Lyev
20th November 2010, 17:40
I'm sure some comrades have heard about the well-known "Liverpool labour council", in the mid-80s during Thatcher's reign, controlled by about 8 Militant (now-SPEW) councillors that refused to implement cuts. However, I sometimes think too big an emphasis is put on this event. Here is a passage from a fairly recent CPGB article, following Socialism 2010, the UK section of the CWI's annual event (like Marxism for the British SWP).
‘Take the Liverpool road!’
The other prong of revolutionary strategy according to SPEW carries on a tradition for which it became (in)famous in its days as the Militant Tendency - municipalism. Local councils should refuse to implement the cuts, but instead mobilise their communities in defiance. Labour figures who implement cuts should be unapologetically shunned. This was the position of comrades Kelly and Hedley - although the latter said that any resultant organisations pulled together should avoid “mad” names like No2EU, which “sounds like Ukip’s little brother”. (The room winced - of all the people to utter that line, an RMT regional organiser was possibly the most discomforting, since SPEW’s involvement in that electoral calamity last year could be put down wholly to RMT involvement.)
Calls were heard repeatedly for councils to “take the Liverpool road” - a reference to the Militant-led Labour council that ran Liverpool, starting around 1983. The Militant’s strategy was simple - illegally set a deficit budget, in defiance of Thatcherite reforms of local government, and demand that the central government make up the shortfall.
The only serious ‘success’ of this strategy - beyond the considerable extension of social provisions in Liverpool, which should be noted - came in 1984, when the government really did pony up £20 million for the subsequent year’s shortfall. At this point the narrative divides into two alternative endings. If you are a true believer in the heroism of the Liverpool 47, this is the proof that central government cuts can be defied, and the blame for the subsequent petering out of the Liverpool ‘red base’ lies wholly with sell-outs elsewhere, when a number of Labour councils previously refusing to set legal budgets caved in.
If you are not, your eyes drift to other great social conflagrations of 1984 - principally the miners’ Great Strike. Militant’s ability to get money out of Thatcher can be put down to the latter’s unwillingness to see a second front open up in that battle - like, for instance, a generalised strike movement or other rebellion in one of the UK’s major cities. In effect, Militant was bought off with small change from the state in the anticipation that it could be dealt with later. Indeed, it was - Thatcher froze Liverpool out, and the Militant leaders of the council (“a Labour council!” thundered witch-hunter Neil Kinnock) responded by adopting the ‘delaying tactic’ of issuing 90-day redundancy notices to all its employees. This finally ended all hopes of council workers launching an all-out strike. The Labour leadership had its chance - Militant was purged.
The Liverpool road never worked. It was a footnote to a more general failure of the workers’ movement to strike back with any kind of unity against, at that point, the most vicious bourgeois attacks of the post-war era. The continuing deification of this council - one would almost confuse it with the Paris Commune - is almost cultishly bizarre, coming from an organisation which normally has at least one foot in reality.
So that is the strategy - attempt to mobilise the unions around admittedly Keynesian ‘alternatives’ to cuts, combined with localist, municipal resistance to them. More detail was forthcoming at the ‘Rally for Socialism’ from Taaffe, SPEW’s leader since its foundation in 1997. First, we should make the call for a TUC demonstration before Christmas, rather than the current date of March 26 next year (comrade Kelly suggested that a march on that date would be a “funeral march” for many of his union brothers and sisters).
If the TUC does not agree to bring the date forward, the three big ‘left’ unions (PCS, RMT and FBU) should call a demo anyway. This should be used as a platform to call for a one-day public sector general strike, which in turn is a platform for a one-day general strike proper. Beyond that, the picture increasingly fades into obscurity - longer strikes, and then ... silence. “We have the strategy,” thundered Taaffe. “We have the ideas.” Comrades can judge for themselves.I made this post a while ago, but it didn't get much attention. The CPGB article got me thinking about it again.
This particular article from this week's The Socialist got me thinking about austerity measures (i.e. cuts to public services etc.) can be fought.
Link to this page: http://socialistparty.org.uk/issue/636/10141
From The Socialist newspaper, 1 September 2010 (http://socialistparty.org.uk/issue/636)
Slashing public services: do councillors have 'no choice'?
Campaigns against the Tory/Liberal government's cuts have wide support. But many councillors say that they are, in principle, opposed to cutting public services but have "no choice" but to implement cuts.
From 1983 to 1987 the Liverpool Labour council, led by supporters of Militant (the predecessor of the Socialist Party), refused to make cuts or increase local rates to compensate for Tory cuts. Instead they led a mass movement to win more money from Margaret Thatcher's Tory government.
Bob Severn recently spoke to Tony Mulhearn, who was a councillor and Liverpool District Labour Party's president at the time.
