This may as well as regional local elections and London assembly elections Liverpool and other cities will be electing their first ever mayors of their cities. Whilst as socialists we are not in favour of a mayor system in a Bonapartist regime.
But as Liverpool never held a referendum on whether to have one or not and over ruled the people of Liverpool as the Trade Unionists and Socialist Coalition we felt it would be right to stand and not give Joe Anderson the current leader of Labour run Liverpool city council, a free rerun on the position. To not challenge him on the cuts affecting the city of Liverpool would have been a tragedy.
Whilst Geoerge Galloway has been getting alot of attention recently due to his election win another class fighter with a proud record is looking to create a similar ripple in Liverpool this may.
Tony Mulhearn has entered the race to be Liverpool's first elected mayor. The veteran socialist and trade unionist, former District Labor Party president and one of the leaders of the socialist council in 1983-87, has announced he is seeking nomination to stand.
Tony said:
I intend to provide the real anti-cuts alternative to council leader Joe Anderson's vision of savage cuts today and pie-in-the-sky promises for the distant future.
Tony is standing on a clear anti-cuts platform, as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).
TUSC is backed by union leaders such as Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union and Chris Baugh, assistant general secretary of the PCS. It is also backed by the Socialist Party of which Tony is a member.
Tony explained:
There is no need for these cuts. There is a £120 billion tax gap of evaded, avoided and uncollected tax.
The UK holds £850 billion in banking assets. There is some £170 billion lying in the banks uninvited.
The bankers continue to gorge themselves with obscene bonuses. Then there is the latest smash-and-grab raid orchestrated by George Osborne against our pensioners to fund tax cuts for his millionaire friends.
The money is there and none of these cuts need to be made. Liverpool's public services face obliteration unless and until we stand up to this government and demand they return the £120 million they have stolen from our city's funding so far.
The elected mayor will hold greater powers than currently held by the council leader.
Tony added:
If elected I would use all the powers at my disposal to fight for everyone suffering under this relentless assault masterminded by the Con-Dem government and unfortunately carried out by my Labour and Lib Dem opponents and their associates in the council chamber.
• I will seek to take back in-house the vital council services that have been handed out to the privateers.
• I will propose the immediate lifting of threats to services for our children and young people and some of the most vulnerable people in our city, contained in the latest council budget.
• I will propose the reversal of all the cuts made.
• I will seek to use any new funds coming into the city to support our young people at college who are suffering the loss of their Education Maintenance Allowance, and to create real jobs.
• I will demand that Liverpool's councilors abandon their policy of implementing the cuts demanded by the Con-Dem millionaires' government which represents the bankers, hedge fund managers and others who leach on society.
• I will call for a broad city-wide campaign to defend our libraries, our hospitals, nurses etc. The NHS is now at grave risk from a government determined to open it up to private health companies whose first priority will be to maximize profits for shareholders.
Tony is not standing alone. Candidates from TUSC are seeking nomination for council.
Tony said:
I am proud to urge support for trade unionists, young people and socialists who intend standing for the council as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.
All the parties in the council chamber have shamefully voted to carry out eye-watering cuts decided in Whitehall and Westminster by the bankers' best friends.
I and my colleagues in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition say the bankers brought on this crisis, let them pay for it!
Just like in the 80’s Tony has declared like all other TUSC candidates if elected he will only take the wage of a average skilled worker. Not profiting from a elected position he will look to be a voice of workers on the inside giving ordinary people a voice and exposing the corrupt system of capitalism .
Finally, Tony issued a challenge to his former Labour colleague Joe Anderson and the other candidates:
Let us debate the issues in front of the public, in April, in a city centre venue open to all and free of charge.
To all those who can get involved in Toni’s election campaign, you are invited to a campaign meeting to be held in the Liverpool pub (upstairs), James Street, Liverpool on Wednesday, 4 April 2012 at 7.15pm
Tony Mulhearn can be contacted for comment on 07939 098 455, or via his campaign team Alec 07411 362 448 and Dave 07969 511 796
TUSC website: www.tusc.org.uk
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Showing posts with label liverpool city council. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liverpool city council. Show all posts
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Can councillors do anything to fight the cuts ?
Socialist-led Liverpool city council’s struggle in 1983-87 led to mass demonstrations and thousands of new council houses built
At the same time councils will be expected to administer many of the cuts announced under other budget headings. These include the cuts to housing benefit funded from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) budget but administered by councils; the Department for Education’s 12% cut in ’non-school’ spending on young people (including the abolition of educational maintenance allowances for 16-19 year olds); and a ’re-adjustment’ of NHS social care funding.
Setting council tax benefit, averaging £900 a year and currently paid out by councils on behalf of the DWP, will be devolved to councils, but with a 10% cut in overall funding.
Councils will also become the final agency to apply the £500 ’total household benefit’ cap, through housing benefit deductions. "Outsourced", was an apt headline in The Guardian - "town halls must do Osborne’s dirty work", it went on.
To say councils "must do" this dirty work, however, is wrong. Not unexpectedly, Labour councillors are saying there is ’nothing we can do’ to stop the cuts from being implemented locally, even where they control the council. But that is just not so. Councillors have a choice.
That’s why the decision of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC to facilitate the widest-possible challenge in the local elections that will take place in England this year is an important part of building the anti-cuts movement. With the London GLA and mayoral elecctions and several towns and city seats up for elections.
The basic TUSC programme of few points a very basic programme of no to all cuts is the basis of our programme.
It starts from the basis that councillors can refuse to pass on the cuts. Voting in May, it argues, can be not just a ’protest vote’ but can actually stop cuts to local jobs, benefits, and services. Building support for TUSC candidates can be an important means of putting pressure on current councillors when they decide council budgets , and in shaping how they respond to the ’new responsibilities’ they will have to administer.
