Green Left Statement on Local Authority Cuts

Green Left Statement on Cuts to Local Authority Services

The following statement was agreed and issued by Green Left, the ecosocialist platform in the Green Party of England and Wales, on 8th December 2013:

The Green party of England and Wales fought the 2010 general election in opposition to the savage public service cuts supported by the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. The Green party offered a different approach to reducing the country’s debts, which included making the wealthy (people and corporations) pay their fair share of tax, investing in the economy to produce sustainable growth through the Green New Deal, some cuts for example to Trident and pledging to protect public services particularly for the most vulnerable in our society.

Unfortunately, we did not win the general election and so are unable to put these policies into practice, although Caroline Lucas has almost single handedly taken the opposition to the Coalition government cuts agenda. The ideologically driven shrink the state policies of the Coalition government aim to reduce public spending and turn most of the public services over to private corporations. Our elected representatives in local government are on the front line in the assault on public spending, with local authorities having their funding from central government cut by around a third since 2010. Councils of all political stripes are hurting and they worry about whether they will even be able to fund their statutory duties in the future. Local government is under serious threat and everyone involved in it knows this to be true, despite the blithe statements about local authorities making efficiency savings and encouraging local business growth to pay for services, trumpeted by the Coalition central government. All the easy savings and many not so easy have been made now, and a future of even more of the same is daunting.

We in Green Left say enough is enough, and call on all of our existing elected Green party local councillors and any that are elected in the 2014 local elections, to firmly refuse to implement these Coalition government cuts to essential public services. If the government sends civil servants to carry out their dirty work then the responsibility for the cuts will be firmly in the public view, and our elected representatives can be in the forefront of a popular campaign against them. The time has surely come to make a stand, in solidarity with our communities that depend so heavily on the services provided and with the local authority workforce who have endured cuts in wages if not redundancy.

Support The People's Assembly

Unfortunately I cannot attend the People's Assembly Against Austerity on 22nd June due to family commitments, but would urge anyone who can get along to do so as this is an important opportunity to show that there are alternatives to the austerity drive and to network and build a stronger movement of resistance.

More from Owen Jones here

The Nottingham Assembly, which I went along to, was well attended and a good start locally.

The Welfare Cuts Tsunami Arrives

To the accompaniment of criticism from the churches, disability groups, charities, voluntary organisations, political parties outside the coalition and decent fair minded folk everywhere, the Government's welfare cuts regime is upon us - arriving at the same time as the implementation of the "NHS dismemberment legislation" and attacks on legal aid.

The welfare cuts include the hated bedroom tax which will face many low income families with the choice of going without or moving (perhaps away from friends, family, jobs, schools etc) into more expensive private sector accommodation (that will also raise rather than decrease the government's required expenditure - so will not succeed even on those terms, though perhaps one government aim is to further enrich their friends in the Rachmanite community).  There simply is not enough smaller property available in the Social Housing Sector to accommodate all those affected that are being expected to move. This will cause widespread hardship and anguish.

At the same time there is a 1% cap being put on increases in benefits which will reduce the income of poorer people in real terms.

This is not to be confused with the cap in overall benefits which is encountering problems in roll out through pilot areas but the government is still determined to bring in.

There is also the farming out of Council Tax Benefit payments to Councils with a cut in their funding which will lead to people who have never had to pay Council Tax before having to fork out large sums from limited and fixed or decreasing (see above!) incomes.

There is also the moving of many disabled people from DLA into the new PIP regime, again likely to cause disruption and potential hardship. (Not to mention the ongoing war on the disabled being conducted by ATOS and their ilk.)

Taken as a whole this is a wide ranging and multi-faceted, disgusting attack on the most vulnerable in our society and should be opposed - it is all the more sickening when coming from a government of Millionaires, most of whom have never had to suffer any kind of deprivation.

Councils must be encouraged to follow the lead of those Green, SNP and (few) Labour councils that have said that they will not evict tenants who fall into arrears as a result of the Bedroom Tax.  Local campaigns must be built to resist bailiffs and fight people's corners.  The hypocrisy of the well heeled,  expenses- claiming, generously pensioned, extravagantly paid and often multiple job holding political classes must be exposed.

