By Jeremy Dewar
Austerity returned to Lambeth, South London in a big way last month. The right wing clique that has dominated the local Labour Party for decades passed a budget threatening £99 million of cuts by 2029, frontloaded with £50 million coming in the first year.
Details have not been fully revealed, but we know that housing, adult social care and children’s services are targeted.
Lambeth has failed to build a significant number of council homes for years, preferring to reward property developers for gentrification projects. Now homelessness prevention and services for those on the street are being cut. In a cruel irony, a young man was shot dead as he walked down the stairs of his block of flats on the same day that the council voted through cuts to the Youth Early Intervention and Crime Prevention budgets.
Non-statutory services are first in line for the chopper. Libraries are to lose £1 million, a quarter of their budget. But don’t worry, we are told, this can be achieved with no effect on the frontline, by more ‘careful rostering’ of staff. The already overworked staff in question thought otherwise and voted immediately and overwhelmingly for a strike ballot to halt the 16 job cuts in the package.
The following week a packed Unison branch meeting voted to set its own ‘Red Lines’ in opposition to the cuts: no compulsory redundancies; safe and adequate staffing; no worsening of conditions; no higher workloads; and full consultation over new AI implementation.
The latter point provoked a useful discussion from disabled members, who saw some AI as beneficial. The point was amended to clarify that we meant AI that threatened jobs. After this was in place, the motion was carried, meaning we will ballot for strike action if no agreement is reached.
A further motion, setting in place a strike committee to spread the strike message across all workplaces and departments was also carried. Twelve new activists immediately volunteered to serve on it.
Lambeth Unison hired the Assembly Rooms in Brixton’s Town Hall for a public meeting to launch a campaign to ‘rebuild our services’. But when councillors heard of the nature of the meeting, they rescinded the booking.
These pro-capitalist creeps think that they own the borough’s assets and can ban any oppositional forces from using them. Residents and workers will no doubt remind them in time that Lambeth is not a one-party state, and that they have the democratic right to fight back. Undeterred, the meeting will go ahead on 12 April in St Matthew’s estate TRA Hall. Already the NEU, which has held successful strike ballots in 12 schools in the past year, is signed up, as are housing campaigns, pensioners’ groups and Lambeth 4 Divestment. With community action and joined up strikes we can win!