What can councils do?
WHAT ROLE could councils play to stop the cuts, if the political will was there to seriously oppose the Con-Dem government’s austerity measures?
Over the years councils have been stripped of direct funding responsibility for many different services. The TUSC election platform notes that former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who began this process, famously said: "I must take more power to the centre to stop socialism" - in other words, that public services that ’crowded out’ the private sector should be curbed or, where they exist, should be opened up to private companies to make profits from public needs. New Labour continued this process throughout its 13 years in office - the turnover of private companies running public services reached over £80 billion in 2008, for example, 126% higher than 1995-96 under the previous Tory government. Now the Con-Dems’ spending review announcement includes plans for ’private provider quotas’ for councils’ elderly care, early years, youth and family support services.
Despite this however, as the TUSC election platform states, councils still have enormous powers and responsibilities. They control budgets totalling billions of pounds spent on services from housing to schools, youth clubs, libraries, adult social care, crime reduction, sports centres, highways maintenance and refuse collection, to name but a few. They have legal powers over non-council provided services, including many of those now ’outsourced’ that could be used, if the will was there, to defend jobs and services.
Councillors could - and TUSC councillors would, as the policy platform states - "vote against the privatisation of council services, or the transfer of council services to ’social enterprises’ or ’arms-length’ management organisations, which are first steps to privatisation". They could - and TUSC councillors would - push for councils to "use all their legal powers available" to "oppose both the cuts, and government polices which centrally impose the transfer of public services to private bodies".
That could mean that, for example, faced with the Con-Dems’ housing benefit cuts, councils would refuse to evict council tenants who fall into arrears as a result of the changes - and withdraw from ’partnership agreements’ with housing associations (HAs) and other ’social landlords’ who fail to do likewise (and actively support HA tenants’ organisations to fight for this policy).
Councils could also intervene in the private rented sector. The government hypocritically claims that its aim is to ’bring rents down’, after housing benefit payments have ballooned to £21 billion - although the Tories began this by abolishing rent controls in 1988 and slashing council house-building (policies not reversed by New Labour). Councils cannot impose a legally-binding private rent limit but they could, for example, threaten compulsory purchase proceedings against multi-property landlords who move to evict tenants suffering housing benefit cuts.
But housing is just one area where councils with the political will to oppose the Con-Dem government could play a key role in resisting the cuts. They could use their powers to ’call in’ and refer local NHS re-organisation proposals, for example. With a King’s Fund survey showing that fewer than one in four doctors believes the government’s new GP consortia commissioning plans - opening up £80 billion of NHS primary care funding to private companies - will improve patient care, councils could galvanise opposition to the Con-Dems’ dismantling of the NHS.
Defending councils’ budgets
Even some Tory and Lib-Dem councillors are criticising the government’s ’free schools’ plans (particularly in relation to faith schools) as endangering socially cohesive local education. Councils could use their ’schools organisation’ and admissions monitoring powers, governor appointments etc - and initiate consultative parents’ ballots, for example - to build a public campaign of opposition to these and the equally divisive accelerated academies programme. Councillors, it is clear, have a choice - they don’t have to do the government’s ’dirty work’. They can resist.
But what can councils do when faced with government cuts to the centrally allocated ’revenue support grants’ they receive to pay for council-funded services? The TUSC draft election platform states that councils should refuse to implement these cuts, and reject above inflation increases in council tax, rents and service charges to compensate for them. If even a handful of councils were to make such a stand it would electrify the mass opposition to the cuts that is developing.
As Margaret Thatcher’s resignation 20 years ago last November shows, in the face of mass non-payment of the poll tax, even the seemingly most imposing government - and the Con-Dem coalition is not that - can be forced to retreat if it faces a sufficiently powerful mass campaign of opposition. Not only was Thatcher removed but the Tories were forced, within weeks of her downfall, to put an extra £4.3 billion into local government funding (around £7 billion today) to finance the abolition of the poll tax.
The TUSC policy platform argues that the best way that councils can contribute to mobilising the mass campaign necessary to defeat the cuts is to set budgets that meet the needs of their local communities, without massive council tax hikes, and combine together to demand that the government makes up the funding shortfall. That is the ’Liverpool model’ which in 1984 enabled the city’s Labour council, led by Militant supporters, the predecessor of the Socialist Party, to compel Thatcher’s government to concede extra resources to the city worth up to £60 million (£98 million today).
The campaign built by Liverpool city council in 1983-87 to win extra funding inspired thousands of workers, photo Militant
But the campaign in support of Liverpool’s ’needs budget’ had been long prepared, even before Labour won a majority on the council in 1983. A 25,000-strong demonstration was organised in November 1983 and the budget meeting itself, in March 1984, just weeks after the start of the miners’ strike, took place against the backdrop of a city-wide one day strike and a 50,000-strong march to the town hall. The anti-cuts movement will grow rapidly, given confidence by events such as the 24 hour public sector general strike last November and the combative stance of unions such as the Fire Brigades Union, the PCS civil servants’ union and the RMT transport workers, but it is still at an early stage. There is certainly no group of councillors who have prepared the ground as the Liverpool councillors had in 1984.
So, for the next budget-setting period, the draft TUSC policy platform also includes support for councillors who are prepared to use councils’ reserves and ’prudential borrowing’ powers to avoid passing on government cuts. Such a policy is completely within a council’s legal powers.
Council finance officers can challenge a budget they believe to be ’knowingly unbalanced’, in other words, a planned deficit - which a ’needs budget’ without massive council tax rises would be - but they can only question an individual council’s ability to meet short-term debt re-payments. The use of reserves to meet such initial debt re-payments, for example, is legally a ’matter of judgement’ for councillors to make. Councillors have a choice.
