if a serious strategy is put forward to build a movement to take on a government determined to defend big business interests.
Even with the limitations on time to build for it and it being a work day, a bold lead would give confidence to working-class people, including the hundreds of thousands of workers planning to ballot for strike action in the autumn, and the young people planning student strikes on 20 November. Even after Burnham’s rhetoric has allowed Labour to inch ahead in the polls, the Greens still lead among 18-24 year olds.
The Greens have a powerful position. In May they won four London boroughs and now lead nine councils. The number of Green councillors rose by 400 to over 1,300. The Greens now participate in almost 50 council administrations.
Councils can already do a lot. This autumn, bills and food prices are expected to rise, but councils already have power to help families struggling to heat and eat. They could use the government’s Crisis and Resilience Fund to provide grants and send the bill to Burnham. They could use existing resources – open up school canteens to students’ families, and use council buildings to offer warm, or cool, spaces.
Council homes
Housing is a major ingredient in squeezed family budgets. The Manifesto pledged that a Hackney Green council would: “Make building new council homes a core priority.” During his by-election Burnham said he wanted to “oversee the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”.
The Hackney Green manifesto says that “this requires the central government to rapidly invest in a mass programme of public housebuilding.” But councils could start building now.
It is not true that nothing can be done without government initiative. Councils in England, for example, control budgets totalling almost £150 billion, over one fifth of all public spending. If initially only the nine Green-led councils combined their borrowing powers for capital spending to begin a mass building programme of eco-friendly affordable council homes – as proposed, for example, in Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto – it would show what was possible.
Our movement
They would face a tsunami of attacks from those who defend the housing market system. But in London alone there were over 300,000 households on local authority waiting lists in 2024. Around 4.5 million people nationally struggle to pay their rent in the private sector. The potential to mobilise a mass movement in defence of councils that build council homes (and create decent jobs for young people) would be enormous.
Hackney deputy mayor Dylan Law correctly said in May’s Green Manifesto: “The council implements the majority of things in Hackney that impact our day to day: from planning permissions to education and healthcare plans, but they also have a special ability to resist when national decisions aren’t in the community’s best interests.”
Dylan is right. Councils can fight for the funding needed. Even before they face an organised struggle, the government has agreed to provide 30 councils with support to manage financial pressures via an ‘Exceptional Financial Support process’. With the potential for anger to grow even further, the government has relaxed the rules on council borrowing. In other words, councils determined to refuse to make cuts and to fund public services can find a way.
But none of this means it is simply a matter of finding a clever way to work within the existing rules. They are set up to maintain the status quo. The big business capitalist class will fight to defend its interests with all the power it has, including saying there is no alternative to cutting public spending which they deem necessary to ensure the long-term profitability of British capitalism.
Remember that even though Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto did not represent the transfer of decisive control of the key levers of the economy to the working class, he was mercilessly attacked by the defenders of capitalism. He faced the wrath of what Zoe Garbett calls a “political elite who are more interested in serving the interests of private corporations.”
The lesson is that an organised and powerful counter-movement is required against the millionaires, mobilising and organising the strength of the multi-million working class, around a socialist programme to win the funding necessary from the clutches of the ever-increasing riches of the capitalist class.
What could be
When Liverpool council defied Thatcher in the 1980s, winning the equivalent of £250 million in today’s money, they built 5,000 council houses, opened nurseries, and created apprenticeships. Crucial was the role of the organised working class.
Liverpool District Labour Party was made up of well over 400 delegates from party branches in every ward, trade unions organised in workplaces, and from the Labour Party Young Socialists.
It democratically debated and decided the course the councillors should take, and organised mass action as part of the battle – including huge demonstrations and a city-wide general strike. That is part of the model for how a workers’ party could fight today.
Imagine the impact if not just one council but all the councils claiming to be anti-austerity were to spearhead such a fight.
There are over a million workers employed in local government. The main unions representing them already have a democratically agreed position of fighting for no-cuts needs-based council budgets.
The Green Summit could be a mobilising call to cohere these forces into the movement we need to take on central government and fight to end 40 years of wealth transmission from the working class to the capitalist exploiters.
- Emergency Anti-Austerity Summit
- Wednesday 9 September, Hackney Town Hall
