Though Cowards Flinch

I’m thoroughly in love with the Democracy Club website, backed by the people at They Work For You, who are extending the principle of recording how MPs vote to what positions candidates take. Some people have used it in really sneaky ways too – like asking about policies they’d hate (e.g. more police on the beat) to see which candidates give knee jerk reactions.

Reading over the results of the first survey, however, any inclination I had to vote Green in Canterbury rather than Labour – and I was seriously thinking about it – has absolutely vanished. Below, snippets from the survey, all of which can be found by entering a Canterbury postcode into the TWFY site, are selected to show precisely why I’m not voting Green and how they’ve confirmed for me every possible stereotype.

Issue one: Many people think taxes will have to rise in the next parliament to cut Britain’s budget deficit. If they do, any increases should disproportionately be paid by higher earners.

Response by Green PPC, G. Meaden: Agree. Statement: “But this does rather depend on whether the proportionality is measured in actual money or in a percentage of their earnings”

Issue two: The British government interferes too much with business.

Response by Green PPC: Neutral. Statement: “Though I tend rather towards ‘agree’”

Issue three: It would be a big problem if Britain became more economically unequal over the next 5 years.

Response by Green PPC: Agree. Statement: “Which it will do if any of the three main parties get into power”

Issue four: Despite the recession, Britain should increase spending on public sector services.

Response by Green PPC: Neutral. Statement: “Depends on which sectors”

Issue five:  A married, heterosexual couple provide the best environment in which to raise a family.

Response by Green PPC: Agree. Statement: none.

Some of these are obviously open to interpretation or the “I didn’t type what I meant” response. Such as, on the question of taxation, issue one, it seems like the Green PPC is saying that everyone should pay the same percentage of what they earn but that because the wealthy earn more, they’ll pay more. On this issue, Labour candidate Jean Samuel came out swinging with a “strongly agree”.

However, on some issues, the response of the PPC is unforgiveable and I’d destroy my ballot rather than vote for him – for example issue five, and the (rather cowardly, I thought) lack of justification for agreeing that a heterosexual, nuclear family is best. Again, Jean Samuel came out swinging, “A stable loving couple or single parents provide the best environment. It is the love and stability that matter.”

Even on regulation of business, Jean, who owns her own business and might therefore be considered suspect, disagreed that the government interfered too much with business. Not to say that Labour’s candidate is perfect. There are lacklustre answers on things like immigration and the local issue of the Scrine Foundation – which Jean said “is too late for discussion now” just as we know Tories are gearing up for their real attacks.

But even in terms of emphasis, Labour still takes the cake in Canterbury. Geoff Meaden’s strongest agreement was on tackling climate change ‘even if energy bills go up’ (though, to be fair, there were some good anti-war answers, which Labour either matched or fell a little short of) and on the issue of the Canterbury Museums and Westgate Hall, rather than on equality, taxation of the wealthy or regulation of business.

This is important and it spills over into issues like climate change. Without the willingness to tax the wealthy and to hold down prices for consumers even while forcing energy companies and other polluters to pay for environmentally friendly production and policies (like the ones which suppress demand), ordinary people are saddled with the cost of protecting an environment that large numbers are pretty careful about not destroying, if they can help it.

Taken all together, this is why I’m not voting Green. As a final note, it’s worth pointing out that the Tories are worse than any other party at saying what they stand for – Geoff Meaden of the Greens, even though I disagree with him, at least had the courage to give his view. Julian Brazier, and hordes of other Tories, have simply refused to engage with new media and voter. Could it be because their policies are all crap?

Stay tuned tomorrow or Saturday for my take on UKIP’s election leaflet for Canterbury – about as apolitical as one can get.

(Advance note: If readers concerned with this situation would check the comments section for some inaccuracies in my article, that I’ve edited, and some potential inaccuracies that I haven’t, I’d be grateful).

A short piece of real-world news. The University and Colleges Union branch at Kent University held an emergency members meeting at 1pm today in Keynes College to discuss the possibility of balloting for strike action.

This comes amidst news that twelve staff at the University Bio-Sciences department face compulsory redundancy, officially on grounds of competence. This is in a department of no more than two dozen and will gut immediate provision for the discipline.

Naturally UCU rejects the allegations of incompetence and several members present at the meeting offered similar examples from other departments where performance management reviews were given preposterously low gradings. One staff member pointed out that he had published fifty papers in the last ten academic years and brought in £1 million investment, but was given 0% at a research review.

The anger in the voices of staff sitting in the common room, awaiting the meeting, was clearly evident.

Apart from UCU staff there were many sympathizers present, including a faculty rep post-grad from Bio Sciences, who backed the UCU, several sabbatical officers and two SWP members. Kent Socialist Party members who are university staff also attended.

Outside Keynes College, UKC students and activists of the Socialist Students held a stall and petition against cuts in higher education, and in support of the UCU, raising the possibility of joint action between the students and staff if the compulsory redundancies are pressed ahead with.

A ballot will be held on whether or not to strike unless the redundancy process is suspended immediately, and a deputation proceeded from the meeting to see university authorities. Feeling in the room was clearly that a “Yes” vote would be the result; proposal to ballot was moved unanimously and no one spoke against the motion.