The People's Assembly Against Austerity gives an opportunity for uniting much of the rising tide of opposition to the Coalition's policies and both the local and National events should be supported and built.

The local elections in May will give an early opportunity to show the Coalition parties the contempt that millions of ordinary people now hold them in.

Housing benefit cuts will increase homelessness

Housing benefit cuts will increase homelessness, Green Party leader warns

“Conservative-Lib Dem cuts will hit the poorer people in society”, says Lucas

Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green Party and MP for Brighton Pavilion, has warned that the coalition government's cuts to housing benefit could result in increasing social problems with serious debt and homelessness.

The Green Party leader was commenting on a recent report published by homelessness charity Crisis. The report highlights the social risks of housing benefit cuts, which will affect 936,960 households across the UK who are currently claiming local housing allowance (LHA). On average, these households will lose over £600 a year.

The report also warns that cuts to housing benefit could have hidden costs in the future, in order to deal with the social problems of homelessness, including health problems and providing accommodation.

Housing benefit cut is equivalent to big increase in income tax for poorer people

Caroline Lucas MP said:

“Consider someone earning £16,000 (after tax-free allowance) and receiving housing benefit. If they lose £728 that would be the equivalent of paying an income tax rise of over 4.5 per cent.

“These particular Tory-Lib Dem cuts will leave more people struggling to pay the rent, more people falling into serious debt and ultimately more people becoming homeless.

“This is very unfair, coming at a time when many of these people are facing economic uncertainty or even redundancy.

“Once again we see the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s cuts hitting the poorer people in society. The government could avoid these cuts by properly tackling tax avoidance and tax evasion perpetrated by some of the wealthiest, which could raise billions of pounds a year.”

Protest Against Nottingham Social Care Cuts

Nottingham City Unison have called a demonstration outside the City Council Budget Meeting on Monday 8th March at 12.30 in Old Market Square. The Labour City Council is proposing cuts in Adult Social Services as part of an £18 million package of cuts in its 2010/2011 budget. The proposed cuts include -

* Proposed closure of Riverside Residential Home (Bulwell) for adults with learning disabilities
*Closure of the Willows Older Persons Day Centre at weekends
*A new daily £2 charge for attendance at all adult day centres
*Cuts in day care for adults living in residential and nursing homes
*A 3% increase in charges for homecare, meals at home and transport to day centres
*Cuts in City Council Deaf Sevice

It is particularly ironic that Labour politicians and activists have been prominently flying their flags at protests against the Conservative controlled Notts County Council over the last week as the Tories launch a similar cuts programme targeted on day centres, residential homes etc in the County. Labour in the City are following the same policy as Tories in the County - targeting the most vulnerable and those they estimate are least likely to kick up a fuss or cost them votes.

Workers and service users need to show the City Labourites that we oppose their cuts every bit as much as those being implemented by the County Tories.

War On Want Christmas Appeal

War On Want have launched a Christmas Appeal For Palestine.

This is a message from John Hilary:

We need your help today to support people in Palestine in their fight for a better life. I visited Palestine this summer, my first visit in many years. I was truly shocked to see how much everyday life for Palestinians has deteriorated. Olive farmers in the West Bank told us how they can no longer get enough water for their trees as water supply has been diverted to illegal Israeli settlements built on their land. In Bethlehem, we met refugee children who are now forced to live under the shadow of Israel's illegal Separation Wall. The people of Bethlehem are threatened on a daily basis by the violence of the Occupation.

The people of Palestine urgently need your support today. Please help us by donating to our Christmas appeal.

http://www.waronwant.org/palestine-appeal

Palestinians are facing economic meltdown as a result of Israel's illegal Occupation of their land. The system of checkpoints and closures in the West Bank has brought the local economy to its knees and communities are harassed on a daily basis. The situation in Gaza is even more urgent. The Israeli blockade has entered its third year, and 80% of people are dependent on food aid.

To meet this new level of threat to the livelihoods of people in Palestine we need your help. Your support will enable us to work with local communities and women's groups in the West Bank and Gaza, giving them the tools and skills to create a better future.

Please donate today.

http://www.waronwant.org/palestine-appeal

Thank you for your support,

With best wishes
John Hilary

Avaaz Petition On World Hunger Crisis

Below is the latest mailing from the international web-based campaign group Avaaz:

With the recent financial crisis, poverty is skyrocketing in poorer countries, with 1 in 6 people on the planet now facing life-threatening hunger.