How was extra funding won by the 1983-87 Liverpool Labour council?
We drew up a set of vital immediate needs for the city and identified the deficit which had been caused by massive Tory cuts in the Liverpool budget. We then launched a campaign to claw that back from central government. It wasn't just a question of requesting it in a nice way but of making demands and then backing it up by a campaign of mass activity involving the trade union movement, community groups, women's organisations, the youth movement. Trade unionists played a key role in that campaign which reached out to the broader mass of the Liverpool working class. This placed pressure on the Tory government to make those concessions.
Could you give examples of the demands made?
We had the slogan of no rate [the predecessor of the poll tax and council tax] or rent increases to compensate for the Tory cuts. That then left a massive £30 million gap between income and expenditure. So our demand, which was extremely reasonable, was £30 million back of the £300 million that the Thatcher government had cut from the city's budget since taking power in 1979. That was the essence of the campaign.
How much money was won back and what difference did this make to the people of Liverpool?
There was a return to the city of something like £60 million between 1984 and 1985. It allowed us to continue our political programme of building houses, creating 2,000 jobs and creating apprenticeships. We developed social services, introduced new nursery schools, built a park, built six new sports centres - concrete examples of what can be achieved if councillors make a stand and back that stand up with a mass mobilisation of the working class.
What is your advice to councillors and councils today who say they don't want to impose cuts but have no choice?
I see, day after day, leaders of councils - so-called Labour councils - for instance in Liverpool, saying 'we have no choice but to implement these cuts'.
I go to a gym in the Knowsley area. I went there one Sunday and the first thing that hit me was a notice which said as from the end of July, due to government cuts, free swimming for young people up to the age of 16 and senior citizens will be stopped and they will have to pay £2.24 per session.
That is an abomination. Many young people will just not go, senior citizens will not go because they can't afford the extra £10-£12 a week. That is a major step backwards.
Now that council has a choice. They could have continued to pay, to continue to provide those free facilities, and campaigned against those government cuts. Similarly there was a council in the North West which is actually closing down a swimming centre and depriving kids of these facilities, saying they have 'no choice'.
There's always a choice. You either resist and say you are not doing it and back it up with a mass campaign, or you lamely carry it out with the apology that goes with it. I believe that all council leaders have the responsibility to defend the people that elected them.
Where should funding to prevent cuts come from?
Watch the so called 'flagship' programmes like Newsnight and News at Ten, and the observers and academics saying that we have this massive budget deficit, and the only way to fill it is cut, cut, cut. What is happening is a gigantic con trick which is being perpetrated on the people of this country.
There is very little mention of the massive handouts that were given to the banks. £1.1 trillion was made available to the banks. If the tax-payer got back just £150 billion from that £1.1 trillion there's your deficit dealt with in one fell swoop.
On the other hand the government are closing down tax offices and sacking tax revenue collectors when there's something like £50 billion lost through all kinds of tax avoidance schemes. The government are allowing that to happen whilst they prattle on about how the only way they can solve this is by cutting back on the living standards of the working class.
This should be totally rejected, and the demand made - the ultimate demand is to establish a socialist society - but a transitional demand would be that they get the money back off the banks, collect the outstanding tax from the super-rich tax dodgers.
Do you think its possible for a council today to win the public support involving not just votes but demonstrations and industrial action like the 1983-87 Liverpool Labour council?
If you demonstrate in action and translate the language of socialism into the language of housing, the language of jobs, the language of social services, the language of freezing council rents, the language of restraining rates increases, into the language of developing social services, people will understand then what exactly you mean as a politician.
Politics now is a dirty word. The sole role of the main political parties now is to confuse, to obfuscate, is to lower the consciousness of the mass of the people of this country and to kid them that there is no alternative to a programme of cuts.
What is required is an organisation that is capable of articulating the alternative. Even on a capitalist basis, important concessions can be won in the short term. We must demand that the real culprits pay for this crisis.
In the pages of the press, even sections of the capitalist class are exclaiming absolute outrage at the role of the banks. Barclays made £11.6 billion last year and they set aside over £2 billion for bonus payments. This is in the middle of a wage freeze.
It's outrageous and if you pose an alternative to the mass of the population, as we did in Liverpool, in a clear fashion, a campaign to get the cash back from the fat cats then you would receive an enormous response. We demonstrated that.
If that means demonstrations and strikes, and I think ultimately it will do, then I think that is the way the labour movement should organise itself; with a clear programme of industrial action, of strike action, to force the Tories back, and in fact raise the question of an alternative party that is capable of carrying through these policies.
The Liverpool Labour councillors were banned from office and surcharged by the district auditor. Wouldn't any councillors who refused to implement cuts face a similar fate?