In some respects this approach would be a ’Liverpool in reverse sequence’. In 1984 the mass campaign led by the council was able to extract extra resources from the government. The campaign continued in 1985 but, with the defeat of the miners’ strike, and under ferocious attack from a Labour Party leadership doing Thatcher’s work for her - effectively, with Liverpool left isolated - the council had to resist cuts and sustain its house-building programme for a second year by using its borrowing powers.
COUNCILS USING their reserves and borrowing powers to avoid making cuts in this budget-setting period would only be buying time before they faced an inevitable showdown with the government for extra resources. Ultimately, there is no ’clever tactic’ that can avoid the need to build a mass campaign against the cuts.
There is, of course, no guarantee in any struggle. Most Labour councillors are ’New Labour’, indistinguishable from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in their pro-market policies and outlook. But even those who sincerely want to oppose the cuts still hesitate before the Liverpool road. Eventually, having defied the government for four years and won lasting gains for the city, the Liverpool councillors were surcharged and dismissed from office in March 1987.
The law has changed since the 1980s. The 2000 Local Government Act abolished the power of surcharge, for example, except for cases of personal gain. As importantly, the actual course of the events in Liverpool needs to be rescued from right-wing myth-making. It was not the setting of a needs budget or the later decision, in 1985, to fall back on the council’s borrowing powers, that the councillors were surcharged for. It was the decision to delay setting a rate at all (rates were the local tax levy then), that was used as the legal pretext to charge the councillors with ’wilfully incurring financial loss’ to the city.
This ’no rate’ strategy was decided on by the leaders of 20 other Labour councils, ironically against the Liverpool councillors’ advice (Liverpool went along with it to keep a united front), who then all - bar Lambeth council - backed down to leave Liverpool to fight alone. Nobody is proposing not setting a council tax rate today.
It was also significant that the councillors were only taken on by the district auditor in 1985 and not in 1984, when they had also delayed setting a rate (as some Labour defections meant no party had been able to get a majority for its budget in the council chamber). It was only when the mass campaign had ebbed - not in Liverpool but elsewhere - after the miners had been defeated, the other Labour councils had capitulated and Liverpool had been attacked and left isolated by the Labour Party leaders, that the Thatcher government felt confident enough to ’apply the law’.
The situation today is different. The Con-Dem cuts are the worst in generations, permanently changing life in Britain, as Cameron himself has explained. They will be resisted, no matter what the axe men decide - in parliament or the council chamber - and the opposition has only just begun. Councillors who are prepared to fight could play a historic role in the inevitable resistance
THE CLAIM that there is ’nothing Labour can do’ to stop the cuts ’until the next election’ - leaving aside its support for ’less deep and fast’ cuts if it did come to power - is disproved by one simple demand.
If Ed Miliband was to stand up tomorrow and commit an incoming Labour government to meet the debts incurred by councils who borrowed rather than made the savage cuts demanded of them, then not one council would have a reason to make the cuts. The same pledge could be made to other public and semi-public bodies like universities, health authorities, school governing boards, housing associations etc which incur ’temporary’ deficits to avoid implementing cuts.
Many trade union leaders still hope that ’Labour will listen’ and resist the cuts. Let them ask for such a pledge, which would, in local government, save the 100,000 jobs at threat and the services they provide. But if, as is almost certain, they don’t get it, then they must admit that the only option is to fight and build a mass campaign, including standing or backing candidates in the 2012 local elections who will fight the cuts.
Some Labour councillors will no doubt sincerely wish to oppose the cuts but draw back at the prospect of taking a bold stand. They should resign and make way for those who will. Whatever, it should be made clear to all councillors: councillors can fight the cuts and TUSC candidates will - and will contest the seats of those councillors who vote for cuts.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition was set-up in 2010 to enable trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists who wanted to resist the pro-austerity consensus of the establishment parties to stand candidates in the 2010 general election. By registering TUSC with the electoral commission, candidates could appear on the ballot paper as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition rather than as ’Independent’ which they would otherwise have to do under electoral law.
TUSC came out of a series of discussions by participants in the No2EU - Yes to Democracy coalition, which contested the 2009 European elections with the official support of the RMT transport workers’ union, the Socialist Party, Solidarity - Scotland’s Socialist Movement, and others.
TUSC is a coalition with a steering committee which includes, in a personal capacity, the RMT general secretary Bob Crow, and fellow executive member Craig Johnston; the assistant general secretary of the PCS civil servants’ union, Chris Baugh, and the union’s vice-president, John McInally; the vice-president of the National Union of Teachers, Nina Franklin; and the recently retired general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Brian Caton. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party are also represented on the committee.
TUSC was established as a federal ’umbrella’ coalition, with an agreed core policy statement endorsed by all its candidates but with participating organisations accountable for their own campaigns. Its core policies include, amongst others, opposition to public spending cuts and privatisation, student grants not fees, the repeal of the anti-trade union laws, and a clear socialist commitment to "bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment".
At the same time councils will be expected to administer many of the cuts announced under other budget headings. These include the cuts to housing benefit funded from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) budget but administered by councils; the Department for Education’s 12% cut in ’non-school’ spending on young people (including the abolition of educational maintenance allowances for 16-19 year olds); and a ’re-adjustment’ of NHS social care funding.
Setting council tax benefit, averaging £900 a year and currently paid out by councils on behalf of the DWP, will be devolved to councils, but with a 10% cut in overall funding.
Councils will also become the final agency to apply the £500 ’total household benefit’ cap, through housing benefit deductions. "Outsourced", was an apt headline in The Guardian - "town halls must do Osborne’s dirty work", it went on.
