We publish here a foreword – written by Socialist Appeal supporter and Chair of Portsmouth Momentum, Sion Reynolds – to the “Needs Budget” presented to Portsmouth City Council this week by Portsmouth Against the Cuts Together (PACT). Labour councillors need to lead the fightback against austerity and refuse to carry out Tory cuts.
We publish here a foreword – written by Socialist Appeal supporter and Chair of Portsmouth Momentum, Sion Reynolds – to the “Needs Budget” presented to Portsmouth City Council this week by Portsmouth Against the Cuts Together (PACT). Labour councillors need to lead the fightback against austerity and refuse to carry out Tory cuts.
Every year councils set budgets to outline their spending plans. Different parties, represented in council chambers in the form of party “groups”, may disagree on how much to spend on each area of public services, such as Education and Young People, Health and Social Care, Housing, etc. But they usually only disagree on how to divide up slices the cake. Only rarely do they decide they need a larger cake! A “needs budget” is a budget that is based upon what local services are needed, and the size of the cake is then decided upon after a full consideration of those needs.
A needs budget is a very democratic thing. It is the product of full popular consultation with networks and groups and individuals affected by public services. Consultation may be with the local Trades Council, with women’s groups, with local parents, with local residents in general. The key political consideration is that councillors should not be at the mercy of National Government in setting out budgets that meet the needs of local people. Councils, particularly Labour-run councils, are under a moral imperative to ensure that local public services are up-and-running and fit-for-purpose. Why should local people suffer the draconian closure of their Sure Start Centres, Dementia Care, Youth Counselling Services, by councillors slavishly following the class-ridden doctrine of “austerity”. What is austerity but the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich? Surely this trend should be reversed?
In Portsmouth North, 24% of children live in poverty. Worse still, in Portsmouth South the figure is 34% (Source: End Child Poverty). The proposed £11m cuts to local public services will only make this situation worse. When National Government spent more than a £1.4 trillion bailing out the banks after the financial crash in 2008, the cost of such profligacy has been passed down to local councils, who are expected to do more with less.
“Better to break the law than break the poor”
The needs budget follows in the tradition of great popular revolts against austerity in local government budget setting and rates. One fine example is the rebellion of the Labour-run Poplar Council, who in 1921 not only refused to pay the central levy of rates to London County Council (LCC) and other centralised London bodies, but who also put their socialist principles into practice by providing a proper system of outdoor relief to the unemployed, increasing the minimum wage for council workers, and implementing equal pay for women.
What brought them into sharp confrontation with the national authorities was their “rate strike”, which involved the borough council setting a rate for local services and its own purposes, but refusing to collect the rate for outside bodies such as the LCC. Poplar Council declared they would not pay the central levy, called “precepts”, until such time as they were based upon the ability of local people to pay. (Poplar, being one of the poorest boroughs in London, was being forced to pay the same level of precepts as other, more prosperous boroughs, such as Westminster, which had richer residents – on the whole – and lower levels of unemployment.) The Poplar councillors demanded “equalisation” of the precept payments, and refused to pay them until this was achieved.
For this, the Labour Leader of Poplar Council, George Lansbury, and 29 other councillors, went to prison. “If we have to choose between contempt of the poor and contempt of court,” said Lansbury defiantly, “it will be contempt of court.” The rebel councillors of Poplar were supported and bolstered by a huge protest campaign which eventually helped secure their release and the backing down of the authorities, in the form of their acceptance of the principle of equalisation by the establishment of a Metropolitan Common Poor Fund (MCPF) throughout London. Poplar had gained a significant increase in poor relief of £400,000. Further, as Lansbury reflected in a fine example of altruism, “Our imprisonment succeeded in reducing Poplar’s rates by six and sixpence in the pound.”
All this is an example of how councillors, through selfless, bold, direct action, can protect working-class people from the swingeing hammer blows of austerity.