We've got to draw lessons from history and draw on the positive features, but also examine the reasons why ultimately the Liverpool city council was defeated. The reason for that was the isolation of the council.
The major councils who started the campaign with us, backed down one by one and in fact implemented the cuts. Councils led by people like Ken Livingstone, David Blunkett, [Graham] Stringer in Manchester, the leader of the Newcastle city council. All of these entered the campaign opposing Tory cuts but succumbed one by one to the pressure. Most of those leaders ended up as MPs or in the House of Lords.
It was clear that once Liverpool was isolated the Tories, in conjunction with [then Labour Party leader Neil] Kinnock, gave the green light to the district auditor to attack Liverpool. It was the biggest demonstration of the dismissal of the democratic process, the removal of 47 councillors from office and surcharging them on the basis of a complete fabrication. It was actually a frame up.
We were accused of losing the city council £106,000 but that in fact was not the case. The Liverpool city council never lost a penny as a result of our actions. It was the actions of the Tories who deprived Liverpool because we set our rate late. There was nothing legally binding us to set it in May. They withheld funding that should have been given to Liverpool, put in the bank to generate interest to the tune of £106,000.
After being in Liverpool for three months, the only thing the district auditor could grasp at was this phoney notion of £106,000 loss of interest. That demonstrated they were prepared to use any device, any measure, to remove us from office, clearly with the collaboration of right-wing trade union leaders and people like Kinnock, and of course the Tory Party themselves.
There's no question in my mind that if three, four, five or six of the major authorities would've stood firm, Thatcher would've been compelled to retreat, as she did in relation to the poll tax.
What happened to us in Liverpool shouldn't be reasons for not struggling in the future, for not struggling at the present time and preparing ourselves in an even broader way, involving the mass of the trade union movement and the mass of the working class, and ensuring that no individual council is picked off.
So if some local authorities refused to implement cuts do you think that could have a national impact on the Con-Dem government?
I don't think there's any doubt that such a move and such a campaign which had broad support would compel to Tories to retreat. It's not the first time we've heard about 'there is no alternative' because that was Thatcher's mantra.
Clegg and Cameron say they're in this mess as a result of the spendthrift policies of New Labour. But under New Labour there was the greatest bonanza for the bankers in history with the lowest form of regulation, supported by the Tories and Liberals. All this needs placing firmly on the agenda in front of the working class so they understand the process that is going on.
I'm convinced that if the leadership is given from the top, and the issues were clearly explained, there would be an immediate response by the working class in opposition to these attacks. Unions like the PCS, the RMT, can give the lead and galvanise action by other unions. I think that's what we've got to concentrate on and point to Liverpool's history to show what can be achieved by a single council in a very short space of time.
Achievements of the 1983-87 Liverpool Labour council include:
6,300 families rehoused from tenements, flats and maisonettes.
4,800 houses and bungalows built.
7,400 houses and flats improved.
600 houses/bungalows created by 'top-downing' 1,315 walk-up flats.
25 new housing action areas developed.
Six new nursery classes built and open.
17 community comprehensive schools established following massive re-organisation.
£10 million spent on school improvements.
Five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached, built and open.
2,000 additional jobs provided for in the Liverpool city council budget.
10,000 people per year employed on the council's capital programme.
Three new parks built.
Rents frozen for five years.
Some of the achievements of the council in this 5 year period (as listed at the end of the article) are quite impressive and I can understand how such actions are conducive to wider support, thus when the organisation with members on a council leads a demonstration or something similar it's easier to get a heavier weight behind it. And it's also understandable how many CWI members are proud these achievements. However, on the other hand, giving this as an example of how cuts can be fought is somewhat problematic. Rather than calling upon the lefter portions of New Labour (or any other big centre-left party) to fight cuts (which at the moment I can't really see as anything but reformism), why not just call for grassroots action, from below? Although in Liverpool grassroots action was coordinated in tandem with the councill improvements in housing, employment etc. etc.
Also, I think it is often inherent in bourgeois political structures for "betrayals" (f.e. the selling-out of Kinnock and such) to occur in such circumstances as the Liverpool Labour council found themselves. So in a way such action as calling upon "socialist" councillors to fight cuts (on behalf the working class) can be self-defeating because said socialists are dropped into a sea of capitalist politicians who will defend capital and bourgeois interests as and when said socialists come into conflict with them. Now, there is a slight distinction here between a thoroughly reformist party (the Tories) and a reformist party with proletarian elements (the Labour party of the 80s with Militant inside it) because, due to pressure from the proletarian elements in Labour/Militant, the (class?) interests of the opposing parties came into conflict and so a few gains were made for the working class in Liverpool.