Next week, leaders will meet at the World Food Summit in Rome to address this growing crisis. The best solution is funding to boost sustainable agriculture in poorer countries, but the UK and other countries are backing out on a $20 billion promise made earlier this year.

Millions of lives are on the line. Sign the petition below for rich countries to keep their promises, and it will be delivered directly to world leaders through a spectacular stunt at the Roman Colosseum on the eve of the Summit:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/world_hunger_pledges

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. Yet the number of people suffering from chronic hunger across the planet has reached the record-high figure of 1 billion this year.

Hundreds of billions are spent by wealthy governments to bail out banks and financial institutions, but the G8 countries are trying to cut a promised $20 billion commitment to agricultural investment to only $3 billion in new money. With literally millions of lives on the line, this is a scandal.

The Rome summit is also our best opportunity to push governments to promote small holder agricultural production -- growing evidence shows that intensive farming models are not effectively countering hunger and have a highly damaging impact on our environment.

We are teaming up with anti-poverty organisation ActionAid and global farmers networks to show our governments that we refuse to accept a world where people die every minute from hunger. Sign the petition to the Rome Summit -- every signature will be represented at a stunning delivery event at Rome's Colloseum:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/world_hunger_pledges

With hope,

Luis, Alice, Benjamin, Graziela, Ricken, Pascal, Iain, Paula, Paul, Veronique and the entire Avaaz Team

High School Osborne......

This is a bit obvious....but worth posting anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnz5McrMbsI&feature=player_embedded

Food First

I have recently completed reading Food First, the influential book by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins of the Institute for Food and Development Policy that was first published in the 1970s. The book has lost little of its's power and if anything, the tragedy of the wasted opportunities of the last 30 years make it even more relevant.

The central message, that poverty and hunger are not chiefly about "over-population" or "primitiveness" or "resistance to change", still less about lack of "free trade" or access for Western multinationals. We still read these excuses wheeled out in the daily mass media. The chief causes behind poverty and hunger are the political and economic systems of both the developed and developing worlds that chain the vast majority to the route most favouring the ruling oligarchy. Corrupt local elites and global capitalism work in concert. The continued existence of this state of affairs rests to a large extent on the continued acceptance of a cynical and fatalistic attitude to human nature which is peddled by the mouthpieces of the ruling elites. But Moore Lappe's and Collins' book was a positive intervention by people who believed that ordinary people could, and should, make a difference.

In their postcript they wrote:

We want you to join us, not simply because of the urgent struggle to construct a just and life-giving society, but because through our own experience we have become certain that none of us can live fully today as long as we are overwhelmed by a false view of the world and a false view of human nature to buttress it. Learning how a system can cause hunger then becomes , not a lesson in misery and deprivation, but a vehicle for a great awakening in our lives.

I recommend the book and further reading from the works of the authors and the IFDP.

Weekly Links 2/3/2009

Very busy this week, so just time for a few interesting links.

Last week an in depth report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation delivered a damning report on New Labour's record as regards their promise of delivering a more equal society. The report is mixed to say the least. There is a marked contrast between the few modest but welcome reforms associated with New Labour's first term and the gradually deteriotating situation since -

Commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the study, by a team led by LSE’s Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, shows sharp contrasts between different policy areas.
Notable success stories include reductions in child and pensioner poverty, improved education outcomes for the poorest children and schools, and narrowing economic and other divides between deprived and other areas.

But health inequalities continued to widen, gaps in incomes between the very top and very bottom grew, and poverty increased for working-age people without children. In several policy areas there was a marked contrast between the first half of the New Labour period and the second half, when progress has slowed or even stalled.

More here. The Child Poverty Action Group respond here.

The Green Party Trade Union Group have posted video clips on their blog of the recent meeting on work-life balance addressed by Green MEP Jean Lambert and representatives of several unions.

Two new articles by co-author of the first ecosocialist manifesto Michael Lowy have been posted on the Ecosocialist International Network website, these are Ecosocialism and Democratic Planning (reprinted from the Socialist Register) and What is Ecosocialism? (Reprinted from Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.)

