The council room of Camden Town Hall was packed out on the evening of Monday 10 January for the launch meeting of Camden United Against the Cuts.
Camden’s financial crisis is one of the worst in London and the sheer scale of the cuts is historic. With £80 to £100 million to be lost from the council budgets over the next three years, local departments are modelling cuts of between 20 to 25 per cent, with 1,000 jobs threatened, plus a massive cull in capital investment on top which faces a £400 million shortfall.
The story of these cuts undoubtedly starts in Whitehall. Like many inner city boroughs Camden receives a host of grants targeted at the most impoverished areas by central government. Just £1 in every £8 the council spends is raised through council tax. With many of the central government grants getting slashed by the Con-Dems, the result will be a bonfire of our local services.
Camden Labour Party’s bulletin to its members paints a bleak picture with youth clubs, libraries, sport facilities, community centres and senior clubs, all under review and facing the axe.
Libraries alone face a funding cut of 25 per cent making closures inevitable. Street cleaning, housing patrols, community wardens are all being cut back. The social care budget faces a huge 75 per cent cut.
The council also plan to withdraw all direct funding – i.e. free places – for the ‘play’ child care service with those who can still afford it facing higher charges.
The list goes on and on.
No wonder then that the launch meeting of the new campaign saw 189 people pack into the council room of Camden Town Hall.
There was an angry mood and the real feeling this was the start of an almighty class battle to defend our services.
George Binette, from Camden Unison and the Trades Council, warned everyone present, “what happens if we don’t win? Look across the Irish sea. If we don’t win this fight, what we will lose is enormous. It’s not hyperbole to say we face an historic attack on the post-1945 welfare system.”
Many speakers echoed his comments with a call to fight. But it was the pressure on representatives of the Labour Party, who have run Camden since the May election, in the room that was most palpable.
Local MP Frank Dobson addressed the meeting, and he certainly did his best to echo the radical sentiments of the audience. He said he was against all cuts and gave a damning attack on the Con-Dem offensive.
He also talked about how he had stood against the cuts of the Heath government in the early ‘70s when he was leader of the council, at the time refusing to pass them on with rate rises.
“But”, there was always going to be a “but” – he pleaded with those present to “understand it was difficult to break the law, that a great dilemma faced all Labour councillors”.
Dobson lost any sympathy he might have had in the room however, when he twice tried to justify, following a question in the audience, not replying to a disabled constituents’ email. His staff got “hundreds of emails every hour, most of it spam” – leading to cries of indignation from all sides of the meeting hall.
Candy Udwin, of Defend Council Housing, put Dobson and the Labour councillors present on the spot, “Frank says it difficult to break the law, but I think it’s harder to tell parents their play centres are closed, I think it’s harder to sack hundreds of workers.” Trade unionists in the audience echoed these words, John Reid, Camden RMT steward, said “Camden councillors should pledge no cuts, put forward a need’s budget, and resist cuts everywhere”.
There were also reports of battle lines already being drawn. Andrew Baisley, from the Camden Branch of the NUT, slammed the Con-Dem claim that education was protected, the fraud of the pupil premium, and outlined an appalling list of local education cuts. But he finished with a resounding message, “we are balloting for strike action in all Camden schools, we will work with as many public sector workers as we can to co-ordinate the resistance.”
The voice of the student struggles was also heard. Ruby from LaSwap, the Camden sixth form, spoke from the platform about the college occupation she organised and said our aim should be nothing less than “bringing down the Con-Dem government”.
Students from the UCL occupation echoed these comments, calling for a series of occupations of local buildings facing cuts and closures. “It’s not easy to break the law”, said Matt, “but it’s even harder to be thrown on the dole, to lose basic services”.
It was left to Labour Party councillor, Theo Blackwell, finance officer for Camden council, to defend their cuts programme. “I believe in setting legal budgets”, he said. “If the budgets are not set by us, they will be set by the opposition, if we vote them down, then the full time director will set it”. Although he spoke of “providing as much leadership as possible”, he said he “was not George Osborne."
The message was clear enough: I’m not to blame and don’t expect me to fight.
It was telling that the room was full of representatives of campaigns and struggles. It showed the potential of the alliance – it had succeeded in pulling together pensioners, workers, students, youth, community activists, and the socialist organisations. The task ahead is to turn the energy of all these layers into a truly mass campaign of resistance.
All local unions should follow the example of the NUT and launch ballots for action now – and link up with a campaign of community protests, marches and demonstrations.
There will be a Camden People’s Assembly in February, which must become a huge rallying point for local people, planning our resistance. And then a mass demonstration on the 28 February – the day the Labour council plan to vote through the budget.