Sussex University recently faced a 29-hour student occupation in support of UCU’s efforts to resist cuts. The campaign there is on-going, but the statement released reminds us that these cuts are a result of the continued attempt to turn universities into a profitable business and that both top-up fees and cuts in university budgets are ways of lumbering the cost of education on to workers, whilst others reap the benefits.

UCU are likely to propose a series of one or two-day rolling strikes, so the time to organize for coinciding occupations is now, and students have everything to play for – their future included.

Dog bites man. Here in Canterbury, a number of residents groups and a significant chunk of the people who responded to a Tory public consultation on the proposed budget (of swingeing cuts) have been upset about plans to close several of Canterbury’s fine museums.

Bearing in mind that the city thrives on tourism, and that a related fixed capital project to improve and expand them might boost tourism income in the long term – while helping to boost employment in sectors hit by the recession – it seems mad to get rid of these museums.

Our local press sniffed blood in the water when the figures began to come out for the budget (that will be approved this month) talking about cuts of £3 million, half of what Canterbury City Council lost through investing in Icelandic financial derivatives.

Since then the Tory council ran a consultation exercise. The single largest block of votes (44.8%) flatly opposed the closure of the museums. Nevertheless the council executive has decided to close the museums and this will be approved on February 18th.

The importance of having a space, and professional staff, to show the many archaeological finds from Canterbury – which is a key area for Britain’s heritage – cannot be underestimated. This is precisely what the Tory plans strike at.

UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site in the city in 1988, including Christ Church Cathedral, St Augustine’s Abbey and several smaller churches in the location. The museums, including Westgate Towers and the Roman museum, are clustered around these important sites and form part of the itinerary of a large number of visitors’ groups.

Dr. Paul Bennet, of the Canterbury Archeological Trust, railed against the move. “It is the very combination of museums in different locations that with greater engagement ought to provide added value to the Canterbury experience. We should be exploiting Canterbury’s heritage assets more fully at this difficult time, not considering closure of the best of them for potential re-use as a retail outlet.”

These cuts form part of a wider attack on the services provided by the city council, including the demolition of Westgate Hall, a community centre which is one of the few centrally located indoor public spaces (which will be fewer still, once the museums go). Several sources have remarked that the area may be used for car parking, threatening a traffic control system that protects the centre of Canterbury.

What I really want to know is, is it justifiable to spend money ‘consulting’ the public when you are simply going to ignore the results?

Lib-Dem group leader on the Council, Alex Perkins, pointed out that, “At every opportunity every single liberal democrat cllr (18) has voted against the tory proposals to close the museums. And will be proposing an alternative budget on the 18th feb which provides adequate funding to keep them open.”

Of course one wonders what Mr Perkins would say if he was in the shoes of John Gilbey, Tory supremo. And what other necessary or commercially viable services he’s planning to cut to save the museums.

Having been told that the Socialist Students group at the local university is going to be building for the anti-war demonstration on October 24th, presumably with street stalls and leafleting, my main response was, “Why?” I have been a proud and loyal “stopper” since before the war broke out, but aren’t our energies better devoted to other things now?

The purpose of the anti-war movement, as I always saw it, was three fold. First, to prevent the war. Failing that, to maintain pressure on the government to make the wars as short as possible by bringing the troops home. Third (and centrally to this argument) the point was to create a nexus that would gather both the regular political activists and the irregular activists, those ‘normal people’ outraged by the war.

I think that, with certain qualifications, the Stop the War Coalition has failed on point number three. The main qualification is that engagement with the public has not ceased; petitions are still steadily signed on Stop the War stalls around the country – and in towns with major barracks such as Canterbury, that’s important. The SWP here do a solid job in that regard.

Notwithstanding this engagement, however, the socialist Left only has a limited number of activists with a limited amount of time and resources. I think these can be better directed towards union work and building to fight cuts to Council jobs and services. Moreover, I think that the forum for debate created by such a campaign would be infinitely more productive than anti-war work at this point.

As has been detailed on this blog over the course of several articles, the ways in which Councils are intending to cut jobs and services are manifold. Tory Councils particularly seem to be gearing up, possibly anticipating primary legislation to help them (when the Tories win the General Election) – which Paul has speculated on at length. Labour is thinking in the same vein – and cuts to education will be felt in local services too.

It can be argued that these issues are not of immediate relevance to students, but I think this is too narrow an approach. Students regularly campaign on free education, campaign for the protection of university staff and services. The SP-led Socialist Students organisation is also involved with the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign. These campaigns are at their best when they have the active support of other workers.

The position of these workers, in terms of organisation, political consciousness and ability to render aid to other workers, is directly affected by such cuts, and this impacts the position of students – which is one reason why so many students at SOAS went all-out to save staff in danger of deportation after dirty tricks by management.

So perhaps it is time for a little less concentration on Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Sri Lanka (etc – QUB/UU Socialist Society site gives an additional flavour) and a little more concentration on building the links (and, as an object lesson in socialist theory, updating the organisational concepts of?) solidarity necessary to sustain the campaigns about things which do have direct relevance to students. Which might, additionally, have the effect of changing the rather turgid and sterile character of SU politics.

