Building wealth on cuts?

Discussion at The World Transformed (TWT) festival that took place alongside Labour Party conference (7-10 October) reinforced how disoriented much of the left is on local government.

The TWT session on “ecosocialism” — really more about local community organising — featured a speaker from “Cooperation Hull”, a group of activists who have organised meetings they call “People’s Assemblies” in the town and are now planning to stand in local elections there.

Some of the organising Cooperation Hull has done sounded interesting and even impressive, but what their speaker said begged many questions.

One crucial one: they advocated “participatory budgeting”, but said nothing at all about the radical defunding of local government by the Tories or the need to fight for more, desperately needed resources.

It’s not radical to passively accept of the gutting of local government but dress it up with talk about “participation”.

The chair of the session hailed the Cooperation Hull speaker using a different buzz-phrase, one beloved of Labour left organisation Momentum: “community wealth-building”.

Again, this seems to amount to giving left coloration to councils fiddling around within the framework of accepting huge funding cuts, doing nothing to try to reverse them.

On 28 September the Guardian reported that “councils are facing a record cash shortfall of more than £3.5 billion in the coming year with jobs and services facing cuts… the situation [is] likely to worsen as the cumulative funding gap is predicted to rise even further to more than £7bn in 2025-6. [Public sector] union [Unison] said many local authorities were already considering job cuts as well as scaling back community services” — this after thirteen years of brutal cuts.

That the left cannot bring itself even to argue — let alone campaign — for refunding of local government is surreal.

Those who suggest radical policies are possible without winning more resources are making the Tories’ job easier.

As the barest of minimums, local government trade union and Labour Party activists need to create an organised voice indicting the Tories’ defunding of local government, and demanding more money and a commitment from Labour.