Furthermore, another problem with calling upon councillors to fight cuts is it will localised, as seen in 1980s Liverpool. So it's not something that can established across a large region or country. To add, half of me thinks that the working class movement should try and defend itself and fight every gain possible in the here and now, rather than just sit around complacently as public services are axed. I mean, if Militant are on the council why not just use them? But having said all this, if Militant's position on Liverpool council was ultimately utilised to effectively put socialism on the agenda then I'm not sure if there's any qualms that can be found in what they did. What does anyone else think?
Anyway, I am confused and may have tripped up on my words and/or confused some people (myself included) in the process. I am not sure what to the think of this article and nor can I work out a concise position of anti-austerity for myself, still. A few things to discuss then: what lessons can be learnt from the experiences of the Militant-led council in the 80s? Secondly, did they succeed in fighting cuts, ultimately? Lastly, and most importantly, what do you posit as a concrete strategy for fighting austerity? This is a bloody important issue, and the actions that try to prevent cuts do imply some sort of theory behind them, so it's an issue that needs ironing out for sure.Furthermore, there was this article in this weeks edition of The Socialist, SPEW's weekly newspaper:
Link to this page: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/647/10621
From The Socialist newspaper, 17 November 2010 (http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/647)
We need councillors who will fight the cuts!
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition launches its campaign for the 2011 local elections
"These cuts will hurt", warned the Tory chair of the Local Government Association, Lady Eaton. "Up to 100,000 jobs in local authorities will go. That's one in ten of the workforce".
Clive Heemskerk
The Con-Dems' savage austerity plans announced in October's comprehensive spending review put local councils firmly in the front line. Funding for councils from the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) will be cut from £31 billion in 2009-10 to £22.9 billion in 2014-15 - a 27% fall, the biggest 'departmental cut' of all.
At the same time councils will be expected to administer many of the cuts announced under other budget headings. These include the cuts to housing benefit funded from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) budget but administered by councils; the Department for Education's 12% cut in 'non-school' spending on young people (including the abolition of educational maintenance allowances for 16-19 year olds); and a 're-adjustment' of NHS social care funding.
Setting council tax benefit, averaging £900 a year and currently paid out by councils on behalf of the DWP, will be devolved to councils, but with a 10% cut in overall funding.
Councils will also become the final agency to apply the £500 'total household benefit' cap, through housing benefit deductions. "Outsourced", was an apt headline in The Guardian - "town halls must do Osborne's dirty work", it went on.
To say councils "must do" this dirty work, however, is wrong. Not unexpectedly, Labour councillors are already saying there is 'nothing we can do' to stop the cuts from being implemented locally, even where they control the council. But that is just not so. Councillors have a choice.
That's why the decision of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC - see box) to facilitate the widest-possible challenge in the local elections that will take place in England next year is an important part of building the anti-cuts movement. 32 million people will be able to vote in these elections, in every part of England bar London. TUSC is also involved in discussions to ensure an anti-cuts challenge is organised in elections to the Welsh assembly and the Scottish parliament, also in May 2011 (there are no local elections in Wales and Scotland).
The TUSC steering committee has agreed a draft policy platform for the English local elections, which will now be open for discussion in trade union branches and anti-cuts campaigns and finalised at a conference of prospective candidates in January.
It starts from the basis that councillors can refuse to pass on the cuts. Voting in May, it argues, can be not just a 'protest vote' but can actually stop cuts to local jobs, benefits, and services. Building support for TUSC candidates can be an important means of putting pressure on current councillors when they decide council budgets in March, and in shaping how they respond to the 'new responsibilities' they will have to administer.
What can councils do?
WHAT ROLE could councils play to stop the cuts, if the political will was there to seriously oppose the Con-Dem government's austerity measures?
Over the years councils have been stripped of direct funding responsibility for many different services. The TUSC election platform notes that former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who began this process, famously said: "I must take more power to the centre to stop socialism" - in other words, that public services that 'crowded out' the private sector should be curbed or, where they exist, should be opened up to private companies to make profits from public needs. New Labour continued this process throughout its 13 years in office - the turnover of private companies running public services reached over £80 billion in 2008, for example, 126% higher than 1995-96 under the previous Tory government. Now the Con-Dems' spending review announcement includes plans for 'private provider quotas' for councils' elderly care, early years, youth and family support services.
Despite this however, as the TUSC election platform states, councils still have enormous powers and responsibilities. They control budgets totalling billions of pounds spent on services from housing to schools, youth clubs, libraries, adult social care, crime reduction, sports centres, highways maintenance and refuse collection, to name but a few. They have legal powers over non-council provided services, including many of those now 'outsourced' that could be used, if the will was there, to defend jobs and services.