There is no point in having a bastion of radicalism amongst students if those students remain isolated, and are not used to direct unionisation and the extension of working class organisation. For groups like Socialist Students, which often gets off the ground in towns without branches of the Socialist Party amongst local workers, this is doubly important. Isolated, students will be defeated every time.

About this time last year, I reported local news regarding the Scrine homeless charity here in Canterbury. The City Council had announced a massive cut in subsidies from an average of £177 per housed individual to around £66 per individual. Canterbury is possessed of the only night shelter in Kent and, I presume, the money for individuals at the previous rate was able to meet overhead as well as direct provision costs and thereby coincidentally provide services for others as well. The Council was not amused.

In fact, the Council had been struggling for a few years to cut the money being given to the Scrine. This year, the cuts having been made, the Council are now planning to withdraw a further £600,000 by cancelling three contracts for provision on the grounds that care is not up to standards. Obviously there was something of a vicious circle at work here: the Council cut funds, Scrine provision slips a little, so the Council cuts more funds. This July, all sixty-six employees of Scrine were put on notice, because the situation is quite dire.

For any reasonable person, it should be concluded that the amount being paid to the Scrine is not enough to cater for all the homeless people in Canterbury, which is why a little is being stretched a longer way. Violence against the homeless is not uncommon (see the bottom of this article for a ridiculous police attitude) and getting them off the street at night is a priority. The Tory-dominated City Council doesn’t seem to be concerned all that much; their criticism last was that service provision was determined by Scrine and that there was too much of it.

Shamefully, in a discussion at the Canterbury branch of the Labour Party, a former leader of the Labour group on Canterbury City Council backed the legalistic Tory arguments. Despite an employee of the Scrine Foundation turning up to the meeting, no decision was reached and no campaign was mounted against the Council. I turned up to the subsequent demonstrations in Canterbury against the cuts, but since then I haven’t heard much beyond these further rumblings from the Council, which wants to have matters both ways – up-to-scratch provision for a hundred and fifty homeless, whilst not paying the sort of money which would secure it.

Voltaire’s Priest (of Shiraz Socialist fame) has been in touch to highlight a similar situation emerging in Coventry. Coventry homeless services are under attack by the Tory city council. Out of a budget of £2.2 million, for example, Coventry Cyrenians – which had contracts to provide 2000 single people with beds and an outreach service to help the homeless get back on their feet – will lose £750,000. The council has cancelled the contracts. This is at a time when homelessness is increasing due to housing repossessions, spiralling unemployment and so on.

The Coventry Telegraph records that out of 1700 reports of homelessness from families last year, risen from 1000, only a third were granted assistance – and only 300 were offered temporary shelter while their applications were processed. Again, as in Canterbury, the attack on funding is resulting in harsher application of the legal criteria upon which aid is based. Yet Coventry City Council is (rather cynically) focussing on the need for ‘reorganization’ of services, and the need to move people on who have been living in sheltered accommodation ‘for 40 years’.

That an additional 700 applications have been made for the year 2008/9, in conditions of economic hardship, is just plainly ignored lest it be admitted that such people are part of the ‘deserving poor’, making it hard for the council to dismiss them like people who have needed support long-term and who the council now wants to force out.

This rhetoric also disguises the effect that marketization of the voluntary sector is having on services; groups are being played off against each other to secure lower costs for homelessness provision, but as can be seen in Canterbury, it is driving down ‘standards’, though whether or not ‘standards’ are being used as a political football is an open question.

Secondly, it takes no account of the number of people being turned away as ‘ineligible’ or the number of people who meet the ‘vulnerable’ criteria, but who aren’t offered beds whilst their application is processed – e.g. relative provision for sufferers from domestic violence nationwide is a quarter of what it was four years ago. This is an assessment backed by Mike Fowler, chief executive of the Coventry Cyrenians.

Various councils have attempted to explain away their cuts in the gradual reduction of the Supporting People grants. In the case of Coventry, the government have cut the SP grant by £3.3m since 2004, to around £13 million. It has never been the case that Councils rely only on this grant – they are expected to cough up their own funds as well. Having sifted through the Council’s accounts [1][2][3], gross income for housing increased by £24 million for the same period as the SP grant – gross expenditure didn’t keep pace, only expanding by £22 million. The cost cutting is not purely related to the decreased Supporting People grant, contra Steve Rudge.

What New Labour can be smacked about for is their failure as of April 1st this year to maintain the ring-fence around the Supporting People grants, in preparation for their folding into Area Based Grants. It is the worry of charities and other organizations that this will result in the diverting of money away from Housing Related Support to other local priorities, since the homeless are not an electorally powerful group. I think that this diversion is precisely the gambit we now see opening on the part of Conservative councils. It seems the spirit of Shirley Porter lives on in Tory Britain.

Something Tory hopefuls around the country should remember, when they’re lambasting unchristian Labour for paying more attention to the Guardian than the Bible.