Brighton and Hove Green
Party leader Jason Kitcat wants to follow up last year’s attack on the city’s Bin
Workers’ wages with further cuts in the council’s 2014-15 budget. If successful, this would mean that his
administration, elected on a mandate to ‘resist austerity’, has cut £50 million
from jobs and services in the city in 3 years. Amazingly the Green Party are trying
to spin this attack as an act of ‘resistance’ to central government cuts and are
seeking a mandate for their budget, and a 4.75% increase in the council tax, in
a referendum that, if it goes ahead which will cost the city almost a quarter of a million pounds to
carry out!
There is no question that
the primary responsibility for cuts in local government services lies with the
Con-Dem Government’s austerity programme. This has ramped up the onslaught on
council budgets after 13 years of attacks under New Labour. The proposal by the
Greens to increase council tax by 4.75%, however, is no defence in the face of
this attack.
This tax increase would
raise £2.75million more than December's draft budget.[1] But that budget proposed £22.56 million in
spending cuts[2]. These threaten the jobs
of 100-150 Council workers[3]. In other words the Green Administration would
be asking the voters of Brighton to swallow a rise of almost 5% in their
council tax bills as the price for still accepting nine tenths of the cuts in
jobs and services demanded by Pickles and the Con-Dem government!
These would come on top of
£30 million worth of Tory cuts which the Green Party have passed on to workers
and service users in the city since coming to power in 2011. Not surprisingly
the Tory local government minister Brandon Lewis MP fully supports the Greens’
move.[4]
This shows that it is not the case, as Green Party National Leader, Natalie
Bennet, has claimed, that: ‘Instead of
letting Whitehall impose cuts on vulnerable people in Brighton & Hove, this
announcement takes the decision to the people.[5]
By playing along with the
spending limits imposed by Pickles and the Millionaire ‘Eton Boot Boys’ in the
Con-Dem cabinet, Brighton’s Green Party is ensuring that the only possible
outcomes of the referendum are either:
·
Voters reject an
increase in council tax bills 2 ½ times the rate of inflation (at a time when
real wages are under sustained attack and public and private sector rents and
other housing costs are shooting through the roof) and so all £22½ million
pounds in cuts demanded by central government go through,
or
·
Council tax
payers in Brighton bear the brunt of subsidising the cuts in central government
spending: the penalty system means that much of the extra council tax will not
fund threatened services, but will simply be clawed back by Central Government. At the same time
we will still have to swallow 90p in every £1.00 of Eric Pickles’s cuts to
services!
In other words, whatever
Natalie Bennett and Jason Kitcat claim, either way, the referendum can only
lead to ‘Whitehall imposing cuts on vulnerable people in Brighton and Hove.’
The referendum would also be
a highly divisive exercise in ‘divide and rule’: pitting ‘council tax payers’,
against ‘council workers’ and ‘service users’ when the reality is that
resisting the cuts requires that we stand united (indeed, most often we are the
same people, anyway!). If we accept the
Greens’ ‘dented shield’ analysis, which says that nine-tenths of the cuts are
inevitable, we will end up engaging is a vicious ‘race to the bottom’. This
would pit education against housing and children’s services against
services for older people and the disabled, in a struggle to become the lucky
‘one in ten’ to escape Councillor Kitcat’s axe. Instead we should be standing
together and resisting ALL CUTS.
This is not what is being proposed by The Labour Party. Labour Councillors are proposing a ‘vote of no confidence’ in the Green administration. Not because they are carrying out cuts but because they want to carry out more cuts! Labour want an ‘all party administration’ to implement the Con-Dem coalition’s cuts in full for 2014-15, and for 2015-16. This would inevitably lead to even more losses in jobs and services.
This is not what is being proposed by The Labour Party. Labour Councillors are proposing a ‘vote of no confidence’ in the Green administration. Not because they are carrying out cuts but because they want to carry out more cuts! Labour want an ‘all party administration’ to implement the Con-Dem coalition’s cuts in full for 2014-15, and for 2015-16. This would inevitably lead to even more losses in jobs and services.
There is an alternative,
which the Socialist Party, the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC),
Brighton Trades Council and Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition have urged on the
Green Administration since it was first elected. Cuts are only inevitable because
our councillors have meekly accepted the restrictions imposed on the City’s
budgets by successive Labour and Con-Dem ministers in the interests of big
business. Instead, Brighton and Hove Council should set a ‘needs budget’ and campaign for
Central Government to return the £70 million plus which has been cut from
central government allocations to the city since 2010.
Imagine; if our councillors
explained that adequate funding for Brighton’s schools, bins and recycling
(which are still reeling from the ‘settlement’ of last year’s strike and the
botched ‘reorganisation’ forced through by Kitcat and senior managers), housing
and care services should have priority over the governments’ agenda: tax cuts
for the rich, subsidies for fuel companies which raise prices and destroy our
environment by ‘fracking’, and imperialist wars in Afghanistan and the Middle
East! This way, Councillors could build a mass movement of resistance and
unite council workers, services users and Brighton’s communities to force Pickles
to return the money stolen from our city.
This was what the Socialist
Council did in Liverpool in the 1980’s. Not only did they force the Thatcher
government to increase funding for services but they expanded the council’s
workforce at a time of rising unemployment and built 5,000 new council houses
(more than were built by councils in the whole of the rest of England and Wales
in the same period!). For this, 47 Labour councillors were surcharged and
banned from office. The draconian laws which allowed this to happen no longer
apply. The worst which Brighton Councillors defying Pickles’s cuts today would
face is being forced to face a new election at which they could defend their
strategy: a real ‘referendum on Austerity’ unlike the bogus exercise being
entertained by Councillor Kitcat.
Liverpool Council did raise
the rates (the fore-runner to the Council Tax) but only to expand spending and provide new services not to pay for central
government’s cuts to the City’s budget, their political honesty won them
undying respect from the people of Liverpool. Their willingness to fight and
boldly confront the government shows that there is an alternative and, that it
would gain mass support, if followed in Brighton three decades on.
http://www.brightonhovegreens.org/news/greens-propose-referendum-for-council-tax-rise,-to-protect-citys-vulnerable.html
[1]
Guardian 16/1/14.
[2] ‘Budget Update and Savings 2014/15’, Agenda
Item 76 policy and resources committee 5th December 2013 (para 3.24)
[3] Ibid, (para 3.33)
[4]
Brighton and Hove Green Party website http://www.brightonhovegreens.org/news/council-leader-calls-on-labour-to-let-the-people-not-the-tories-decide.html
[5] http://www.brightonhovegreens.org/news/greens-propose-referendum-for-council-tax-rise,-to-protect-citys-vulnerable.html