Councillors could - and TUSC councillors would, as the policy platform states - "vote against the privatisation of council services, or the transfer of council services to 'social enterprises' or 'arms-length' management organisations, which are first steps to privatisation". They could - and TUSC councillors would - push for councils to "use all their legal powers available" to "oppose both the cuts, and government polices which centrally impose the transfer of public services to private bodies".
That could mean that, for example, faced with the Con-Dems' housing benefit cuts, councils would refuse to evict council tenants who fall into arrears as a result of the changes - and withdraw from 'partnership agreements' with housing associations (HAs) and other 'social landlords' who fail to do likewise (and actively support HA tenants' organisations to fight for this policy).
Councils could also intervene in the private rented sector. The government hypocritically claims that its aim is to 'bring rents down', after housing benefit payments have ballooned to £21 billion - although the Tories began this by abolishing rent controls in 1988 and slashing council house-building (policies not reversed by New Labour). Councils cannot impose a legally-binding private rent limit but they could, for example, threaten compulsory purchase proceedings against multi-property landlords who move to evict tenants suffering housing benefit cuts.
But housing is just one area where councils with the political will to oppose the Con-Dem government could play a key role in resisting the cuts. They could use their powers to 'call in' and refer local NHS re-organisation proposals, for example. With a King's Fund survey showing that fewer than one in four doctors believes the government's new GP consortia commissioning plans - opening up £80 billion of NHS primary care funding to private companies - will improve patient care, councils could galvanise opposition to the Con-Dems' dismantling of the NHS.
Defending councils' budgets
Even some Tory and Lib-Dem councillors are criticising the government's 'free schools' plans (particularly in relation to faith schools) as endangering socially cohesive local education. Councils could use their 'schools organisation' and admissions monitoring powers, governor appointments etc - and initiate consultative parents' ballots, for example - to build a public campaign of opposition to these and the equally divisive accelerated academies programme. Councillors, it is clear, have a choice - they don't have to do the government's 'dirty work'. They can resist.
But what can councils do when faced with government cuts to the centrally allocated 'revenue support grants' they receive to pay for council-funded services? The TUSC draft election platform states that councils should refuse to implement these cuts, and reject above inflation increases in council tax, rents and service charges to compensate for them. If even a handful of councils were to make such a stand it would electrify the mass opposition to the cuts that is developing.
As Margaret Thatcher's resignation 20 years ago this November shows, in the face of mass non-payment of the poll tax, even the seemingly most imposing government - and the Con-Dem coalition is not that - can be forced to retreat if it faces a sufficiently powerful mass campaign of opposition. Not only was Thatcher removed but the Tories were forced, within weeks of her downfall, to put an extra £4.3 billion into local government funding (around £7 billion today) to finance the abolition of the poll tax.
The TUSC policy platform argues that the best way that councils can contribute to mobilising the mass campaign necessary to defeat the cuts is to set budgets that meet the needs of their local communities, without massive council tax hikes, and combine together to demand that the government makes up the funding shortfall. That is the 'Liverpool model' which in 1984 enabled the city's Labour council, led by Militant supporters, the predecessor of the Socialist Party, to compel Thatcher's government to concede extra resources to the city worth up to £60 million (£98 million today).
But the campaign in support of Liverpool's 'needs budget' had been long prepared, even before Labour won a majority on the council in 1983. A 25,000-strong demonstration was organised in November 1983 and the budget meeting itself, in March 1984, just weeks after the start of the miners' strike, took place against the backdrop of a city-wide one day strike and a 50,000-strong march to the town hall. The anti-cuts movement will grow rapidly, given confidence by events such as the student demonstration in November and the combative stance of unions such as the Fire Brigades Union, the PCS civil servants' union and the RMT transport workers, but it is still at an early stage. There is certainly no group of councillors who have prepared the ground as the Liverpool councillors had in 1984.
So, for the next budget-setting period, the draft TUSC policy platform also includes support for councillors who are prepared to use councils' reserves and 'prudential borrowing' powers to avoid passing on government cuts. Such a policy is completely within a council's legal powers.
Council finance officers can challenge a budget they believe to be 'knowingly unbalanced', in other words, a planned deficit - which a 'needs budget' without massive council tax rises would be - but they can only question an individual council's ability to meet short-term debt re-payments. The use of reserves to meet such initial debt re-payments, for example, is legally a 'matter of judgement' for councillors to make. Councillors have a choice.
In some respects this approach would be a 'Liverpool in reverse sequence'. In 1984 the mass campaign led by the council was able to extract extra resources from the government. The campaign continued in 1985 but, with the defeat of the miners' strike, and under ferocious attack from a Labour Party leadership doing Thatcher's work for her - effectively, with Liverpool left isolated - the council had to resist cuts and sustain its house-building programme for a second year by using its borrowing powers.