To say councils "must do" this dirty work, however, is wrong. Not unexpectedly, Labour councillors are saying there is ’nothing we can do’ to stop the cuts from being implemented locally, even where they control the council. But that is just not so. Councillors have a choice.
That’s why the decision of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC to facilitate the widest-possible challenge in the local elections that will take place in England this year is an important part of building the anti-cuts movement. With the London GLA and mayoral elecctions and several towns and city seats up for elections.
The basic TUSC programme of few points a very basic programme of no to all cuts is the basis of our programme.
It starts from the basis that councillors can refuse to pass on the cuts. Voting in May, it argues, can be not just a ’protest vote’ but can actually stop cuts to local jobs, benefits, and services. Building support for TUSC candidates can be an important means of putting pressure on current councillors when they decide council budgets , and in shaping how they respond to the ’new responsibilities’ they will have to administer.
What can councils do?
WHAT ROLE could councils play to stop the cuts, if the political will was there to seriously oppose the Con-Dem government’s austerity measures?
Over the years councils have been stripped of direct funding responsibility for many different services. The TUSC election platform notes that former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who began this process, famously said: "I must take more power to the centre to stop socialism" - in other words, that public services that ’crowded out’ the private sector should be curbed or, where they exist, should be opened up to private companies to make profits from public needs. New Labour continued this process throughout its 13 years in office - the turnover of private companies running public services reached over £80 billion in 2008, for example, 126% higher than 1995-96 under the previous Tory government. Now the Con-Dems’ spending review announcement includes plans for ’private provider quotas’ for councils’ elderly care, early years, youth and family support services.
Despite this however, as the TUSC election platform states, councils still have enormous powers and responsibilities. They control budgets totalling billions of pounds spent on services from housing to schools, youth clubs, libraries, adult social care, crime reduction, sports centres, highways maintenance and refuse collection, to name but a few. They have legal powers over non-council provided services, including many of those now ’outsourced’ that could be used, if the will was there, to defend jobs and services.
Councillors could - and TUSC councillors would, as the policy platform states - "vote against the privatisation of council services, or the transfer of council services to ’social enterprises’ or ’arms-length’ management organisations, which are first steps to privatisation". They could - and TUSC councillors would - push for councils to "use all their legal powers available" to "oppose both the cuts, and government polices which centrally impose the transfer of public services to private bodies".
That could mean that, for example, faced with the Con-Dems’ housing benefit cuts, councils would refuse to evict council tenants who fall into arrears as a result of the changes - and withdraw from ’partnership agreements’ with housing associations (HAs) and other ’social landlords’ who fail to do likewise (and actively support HA tenants’ organisations to fight for this policy).
Councils could also intervene in the private rented sector. The government hypocritically claims that its aim is to ’bring rents down’, after housing benefit payments have ballooned to £21 billion - although the Tories began this by abolishing rent controls in 1988 and slashing council house-building (policies not reversed by New Labour). Councils cannot impose a legally-binding private rent limit but they could, for example, threaten compulsory purchase proceedings against multi-property landlords who move to evict tenants suffering housing benefit cuts.
But housing is just one area where councils with the political will to oppose the Con-Dem government could play a key role in resisting the cuts. They could use their powers to ’call in’ and refer local NHS re-organisation proposals, for example. With a King’s Fund survey showing that fewer than one in four doctors believes the government’s new GP consortia commissioning plans - opening up £80 billion of NHS primary care funding to private companies - will improve patient care, councils could galvanise opposition to the Con-Dems’ dismantling of the NHS.
Defending councils’ budgets
Even some Tory and Lib-Dem councillors are criticising the government’s ’free schools’ plans (particularly in relation to faith schools) as endangering socially cohesive local education. Councils could use their ’schools organisation’ and admissions monitoring powers, governor appointments etc - and initiate consultative parents’ ballots, for example - to build a public campaign of opposition to these and the equally divisive accelerated academies programme. Councillors, it is clear, have a choice - they don’t have to do the government’s ’dirty work’. They can resist.
But what can councils do when faced with government cuts to the centrally allocated ’revenue support grants’ they receive to pay for council-funded services? The TUSC draft election platform states that councils should refuse to implement these cuts, and reject above inflation increases in council tax, rents and service charges to compensate for them. If even a handful of councils were to make such a stand it would electrify the mass opposition to the cuts that is developing.
As Margaret Thatcher’s resignation 20 years ago last November shows, in the face of mass non-payment of the poll tax, even the seemingly most imposing government - and the Con-Dem coalition is not that - can be forced to retreat if it faces a sufficiently powerful mass campaign of opposition. Not only was Thatcher removed but the Tories were forced, within weeks of her downfall, to put an extra £4.3 billion into local government funding (around £7 billion today) to finance the abolition of the poll tax.
The TUSC policy platform argues that the best way that councils can contribute to mobilising the mass campaign necessary to defeat the cuts is to set budgets that meet the needs of their local communities, without massive council tax hikes, and combine together to demand that the government makes up the funding shortfall. That is the ’Liverpool model’ which in 1984 enabled the city’s Labour council, led by Militant supporters, the predecessor of the Socialist Party, to compel Thatcher’s government to concede extra resources to the city worth up to £60 million (£98 million today).
The campaign built by Liverpool city council in 1983-87 to win extra funding inspired thousands of workers, photo Militant
But the campaign in support of Liverpool’s ’needs budget’ had been long prepared, even before Labour won a majority on the council in 1983. A 25,000-strong demonstration was organised in November 1983 and the budget meeting itself, in March 1984, just weeks after the start of the miners’ strike, took place against the backdrop of a city-wide one day strike and a 50,000-strong march to the town hall. The anti-cuts movement will grow rapidly, given confidence by events such as the 24 hour public sector general strike last November and the combative stance of unions such as the Fire Brigades Union, the PCS civil servants’ union and the RMT transport workers, but it is still at an early stage. There is certainly no group of councillors who have prepared the ground as the Liverpool councillors had in 1984.
