Gary Wareing is one of the “Hull Three”, three Labour councillors who voted against a cuts budget on the city’s Labour-controlled council. Along with Dean Kirk and Gill Kennett, Gary has been suspended from the Labour group. He is involved in the Labour Representation Committee and the Councillors Against Cuts campaign. He spoke to Sam Greenwood from Solidarity.
We are against austerity as a means of solving the current problems that the council and the country has got.
We weren’t happy about being bailiffs for the Tory government and making their cuts for them. That is not what we were elected to do.
When we voted against the cuts, the Labour Party locally responded really well. My ward Labour Party has passed a motion supporting us, and party members have told that they fully support our stand.
The Labour whip on the council asked me if I knew how serious it was to break the whip. But I don’t believe breaking the whip is a more serious crime than making 600 people redundant, and closing libraries and other services.
I have had fantastic support from Unite and Unison locally. At a local meeting, Unite called on councillors not to vote for cuts. My own union, [train drivers’ union] ASLEF, has been very supportive of the position we have taken. Council officers and staff may not feel able to say openly that they support us, but they have told me privately they are glad that somebody has taken a stand against the cuts.
After we broke the whip the Labour group on the council met and decided to suspend all three councillors. One of us got a three-month suspension and two others got an indefinite suspension, though all three of us carried out the same vote. We have been banned from associating with other Labour councillors.
We now can’t attend Labour group meetings and make our argument, so there’s a lower level of debate within the group.
Even though we have no input into deciding Labour policy on the council, we’re still expected to vote in line with group decisions.
The Hull Labour Representation Committee (LRC) and the Councillors Against Cuts campaign nationally were very important forums to discuss our ideas and plan our actions. The LRC has provided a space for political discussion and campaign planning that isn’t always available in official Labour Party meetings.
It’s the responsibility of the whole labour movement to fight the cuts. The trade unions have to build a campaign in the lead up to next year’s council budgets and local elections. Unions have to start putting more pressure on Labour councillors about what’s expected of them and how they should vote.
All Labour-controlled councils should be fighting collectively so individual councils cannot be picked off. Individual councillors, or even a single council, can be a beacon but ultimately one council cannot win on its own.
We heard the chancellor in the budget stating that austerity will carry on till 2018 at least; we could have austerity for the next ten years. The labour movement will need to respond to this, or local councils will not be running any services at all in a few years’ time.
The question of whether councils should set deficit or needs budgets is difficult, because council officers have a legal duty to stop deficit budgets being set and would not allow this to happen. The best response for a Labour council that wanted to fight the cuts would be to outline to local people and the government what budget they would need to provide decent services in their area, and campaign to demand the allocation of that amount of money. If they did not get that money, they should then say they are not prepared to set a budget.
That would bring them into conflict with the government and would provide an opportunity to mobilise local people and the local labour movement behind the council. Council staff should refuse to implement any cuts on behalf of the government.
We are in the worst crisis for 200 years, the longest recession since 1930, and this is only the beginning.
I think there is still a feeling among people that if they keep their heads down we will come out of this and go back to the good times of the 1990s and early 2000s. That is the past. The future holds further deeper cuts, higher unemployment, and bigger shocks to the system. We should be explaining that, and the alternatives.
The Labour Party is not a capitalist party, it is a socialist party. It should be putting forward socialist policies in opposition to austerity and capitalism. We should be explaining that there is no solution to the current crisis under capitalism, and capitalism is causing the problems. Our solutions should be a socialist programme of nationalising the banks, rail, utilities, and the leading conglomerates in the country and running them for the benefit of the people rather than the 1%.
What we have done is start to prick councillors’ consciences, and say “is this right?” We’re making them ask the question of themselves.
As far as I’m concerned, I remain a Labour councillor and of course a socialist. We have to try and win the argument at every level of the labour movement. We have to show the Labour group that party members and the working class in general don’t accept it is Labour’s job to implement cuts.
Labour Parties locally have in many cases been hollowed out, so they’re often mainly made up of councillors and their friends rather than being organs of local working-class communities and organisations. But from the perspective of the average working person, Labour remains the party of the working class.
If people went into local Labour parties and transformed meetings into mass forums where big decisions are taken and representatives are elected by a much larger and diverse cross section, and if even a tenth of trade unionists joined and were active in the party, they could transform it.
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