'Legality' and a mass campaign
COUNCILS USING their reserves and borrowing powers to avoid making cuts in this budget-setting period would only be buying time before they faced an inevitable showdown with the government for extra resources. Ultimately, there is no 'clever tactic' that can avoid the need to build a mass campaign against the cuts.
There is, of course, no guarantee in any struggle. Most Labour councillors are 'New Labour', indistinguishable from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in their pro-market policies and outlook. But even those who sincerely want to oppose the cuts still hesitate before the Liverpool road. Eventually, having defied the government for four years and won lasting gains for the city, the Liverpool councillors were surcharged and dismissed from office in March 1987.
The law has changed since the 1980s. The 2000 Local Government Act abolished the power of surcharge, for example, except for cases of personal gain. As importantly, the actual course of the events in Liverpool needs to be rescued from right-wing myth-making. It was not the setting of a needs budget or the later decision, in 1985, to fall back on the council's borrowing powers, that the councillors were surcharged for. It was the decision to delay setting a rate at all (rates were the local tax levy then), that was used as the legal pretext to charge the councillors with 'wilfully incurring financial loss' to the city.
This 'no rate' strategy was decided on by the leaders of 20 other Labour councils, ironically against the Liverpool councillors' advice (Liverpool went along with it to keep a united front), who then all - bar Lambeth council - backed down to leave Liverpool to fight alone. Nobody is proposing not setting a council tax rate today.
It was also significant that the councillors were only taken on by the district auditor in 1985 and not in 1984, when they had also delayed setting a rate (as some Labour defections meant no party had been able to get a majority for its budget in the council chamber). It was only when the mass campaign had ebbed - not in Liverpool but elsewhere - after the miners had been defeated, the other Labour councils had capitulated and Liverpool had been attacked and left isolated by the Labour Party leaders, that the Thatcher government felt confident enough to 'apply the law'.
The situation today is different. The Con-Dem cuts are the worst in generations, permanently changing life in Britain, as Cameron himself has explained. They will be resisted, no matter what the axe men decide - in parliament or the council chamber - and the opposition has only just begun. Councillors who are prepared to fight could play a historic role in the inevitable resistance
Fight or stand aside - or face a challenge
THE CLAIM that there is 'nothing Labour can do' to stop the cuts 'until the next election' - leaving aside its support for 'less deep and fast' cuts if it did come to power - is disproved by one simple demand.
If Ed Miliband was to stand up tomorrow and commit an incoming Labour government to meet the debts incurred by councils who borrowed rather than made the savage cuts demanded of them, then not one council would have a reason to make the cuts. The same pledge could be made to other public and semi-public bodies like universities, health authorities, school governing boards, housing associations etc which incur 'temporary' deficits to avoid implementing cuts.
Many trade union leaders still hope that 'Labour will listen' and resist the cuts. Let them ask for such a pledge, which would, in local government, save the 100,000 jobs at threat and the services they provide. But if, as is almost certain, they don't get it, then they must admit that the only option is to fight and build a mass campaign, including standing or backing candidates in the 2011 local elections who will fight the cuts.
Some Labour councillors will no doubt sincerely wish to oppose the cuts but draw back at the prospect of taking a bold stand. They should resign and make way for those who will. Whatever, it should be made clear to all councillors: councillors can fight the cuts and TUSC candidates will - and will contest the seats of those councillors who vote for cuts.
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What is TUSC?
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition was set-up in 2010 to enable trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists who wanted to resist the pro-austerity consensus of the establishment parties to stand candidates in the 2010 general election. By registering TUSC with the electoral commission, candidates could appear on the ballot paper as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition rather than as 'Independent' which they would otherwise have to do under electoral law.
TUSC came out of a series of discussions by participants in the No2EU - Yes to Democracy coalition, which contested the 2009 European elections with the official support of the RMT transport workers' union, the Socialist Party, Solidarity - Scotland's Socialist Movement, and others.
TUSC is a coalition with a steering committee which includes, in a personal capacity, the RMT general secretary Bob Crow, and fellow executive member Craig Johnston; the assistant general secretary of the PCS civil servants' union, Chris Baugh, and the union's vice-president, John McInally; the vice-president of the National Union of Teachers, Nina Franklin; and the recently retired general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Brian Caton. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party are also represented on the committee.
TUSC was established as a federal 'umbrella' coalition, with an agreed core policy statement endorsed by all its candidates but with participating organisations accountable for their own campaigns. Its core policies include, amongst others, opposition to public spending cuts and privatisation, student grants not fees, the repeal of the anti-trade union laws, and a clear socialist commitment to "bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment".