The climate change film, The Age Of Stupid is about to premiere on 15th March and has a new website. It is being launched at a "People's Premiere" at 64 cinemas across Britain.

Film Review : Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is already accumulating awards and is hotly tipped for the Oscars. I enjoyed the film, though at times it is a little schmaltzy (the Guardian reviewer said that it reminded him of Max Bygraves' rendition of A Deck Of Cards !) and the theme of escape from poverty and hardship through luck and fate (as it says in the film "It is written") is a little hard to stomach for those of us committed to collective solutions to many of the problems that face us in the world, and the importance of people choosing to try and take control over their lives. Nevertheless, the depiction of a life growing up in the slums of Bombay/Mumbai and the darker corners of India's "precarious" classes is by turns illuminating, funny, harrowing and shocking - at least for us pampered Westerners. This can give a slightly uncomfortable feel at times - a feeling of being a voyeur on misery, or a suspicion, unfounded or not, of complicity in making light of truly desperate situations.

In the film, whilst the squalid conditions of the slums and the horrors of communal violence, gangsterism and child exploitation are realistically depicted, the human spirit and humour shine through. The film depicts the authorities - especially the Mumbai Police - and some of those who have "made good" in the new India in a very bad light and is firmly on the side of the underdogs, the outcasts and the exploited.

I have not read the book on which the film is based, and had not read many reviews before going to see it, so I came fresh to the film and got all kinds of nods and references which may or may not have been intended - including the novels of Charles Dickens, particularly Oliver Twist (with a far more horrific hybrid of Fagin and Mr Bumble) and Great Expectations (this Pip finally liberates his Estella), Indian "Bollywood" Epics (as would be expected - the question master in the central Who Wants To Be a Milliionaire Show in the film is a well known Bollywood star), Biblical stories from Old and New Testament (Cain and Abel, Judas)and both the feelgood films of the 1930s and the film noir of the same period - with the interogatory theme and narrative eye throughout.

The 30's echos are particularly interesting given the economic times we are living through - with the same ideas of escape and glamour, the human spirit overcoming hardship and disadvantage and moral messages that were found in some of the films of that period. This may account for some extra success due to good timing.

Great acting by all concerned, particularly Dev Patel and Frieda Pinto as the central couple, excellent cinematography and a great script. This is undemanding and beautifully shot entertainment, without as sharp a feel as Danny Boyle's previous Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. Nevertheless, it will be good that the world gets to see a glimpse of another India beyond journalistic platitudes about the recent "boom" and tourist publicity.

Poverty Blogging

Today is a global day of blogging on the subject of poverty.
In my humble contribution I am going to link to some historic musical contributions on this subject, some with a good left-wing political perspective.

There are various versions of a traditional weavers song -including a popular recent one from Chumbawamba - Poverty Knock

Chumbawamba's version is here -
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nfwJ387cs00&feature=related

When people are poor, it does not mean that they should lie down and be patronised, or be prey to snake oil merchants no matter how "charitable". Some of the great songs popular in the hard times of the 1920s and 1930s in the USA not only poked fun at the religious organisations that sought to exploit misery to gain recruits alongside their charity, they showed a confidence in the power of poor, working and unemployed people to take control of their situation and make a better world. Maybe we need more of that spirit today and less grandstanding from popstars and politicians...

Here are Harry McClintock's Hallelujah, I'm a Bum and Big Rock Candy Mountain -

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yC0s3SiY8yc&feature=related

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CS6UmLhSK9U&feature=related

Beyond this gentle mockery, the singers associated with the Wobblies, the Industrial union spread by boxcar riders and itinerant workers across the States in the years before, during and after World War One (and still existing today) showed the strength that could be gained to fight poverty through fighting in unity for better wages and working conditions, with an eye on the final prize.

Solidarity Forever -
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kYiKdJoSsb8

Power In The Union
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KW58m7H2HK4&NR=1

Of course, as an ecosocialist blogger I cannot avoid mentioning the importance of environmental limits and climate change when discussing the question of poverty. It will be the poor who will pay the highest price for the inability of governments and corporations to tackle these problems. It is a good sign that alongside the long term social campaigning of the Green Party in England and Wales, groups such as Friends of The Earth are now trying to tackle issues from the point of view of "environmental justice" - a case in point being their recent challenge to the UK government over fuel poverty.