So, for the next budget-setting period, the draft TUSC policy platform also includes support for councillors who are prepared to use councils’ reserves and ’prudential borrowing’ powers to avoid passing on government cuts. Such a policy is completely within a council’s legal powers.
Council finance officers can challenge a budget they believe to be ’knowingly unbalanced’, in other words, a planned deficit - which a ’needs budget’ without massive council tax rises would be - but they can only question an individual council’s ability to meet short-term debt re-payments. The use of reserves to meet such initial debt re-payments, for example, is legally a ’matter of judgement’ for councillors to make. Councillors have a choice.
In some respects this approach would be a ’Liverpool in reverse sequence’. In 1984 the mass campaign led by the council was able to extract extra resources from the government. The campaign continued in 1985 but, with the defeat of the miners’ strike, and under ferocious attack from a Labour Party leadership doing Thatcher’s work for her - effectively, with Liverpool left isolated - the council had to resist cuts and sustain its house-building programme for a second year by using its borrowing powers.
COUNCILS USING their reserves and borrowing powers to avoid making cuts in this budget-setting period would only be buying time before they faced an inevitable showdown with the government for extra resources. Ultimately, there is no ’clever tactic’ that can avoid the need to build a mass campaign against the cuts.
There is, of course, no guarantee in any struggle. Most Labour councillors are ’New Labour’, indistinguishable from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in their pro-market policies and outlook. But even those who sincerely want to oppose the cuts still hesitate before the Liverpool road. Eventually, having defied the government for four years and won lasting gains for the city, the Liverpool councillors were surcharged and dismissed from office in March 1987.
The law has changed since the 1980s. The 2000 Local Government Act abolished the power of surcharge, for example, except for cases of personal gain. As importantly, the actual course of the events in Liverpool needs to be rescued from right-wing myth-making. It was not the setting of a needs budget or the later decision, in 1985, to fall back on the council’s borrowing powers, that the councillors were surcharged for. It was the decision to delay setting a rate at all (rates were the local tax levy then), that was used as the legal pretext to charge the councillors with ’wilfully incurring financial loss’ to the city.
This ’no rate’ strategy was decided on by the leaders of 20 other Labour councils, ironically against the Liverpool councillors’ advice (Liverpool went along with it to keep a united front), who then all - bar Lambeth council - backed down to leave Liverpool to fight alone. Nobody is proposing not setting a council tax rate today.
It was also significant that the councillors were only taken on by the district auditor in 1985 and not in 1984, when they had also delayed setting a rate (as some Labour defections meant no party had been able to get a majority for its budget in the council chamber). It was only when the mass campaign had ebbed - not in Liverpool but elsewhere - after the miners had been defeated, the other Labour councils had capitulated and Liverpool had been attacked and left isolated by the Labour Party leaders, that the Thatcher government felt confident enough to ’apply the law’.
The situation today is different. The Con-Dem cuts are the worst in generations, permanently changing life in Britain, as Cameron himself has explained. They will be resisted, no matter what the axe men decide - in parliament or the council chamber - and the opposition has only just begun. Councillors who are prepared to fight could play a historic role in the inevitable resistance
THE CLAIM that there is ’nothing Labour can do’ to stop the cuts ’until the next election’ - leaving aside its support for ’less deep and fast’ cuts if it did come to power - is disproved by one simple demand.
If Ed Miliband was to stand up tomorrow and commit an incoming Labour government to meet the debts incurred by councils who borrowed rather than made the savage cuts demanded of them, then not one council would have a reason to make the cuts. The same pledge could be made to other public and semi-public bodies like universities, health authorities, school governing boards, housing associations etc which incur ’temporary’ deficits to avoid implementing cuts.
Many trade union leaders still hope that ’Labour will listen’ and resist the cuts. Let them ask for such a pledge, which would, in local government, save the 100,000 jobs at threat and the services they provide. But if, as is almost certain, they don’t get it, then they must admit that the only option is to fight and build a mass campaign, including standing or backing candidates in the 2012 local elections who will fight the cuts.
Some Labour councillors will no doubt sincerely wish to oppose the cuts but draw back at the prospect of taking a bold stand. They should resign and make way for those who will. Whatever, it should be made clear to all councillors: councillors can fight the cuts and TUSC candidates will - and will contest the seats of those councillors who vote for cuts.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition was set-up in 2010 to enable trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists who wanted to resist the pro-austerity consensus of the establishment parties to stand candidates in the 2010 general election. By registering TUSC with the electoral commission, candidates could appear on the ballot paper as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition rather than as ’Independent’ which they would otherwise have to do under electoral law.
TUSC came out of a series of discussions by participants in the No2EU - Yes to Democracy coalition, which contested the 2009 European elections with the official support of the RMT transport workers’ union, the Socialist Party, Solidarity - Scotland’s Socialist Movement, and others.
TUSC is a coalition with a steering committee which includes, in a personal capacity, the RMT general secretary Bob Crow, and fellow executive member Craig Johnston; the assistant general secretary of the PCS civil servants’ union, Chris Baugh, and the union’s vice-president, John McInally; the vice-president of the National Union of Teachers, Nina Franklin; and the recently retired general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Brian Caton. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party are also represented on the committee.
TUSC was established as a federal ’umbrella’ coalition, with an agreed core policy statement endorsed by all its candidates but with participating organisations accountable for their own campaigns. Its core policies include, amongst others, opposition to public spending cuts and privatisation, student grants not fees, the repeal of the anti-trade union laws, and a clear socialist commitment to "bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment".