The draft local elections policy platform agreed by the steering committee is a supplement to the core policy statement. It will be finalised at a conference in January and will form the basis on which any prospective council candidate can stand under the TUSC name in May's elections.I am starting to come closer and closer to the view that Liverpool didn't really achieve that much in the wider scheme of things, especially in the volatile and quickly-changing landscape of 80s Britain. If, then, Liverpool was a failure, calling on councils to follow the "Liverpool road" is something of a moot point. And this is disregarding the fact that probably no council anywhere will refuse to implement cuts: whether a councillor is tory or at least nominally socialist they are constrained by the bourgeois economic formations they are working within, or at least to an extent. With the effort it would take to mobilise a campaign for councillors to reject local cuts, it would likely take just as much time and effort to organise a grassroots campaign from below (having said this, the Militant council did actually have broad support from the Liverpudlian working class). In part, I am also kind of a bit weary of standing on a platform like this anyway. I still haven't made up my mind entirely on this whole issue. What does anyone else think on the matter?
‘Take the Liverpool road!’
The other prong of revolutionary strategy according to SPEW carries on a tradition for which it became (in)famous in its days as the Militant Tendency - municipalism. Local councils should refuse to implement the cuts, but instead mobilise their communities in defiance. Labour figures who implement cuts should be unapologetically shunned. This was the position of comrades Kelly and Hedley - although the latter said that any resultant organisations pulled together should avoid “mad” names like No2EU, which “sounds like Ukip’s little brother”. (The room winced - of all the people to utter that line, an RMT regional organiser was possibly the most discomforting, since SPEW’s involvement in that electoral calamity last year could be put down wholly to RMT involvement.)
Calls were heard repeatedly for councils to “take the Liverpool road” - a reference to the Militant-led Labour council that ran Liverpool, starting around 1983. The Militant’s strategy was simple - illegally set a deficit budget, in defiance of Thatcherite reforms of local government, and demand that the central government make up the shortfall.
The only serious ‘success’ of this strategy - beyond the considerable extension of social provisions in Liverpool, which should be noted - came in 1984, when the government really did pony up £20 million for the subsequent year’s shortfall. At this point the narrative divides into two alternative endings. If you are a true believer in the heroism of the Liverpool 47, this is the proof that central government cuts can be defied, and the blame for the subsequent petering out of the Liverpool ‘red base’ lies wholly with sell-outs elsewhere, when a number of Labour councils previously refusing to set legal budgets caved in.
If you are not, your eyes drift to other great social conflagrations of 1984 - principally the miners’ Great Strike. Militant’s ability to get money out of Thatcher can be put down to the latter’s unwillingness to see a second front open up in that battle - like, for instance, a generalised strike movement or other rebellion in one of the UK’s major cities. In effect, Militant was bought off with small change from the state in the anticipation that it could be dealt with later. Indeed, it was - Thatcher froze Liverpool out, and the Militant leaders of the council (“a Labour council!” thundered witch-hunter Neil Kinnock) responded by adopting the ‘delaying tactic’ of issuing 90-day redundancy notices to all its employees. This finally ended all hopes of council workers launching an all-out strike. The Labour leadership had its chance - Militant was purged.
The Liverpool road never worked. It was a footnote to a more general failure of the workers’ movement to strike back with any kind of unity against, at that point, the most vicious bourgeois attacks of the post-war era. The continuing deification of this council - one would almost confuse it with the Paris Commune - is almost cultishly bizarre, coming from an organisation which normally has at least one foot in reality.
So that is the strategy - attempt to mobilise the unions around admittedly Keynesian ‘alternatives’ to cuts, combined with localist, municipal resistance to them. More detail was forthcoming at the ‘Rally for Socialism’ from Taaffe, SPEW’s leader since its foundation in 1997. First, we should make the call for a TUC demonstration before Christmas, rather than the current date of March 26 next year (comrade Kelly suggested that a march on that date would be a “funeral march” for many of his union brothers and sisters).
If the TUC does not agree to bring the date forward, the three big ‘left’ unions (PCS, RMT and FBU) should call a demo anyway. This should be used as a platform to call for a one-day public sector general strike, which in turn is a platform for a one-day general strike proper. Beyond that, the picture increasingly fades into obscurity - longer strikes, and then ... silence. “We have the strategy,” thundered Taaffe. “We have the ideas.” Comrades can judge for themselves.I made this post a while ago, but it didn't get much attention. The CPGB article got me thinking about it again.
This particular article from this week's The Socialist got me thinking about austerity measures (i.e. cuts to public services etc.) can be fought.
