“I agree with every word of that,” said UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis at a conference in Glasgow last Saturday, in response to a contribution from the floor calling on local authorities to set no-cuts budgets.
The conference, “Strategy Conference: There is an Alternative – A Better Way for Public Services” had been organised by Unison Scotland and was attended by nearly 300 trade unionists and community activists.
Unfortunately, it quickly became clear from the rest of Prentis’s contribution that he did not really agree with local authorities setting no-cuts budgets. What he actually was in favour of amounted to lobbying councillors, publicising the cuts they were making, and getting everyone to “sign up to our agenda”.
The first part of the conference was platform presentations, largely taken up with arguments and statistics about why the Tories’ cuts did not ‘make sense’ (i.e. would weaken rather than strengthen the British economy): the cuts were not an economic necessity but an ideologically motivated attack on public services.
There was much useful information in those presentations. This was underlined by contributions from UNISON activists in the plenary session and in workshops: even amongst some sections of council workforces the argument that cutbacks were neither necessary nor inevitable had yet to be won.
On the other hand, some of the information in the presentations was more questionable.
Reasons why “Britain could not be another Greece”, for example, included: Greeks are corrupt and don’t pay taxes (which destabilises the economy); ‘we’ control ‘our’ currency because we still have the pound (whereas Greeks at the mercy of the euro); and the UK is classed as the fifth best country in the world in which to do business, whereas Greece is a lowly 109th.
(But Britain is a good country in which to do business due to factors such as it having the most draconian anti-union legislation, the weakest legal protection against redundancies, and the longest working hours in Europe. Perhaps it’s a pity Britain isn’t more like Greece?)
The issue of the role of local authorities came up again in the afternoon workshops. Could local authorities and political parties be allies in the fight against the cuts? The only logical answer is: Yes, provided that they oppose the cuts not just in words but also in deeds, i.e. provided that they refuse to implement cuts.
But that certainly does not appear to be the thinking amongst UNISON’s leadership. From their point of view, anyone who thinks that cuts are a bad thing – even if they are involved in implementing them at the same time – is to be classed as an ally.
This sets the stage for a re-run of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Labour-controlled councils declared their opposition to cuts but went ahead and implemented them anyway, saying that it was all the fault of the Tories in Westminster.
One other striking feature of the conference was that far more time was spent discussing building alliances with local community groups than was spent discussing co-ordinated industrial action against the cuts. In fact, the possibility of industrial action received only the occasional passing mention.
Repeatedly, the name of the recently deceased Jimmy Reid was invoked. Had he not dreamt up a new and effective way of fighting job losses? Had he not built an effective alliance against those cuts? Had he not been successful? Couldn’t the UCS work-in of 1971/71 serve as a model for the anti-cuts campaign?
(The answer to all four questions is: ‘No’.)
Links with local community groups are important. But they are no substitute for industrial action. And the need for an industrial action strategy had been underlined only the previous day by the announcement by North Lanarkshire, the fourth largest local authority in Scotland, that it intended axing 2,000 jobs over the next two years.
Two events were raised by way of how the conference should be followed up: organising events on 29th September (the Euro-TUC’s Europe-wide Day of Action) and mobilising for the 23rd October demonstration in Edinburgh against cuts, called by the Scottish TUC under the slogan “There Is a Better Way”.
The kind of campaign which took shape at the conference is one which will attempt to build links between service-providers and service-users, one which will expose the ideologically driven nature of the Con-Dem cuts, and one which will expose the impact of the planned cuts not just on council workforces but also on local communities.
All good stuff as far as it goes. But what the conference did not properly address is the question of mounting a campaign which demands non-implementation of cuts by local authorities, and the question of what an effective strategy of industrial action would look like.