Monday, 3 October 2011
The Liverpool 47, forgotten by many but not by militants
Whilst many last week would have been glag to see Ed Miliband attacking Militant in the 80's over their role in the city of Liverpool struggles and thought he was right to do so i do not agree. I think the moveemnt that was around at the time which provoked some of the most vicious slanders on militant members at the time has to be remembered. Many of the great labour movement moments in history are rmembered and used to inspire new workers today but the lies and the smears the right wing in the labour movement and the official labour party of today and since the 80's has meant many workers fear looking into the struggles of the Liverpool city council back then.
The mantra 'not going illegal' seems to be the catch-all excuse for implementing the most savage cuts in Liverpool's history. [the Liverpool 47 group and the Socialist Party - Eds.] have argued for a needs budget not an illegal budget. This means using every legal device to defend jobs and services - using council reserves, taking privatised services back in-house.
Such action would need to be linked to a mass anti-cuts campaign involving trade unions, community organisations and council workers on a clear policy of compelling the Con-Dem government to abandon its punitive policies, with an appeal to other local authorities to do the same.
Jobs, wages and services are being cut while the income of CEOs increased hugely last year; the culprits for the crisis, the bankers, continue to gorge themselves on obscene bonuses; Cameron's advisers say the NHS should be up for grabs to the private health companies.
This outrageous situation cries out for courageous leadership committed to defending workers and those least able to defend themselves.
As for the argument that the conditions for mass struggle don't exist: history shows that, where leadership is given, support will be forthcoming as the Liverpool 47 showed in the 80s, as did Tom Mann in 1911 in Poplar.
Liverpool city council's struggle in 1983-87 for more funding from the Thatcher government was an inspiration to workers,
AFTER 20 years of slashing jobs, of privatising and cutting services, Liverpool's ruling parties - New Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with almost identical free-market policies, have decided to inflict a catastrophe on the local authority workforce.
1,500 will lose their jobs, the already high number of families without a wage-earner will grow. Despite Labour council leader Joe Anderson's pledge to protect the poor, public services will suffer and already are suffering.
Labour is the majority party but a key component of Anderson's strategy to deal with the cuts is to form an alliance with the arch-proponents of privatisation and cuts, the Lib Dems.
In 1987 the House of Lords backed Thatcher's district auditor's decision to remove the 47 fighting Liverpool Labour councillors from office undemocratically i might add. Since then, the city council's workforce has been reduced from 30,000 to fewer than 10,000.
The spectacle of a Labour leader going into an alliance with the local Lib Dems, a party which is part of a national coalition with the millionaire Tory cabinet, shows catastrophic abdication of leadership by a Labour party which was elected by the city's working families to protect them from the Tory onslaught.
Council leader Joe Anderson detailed how the council intends to make £91 million of savings over the coming year. It aims to cut half its senior management posts, saving £4.5 million, and to reduce budgets for children's services and adult social care.
It 'hopes' it can reduce predicted job losses from 1,500 to about 1,200. Anderson claimed the council had tried to protect frontline services but the scale of the cuts meant that 'real pain' would be felt in some communities.
Funding for voluntary groups has been cut by £18 million, almost 50%. The council says savings in this area were necessary to protect 'life and death' essential services to the most vulnerable.
'There is no alternative' claims the Labour leader. But there is always an alternative to supine capitulation and that is to fight - to form a coalition with the organised labour movement and community organisations, instead of a coalition with the capitalist parties and their allies.
This fighting policy, following the example of the Liverpool 47 councillors, would show Cameron's Tories they have a battle on their hands. In 1983, the incoming Labour council inherited a catastrophic financial situation.
The outgoing Liberal-Tory alliance deliberately under-spent throughout the 1970s to try to maintain electoral support; in one year they actually cut household rates.
They wooed their natural Tory-voting base by increasing rents, terminating the house-building programme and shedding thousands of jobs, plus making cuts in other sectors.
Much like today where the chancellor has announced council tax will be frozen for another year further putting pressure on councils to put through cuts to compensate for the loss of extra council tax.
Liberal council leader Trevor Jones could claim he presided over the lowest rate increases in Liverpool's history and was knighted by Thatcher for services rendered.
An angry Liverpool working class kicked out this Liberal-Tory alliance and returned Labour to power in 1983 on a clear, fighting socialist programme. The brave 47 Liverpool Labour councillors refused to cut jobs and services and defied Thatcher, mobilising support from the council workforce and from local people.
They won an extra £60 million from the government in 1984 and gained six new nurseries, and five colleges. Over 5,000 council houses were built.
Time has not diminished the achievements of the 47, nor undermined the importance of the struggle. The record of the 47 remains stubbornly intact.
Today Joe Anderson, however, tells council workers that the 47 were responsible for Labour's decline in the city. That is a complete falsehood.
The 47 received magnificent support from the council workforce and the wider trade union movement and at the ballot box. If some leadership was shown in this present crisis then the council could win that support again.
Anderson and Co say: 'We have no choice.' But there is a choice. The mass movement built by the 47 did not drop from the sky.
It was developed with the Liverpool District Labour Party (DLP) hammering out a clear policy which included: opposition to cuts, no rent increases, cancelling redundancies, creating jobs, expanding social services, campaigning to retrieve the millions which the Thatcher government had cut from the city's grants, and linking this programme to the need for a socialist society.
This drew the local authority trade unions, the Labour Party Young Socialists, the women's organisations and others into the decision-making process through the DLP.
At that time the DLP democratically determined council policy and Labour councillors were constitutionally bound to carry it out! A 'trade union and labour movement organising committee' was created, representing all sections of the working class with the 47 providing the cutting edge.
