Following their recent conference in Bournemouth, the Local Government Association has announced that local authorities are facing a shocking budget deficit of £3bn in the next two years.
Councillors have described facing a “black hole” in terms of funding. And it is working-class communities who are expected to suffer the consequences of these shortfalls.
Over a decade of brutal austerity has eroded council budgets across the board. On top of this has been the impact of the pandemic and the menace of inflation.
Local authorities actually saw an overall 9.4% rise in funding in 2023. But inflation has devoured a large chunk of this increase, meaning that councils are still having to cut back.
The mantra the Tories live by is ‘cut red tape and trim the fat’. But the butcher’s cleaver has already bitten into sinew and bone.
“[The impact of these cuts] won’t just be around potholes that need to be filled, play areas that need maintenance, and grass that needs cutting,” said one council leader. “It will be around more fundamental things like children’s services and social care, and it will have knock-on effects for the NHS.”
To put it bluntly, there is simply nothing left to gut – not without causing disastrous damage to workers’ lives, and even to their life expectancy itself.
Uneven cuts
The wealthiest areas – traditionally Tory-voting parts of the country – have generally borne less heavy cuts than working-class inner city areas.
Some might be tempted to conclude, then, that this austerity is simply ‘ideological’. But that is not the case.
In reality, these cuts stem from the fact that British capitalism has never really recovered from the 2008 crash. Indeed, further economic hits – such as the COVID crisis and the returning spectre of inflation – have made the situation even more precarious.
Some Tory councils may have been more insulated from the full brunt of the cuts. But others have seen their budgets slashed to the bone.
Indeed, several of the councils now effectively declaring bankruptcy – such as Thurrock – are Tory-controlled. And there are others, also Tory-run, which are sounding the alarm.
“None of us can carry on like this”, complained Rob Humby, Tory council leader for Hampshire, to the Financial Times. “We understand savings have to be made, but we have got to the end of the line.”
‘Dented shield’
With council services no longer able to meet requirements, private outsourcing companies are rushing in to fill the gap – all at a ‘reasonable price’, of course.
Refuse collection; libraries and leisure centres; and even social care services in some cases: all these have been snapped up by private or arms-length companies.
It’s no coincidence, in turn, that strikes have broken out in precisely these services – from bin strikes in Coventry, Thurrock, and Bexley; to walkouts by library and leisure centre workers in Bromley and Greenwich.
Despite this mood of anger, local government unions, most notably Unison, have not made a concerted campaign against the cuts, which have resulted in a swathe of sackings of council workers.
In fact, some of the largest dips in Unison’s membership over the past period can be attributed to austerity-driven job losses in the local government sector.
For all their triangulations and boasts about ‘boxing clever’, meanwhile, Labour councils have proved totally ineffective at defending workers and their communities.
Their ‘dented shield’ approach, it seems, has proven to be more of a sieve.
No wonder that many workers see no real difference between a Labour council and a Tory one. Either way, councillors offer no resistance, passing on the same harsh cuts.
Fight the cuts!
Leader of Stoke-on-Trent council Jane Ashworth, writing in defence of local councils passing through cuts, stated in the FT that: “We will have to make unpalatable decisions which hurt our sense of right and wrong.”
But there is an alternative to simply lying down and accepting austerity. We can take inspiration from the huge movements of workers in the past that have resisted attacks such as these.
In the Poplar rebellion, and later with the struggles in Liverpool in the 1980s, councillors defied the establishment. They refused to implement the ruling class’ attacks – setting no-cuts budgets and prioritising the needs of workers.
What is needed now is to return to these militant traditions, but on a higher basis. This means organising a mass campaign against cuts across the entire labour movement, with the trade unions mobilising workers to strike back against austerity.
This should be linked to a bold socialist programme, based on the expropriation of the big banks and monopolies, in order to fund quality services in councils across the country.
In this way, millions could be brought into the fight. But this requires militant leadership, willing to struggle and show the way forward. Such leadership needs to be built.