Militant struggle
Another key moment in the struggle was in 1984-5 in Liverpool, whose Labour-controlled Council organised mass opposition to the Thatcher Government’s cuts to the rate support grant, and set a needs budget to boot. The councillors were supported to the hilt by the people of Liverpool. As the Council met to discuss its “illegal budget”, more than 50,000 workers and young people packed the city centre, singing in football style, “Labour Council, Labour Council, we’ll support you ever more.”
Consequently 47 councillors were banned and surcharged by the authorities. (Until the year 2000 a public servant who had been found to have unlawfully spent public funds, or caused loss to a public authority through misconduct, could be surcharged to recover public money). After a series of negotiations with Patrick Jenkin, the Environment Secretary, an agreement was reached and the Tory Government climbed down, giving Liverpool £60m worth of concessions. Liverpool shows what councillors can do when they are armed with socialist principles and backed by a mass popular movement.
The case of Liverpool also shows that a needs budget can be distinguished from an alternative budget, which is simply a budget that suggests a different sharing out of the cake. In recent years, the Labour Group on Portsmouth City Council (led by Councillor John Ferrett) have not even given us this! Instead, they have sought to amend the ruling group’s budget. It has been argued by local trade union branches and by many members of Portsmouth Labour Party, that this does not put sufficiently clear distance between Labour and the other parties.
This problem was exacerbated after the Local Election in May 2014 when the Labour Group on the Council helped vote in a Tory administration under Councillor Donna Jones. It is this same group of Tory councillors, often supported by UKIP and Labour councillors, that ever since have driven through harmful cuts to local services in Portsmouth. The fact is, in Portsmouth, the Labour Group helped the Tories into power. Local people are often asking, “Why should I vote Labour when they are no different from the others?” It is understandable that people should draw such conclusions.
Fight Tory cuts with socialist policies!
It is time to call for our councillors to stand up for local people by calling for budgets based upon their needs. For example, it is well known that the Council’s housing waiting list far outstrips supply. To deal with this basic problem, a needs budget might state that the City needs 2,000 council properties, and consequently provision should be made for 2,000 council houses to be built. Building workers may then be sourced locally, and employed under the aegis of the Council, and paid on a raised minimum wage determined by the Council (Poplar style), so that more money is put into the local economy rather than the pockets of Carillion, Balfour Beatty and other blacklisting, money grabbing monopolies.
Of course, in order to achieve a needs budget, you need to have in place councillors that are willing to vote for one. The years of austerity since 2010 have shown that the Tories and Liberal Democrats will always vote for cuts, as indeed will UKIP. Therefore, councillors are needed to be drawn from the labour movement, steeled with the ideas of socialism, working for a socialist transformation of society, and supported by a mass movement of the rank-and-file, inspired by the campaign against cuts and for decent public services. A needs budget could form a rallying cry of such a local, popular movement, which would boost its champions into office. Once such a majority of such people exists in the Council, experience shows that they would need to be brave and stand up for themselves against the full might of National Government and the Law.
The rebellion of Poplar Council in 1921 is an inspirational example of how councillors can use their majority in a council to drive direct action for the amelioration of social inequality within the borough. “Better to break the law than break the poor!”, as Lansbury would have it. It is also necessary for our councillors to be creative: to find loopholes in the law, and to find sources of income to keep the local services afloat and council employees continuing to be paid. Liverpool Council in 1985 went to the markets, in particular the French banks, in their attempts to plug the gaps in finances over the immediate short-term.
What would be needed in the long-term, of course, is a national government that can implement a full programme of socialist transformation that would support councils in their efforts to meet local needs. That would mean ending national government’s protection and promotion of the banks, finance-cartels, hedge-funds and other manifestations of capitalism, and instead making the priority the meeting of social needs and the reversing of class and other social inequalities. The means of achieving this would be the nationalisation under democratic control of the top 150 or so monopolies, banks and finance houses so that they can be run for the benefit of society rather than for the accumulation of capital. This is music of the future…but a needs budget would be a fine place to start!