This committee organised the mass rallies and demonstrations which were so important in the Liverpool campaign. This body also participated in the electoral campaign which delivered the highest Labour votes since 1945.
There were many high points of the campaign: one was on 7 March 1985, when a mini-general strike involving 30,000 council workers and 10,000 dockers, plus other sections of workers took place with a demonstration of some 50,000 marching through Liverpool opposing the Thatcher government's policies.
That mass campaign was born out of the social conditions in Liverpool, which had seen 65% of its industrial base collapse in the decade before the 47 were elected.
Mass participation in the movement was also the antidote to the hostile forces of capitalism: the Murdoch/Maxwell Press, ITV and the BBC, the local press, the pulpit, with Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and the national trade union bureaucrats underpinning the establishment's crazed campaign against the 47.
Joe Anderson and other labour party councillors recent 'demonstration' against the cuts may confuse sections of the population for a while and temporarily deflect hostility away from him and his allies.
But as the cuts bite there will be greater focus on Labour's role locally, with a corresponding call for a fighting leadership basing themselves on the policy, programme and campaigning activity of the 47.
A strategy to beat the cuts
IN AN open letter last December, a group of the 47 suggested to Liverpool's present-day Labour leader Joe Anderson and his allies that they follow the example of the 1983-87 Militant-inspired council and set a 'needs budget'.
This would protect temporarily council workers' jobs and services provided or supported by the council. Joe Anderson's response was to tell us to live in 'the real world' and accept that nothing could be done other than for him to carry out the cuts while crying bucketfuls of tears! But our letter raised important questions such as a strategy to oppose the Con-Dem onslaught.
"The first step should be to use the council's budget reserve, reported in the Liverpool Echo as £80 million, to maintain current funding levels in areas which the Con-Dem alliance is cutting.
"This would buy time for more decisive measures to defeat the cuts. Then, as we did in 1983-87, you should work out how much is required to fund existing council services in 2011 and pass a budget in line with inflation.
"This would no doubt produce a shortfall in the council's income. The amount of the shortfall could be identified, say £50 million.
"A campaign could then be launched to oppose the cuts with the specific demand that £50 million be restored to Liverpool city council as a means of defending jobs and services.
"You could call for all local authorities to embrace the same strategy and for support from the local authority trade unions and the wider labour movement, in concert with community organisations which are planning to resist any cuts in their own localities.
"If Liverpool makes a courageous stand, this could act as a beacon to other local authorities and campaigning organisations to join the campaign. If a number of the main local authorities adopted this strategy of refusing to cut jobs and services to compensate for Tory cuts, backed up by a campaign of mass demonstrations and industrial action, the Tories would be compelled to retreat.
"We call on the Labour group to totally reject the cuts and to join, not with the Lib Dems, but with the trade union and labour movement in defending the mass of Liverpool's working people."
SO please dont let the inspiration and the spirit of the Liverpool 47 die. Dont listen to the lies. Do as i did and read up on the struggle myself independently of any influence and decided for myself the truth and what really went on. Adopting a marxist strategy on the cuts that all cuts should be opposed to defend workers and working class people is the only way to go in my view. There is no excuse for Labour councillors who if they wish to warrant the name Labour councillors not to follow this route of the 47.
The mantra 'not going illegal' seems to be the catch-all excuse for implementing the most savage cuts in Liverpool's history. [the Liverpool 47 group and the Socialist Party - Eds.] have argued for a needs budget not an illegal budget. This means using every legal device to defend jobs and services - using council reserves, taking privatised services back in-house.
Such action would need to be linked to a mass anti-cuts campaign involving trade unions, community organisations and council workers on a clear policy of compelling the Con-Dem government to abandon its punitive policies, with an appeal to other local authorities to do the same.
Jobs, wages and services are being cut while the income of CEOs increased hugely last year; the culprits for the crisis, the bankers, continue to gorge themselves on obscene bonuses; Cameron's advisers say the NHS should be up for grabs to the private health companies.
This outrageous situation cries out for courageous leadership committed to defending workers and those least able to defend themselves.
As for the argument that the conditions for mass struggle don't exist: history shows that, where leadership is given, support will be forthcoming as the Liverpool 47 showed in the 80s, as did Tom Mann in 1911 in Poplar.
Liverpool city council's struggle in 1983-87 for more funding from the Thatcher government was an inspiration to workers,
AFTER 20 years of slashing jobs, of privatising and cutting services, Liverpool's ruling parties - New Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with almost identical free-market policies, have decided to inflict a catastrophe on the local authority workforce.
1,500 will lose their jobs, the already high number of families without a wage-earner will grow. Despite Labour council leader Joe Anderson's pledge to protect the poor, public services will suffer and already are suffering.
Labour is the majority party but a key component of Anderson's strategy to deal with the cuts is to form an alliance with the arch-proponents of privatisation and cuts, the Lib Dems.
In 1987 the House of Lords backed Thatcher's district auditor's decision to remove the 47 fighting Liverpool Labour councillors from office undemocratically i might add. Since then, the city council's workforce has been reduced from 30,000 to fewer than 10,000.
The spectacle of a Labour leader going into an alliance with the local Lib Dems, a party which is part of a national coalition with the millionaire Tory cabinet, shows catastrophic abdication of leadership by a Labour party which was elected by the city's working families to protect them from the Tory onslaught.
Council leader Joe Anderson detailed how the council intends to make £91 million of savings over the coming year. It aims to cut half its senior management posts, saving £4.5 million, and to reduce budgets for children's services and adult social care.
It 'hopes' it can reduce predicted job losses from 1,500 to about 1,200. Anderson claimed the council had tried to protect frontline services but the scale of the cuts meant that 'real pain' would be felt in some communities.
Funding for voluntary groups has been cut by £18 million, almost 50%. The council says savings in this area were necessary to protect 'life and death' essential services to the most vulnerable.
'There is no alternative' claims the Labour leader. But there is always an alternative to supine capitulation and that is to fight - to form a coalition with the organised labour movement and community organisations, instead of a coalition with the capitalist parties and their allies.
This fighting policy, following the example of the Liverpool 47 councillors, would show Cameron's Tories they have a battle on their hands. In 1983, the incoming Labour council inherited a catastrophic financial situation.
The outgoing Liberal-Tory alliance deliberately under-spent throughout the 1970s to try to maintain electoral support; in one year they actually cut household rates.
They wooed their natural Tory-voting base by increasing rents, terminating the house-building programme and shedding thousands of jobs, plus making cuts in other sectors.
Much like today where the chancellor has announced council tax will be frozen for another year further putting pressure on councils to put through cuts to compensate for the loss of extra council tax.
Liberal council leader Trevor Jones could claim he presided over the lowest rate increases in Liverpool's history and was knighted by Thatcher for services rendered.
An angry Liverpool working class kicked out this Liberal-Tory alliance and returned Labour to power in 1983 on a clear, fighting socialist programme. The brave 47 Liverpool Labour councillors refused to cut jobs and services and defied Thatcher, mobilising support from the council workforce and from local people.
They won an extra £60 million from the government in 1984 and gained six new nurseries, and five colleges. Over 5,000 council houses were built.
Time has not diminished the achievements of the 47, nor undermined the importance of the struggle. The record of the 47 remains stubbornly intact.
Today Joe Anderson, however, tells council workers that the 47 were responsible for Labour's decline in the city. That is a complete falsehood.
The 47 received magnificent support from the council workforce and the wider trade union movement and at the ballot box. If some leadership was shown in this present crisis then the council could win that support again.
Anderson and Co say: 'We have no choice.' But there is a choice. The mass movement built by the 47 did not drop from the sky.
It was developed with the Liverpool District Labour Party (DLP) hammering out a clear policy which included: opposition to cuts, no rent increases, cancelling redundancies, creating jobs, expanding social services, campaigning to retrieve the millions which the Thatcher government had cut from the city's grants, and linking this programme to the need for a socialist society.
This drew the local authority trade unions, the Labour Party Young Socialists, the women's organisations and others into the decision-making process through the DLP.
At that time the DLP democratically determined council policy and Labour councillors were constitutionally bound to carry it out! A 'trade union and labour movement organising committee' was created, representing all sections of the working class with the 47 providing the cutting edge.
This committee organised the mass rallies and demonstrations which were so important in the Liverpool campaign. This body also participated in the electoral campaign which delivered the highest Labour votes since 1945.
There were many high points of the campaign: one was on 7 March 1985, when a mini-general strike involving 30,000 council workers and 10,000 dockers, plus other sections of workers took place with a demonstration of some 50,000 marching through Liverpool opposing the Thatcher government's policies.
That mass campaign was born out of the social conditions in Liverpool, which had seen 65% of its industrial base collapse in the decade before the 47 were elected.
Mass participation in the movement was also the antidote to the hostile forces of capitalism: the Murdoch/Maxwell Press, ITV and the BBC, the local press, the pulpit, with Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and the national trade union bureaucrats underpinning the establishment's crazed campaign against the 47.
Joe Anderson and other labour party councillors recent 'demonstration' against the cuts may confuse sections of the population for a while and temporarily deflect hostility away from him and his allies.
But as the cuts bite there will be greater focus on Labour's role locally, with a corresponding call for a fighting leadership basing themselves on the policy, programme and campaigning activity of the 47.
A strategy to beat the cuts
IN AN open letter last December, a group of the 47 suggested to Liverpool's present-day Labour leader Joe Anderson and his allies that they follow the example of the 1983-87 Militant-inspired council and set a 'needs budget'.
This would protect temporarily council workers' jobs and services provided or supported by the council. Joe Anderson's response was to tell us to live in 'the real world' and accept that nothing could be done other than for him to carry out the cuts while crying bucketfuls of tears! But our letter raised important questions such as a strategy to oppose the Con-Dem onslaught.
"The first step should be to use the council's budget reserve, reported in the Liverpool Echo as £80 million, to maintain current funding levels in areas which the Con-Dem alliance is cutting.
"This would buy time for more decisive measures to defeat the cuts. Then, as we did in 1983-87, you should work out how much is required to fund existing council services in 2011 and pass a budget in line with inflation.
"This would no doubt produce a shortfall in the council's income. The amount of the shortfall could be identified, say £50 million.
"A campaign could then be launched to oppose the cuts with the specific demand that £50 million be restored to Liverpool city council as a means of defending jobs and services.
"You could call for all local authorities to embrace the same strategy and for support from the local authority trade unions and the wider labour movement, in concert with community organisations which are planning to resist any cuts in their own localities.
"If Liverpool makes a courageous stand, this could act as a beacon to other local authorities and campaigning organisations to join the campaign. If a number of the main local authorities adopted this strategy of refusing to cut jobs and services to compensate for Tory cuts, backed up by a campaign of mass demonstrations and industrial action, the Tories would be compelled to retreat.
"We call on the Labour group to totally reject the cuts and to join, not with the Lib Dems, but with the trade union and labour movement in defending the mass of Liverpool's working people."
SO please dont let the inspiration and the spirit of the Liverpool 47 die. Dont listen to the lies. Do as i did and read up on the struggle myself independently of any influence and decided for myself the truth and what really went on. Adopting a marxist strategy on the cuts that all cuts should be opposed to defend workers and working class people is the only way to go in my view. There is no excuse for Labour councillors who if they wish to warrant the name Labour councillors not to follow this route of the 47.
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