Link to this page: http://socialistparty.org.uk/issue/636/10141
From The Socialist newspaper, 1 September 2010 (http://socialistparty.org.uk/issue/636)
Slashing public services: do councillors have 'no choice'?
Campaigns against the Tory/Liberal government's cuts have wide support. But many councillors say that they are, in principle, opposed to cutting public services but have "no choice" but to implement cuts.
From 1983 to 1987 the Liverpool Labour council, led by supporters of Militant (the predecessor of the Socialist Party), refused to make cuts or increase local rates to compensate for Tory cuts. Instead they led a mass movement to win more money from Margaret Thatcher's Tory government.
Bob Severn recently spoke to Tony Mulhearn, who was a councillor and Liverpool District Labour Party's president at the time.
How was extra funding won by the 1983-87 Liverpool Labour council?
We drew up a set of vital immediate needs for the city and identified the deficit which had been caused by massive Tory cuts in the Liverpool budget. We then launched a campaign to claw that back from central government. It wasn't just a question of requesting it in a nice way but of making demands and then backing it up by a campaign of mass activity involving the trade union movement, community groups, women's organisations, the youth movement. Trade unionists played a key role in that campaign which reached out to the broader mass of the Liverpool working class. This placed pressure on the Tory government to make those concessions.
Could you give examples of the demands made?
We had the slogan of no rate [the predecessor of the poll tax and council tax] or rent increases to compensate for the Tory cuts. That then left a massive £30 million gap between income and expenditure. So our demand, which was extremely reasonable, was £30 million back of the £300 million that the Thatcher government had cut from the city's budget since taking power in 1979. That was the essence of the campaign.
How much money was won back and what difference did this make to the people of Liverpool?
There was a return to the city of something like £60 million between 1984 and 1985. It allowed us to continue our political programme of building houses, creating 2,000 jobs and creating apprenticeships. We developed social services, introduced new nursery schools, built a park, built six new sports centres - concrete examples of what can be achieved if councillors make a stand and back that stand up with a mass mobilisation of the working class.
What is your advice to councillors and councils today who say they don't want to impose cuts but have no choice?
I see, day after day, leaders of councils - so-called Labour councils - for instance in Liverpool, saying 'we have no choice but to implement these cuts'.
I go to a gym in the Knowsley area. I went there one Sunday and the first thing that hit me was a notice which said as from the end of July, due to government cuts, free swimming for young people up to the age of 16 and senior citizens will be stopped and they will have to pay £2.24 per session.
That is an abomination. Many young people will just not go, senior citizens will not go because they can't afford the extra £10-£12 a week. That is a major step backwards.
Now that council has a choice. They could have continued to pay, to continue to provide those free facilities, and campaigned against those government cuts. Similarly there was a council in the North West which is actually closing down a swimming centre and depriving kids of these facilities, saying they have 'no choice'.
There's always a choice. You either resist and say you are not doing it and back it up with a mass campaign, or you lamely carry it out with the apology that goes with it. I believe that all council leaders have the responsibility to defend the people that elected them.
Where should funding to prevent cuts come from?
Watch the so called 'flagship' programmes like Newsnight and News at Ten, and the observers and academics saying that we have this massive budget deficit, and the only way to fill it is cut, cut, cut. What is happening is a gigantic con trick which is being perpetrated on the people of this country.
There is very little mention of the massive handouts that were given to the banks. £1.1 trillion was made available to the banks. If the tax-payer got back just £150 billion from that £1.1 trillion there's your deficit dealt with in one fell swoop.
On the other hand the government are closing down tax offices and sacking tax revenue collectors when there's something like £50 billion lost through all kinds of tax avoidance schemes. The government are allowing that to happen whilst they prattle on about how the only way they can solve this is by cutting back on the living standards of the working class.
This should be totally rejected, and the demand made - the ultimate demand is to establish a socialist society - but a transitional demand would be that they get the money back off the banks, collect the outstanding tax from the super-rich tax dodgers.
Do you think its possible for a council today to win the public support involving not just votes but demonstrations and industrial action like the 1983-87 Liverpool Labour council?
If you demonstrate in action and translate the language of socialism into the language of housing, the language of jobs, the language of social services, the language of freezing council rents, the language of restraining rates increases, into the language of developing social services, people will understand then what exactly you mean as a politician.
Politics now is a dirty word. The sole role of the main political parties now is to confuse, to obfuscate, is to lower the consciousness of the mass of the people of this country and to kid them that there is no alternative to a programme of cuts.
What is required is an organisation that is capable of articulating the alternative. Even on a capitalist basis, important concessions can be won in the short term. We must demand that the real culprits pay for this crisis.
In the pages of the press, even sections of the capitalist class are exclaiming absolute outrage at the role of the banks. Barclays made £11.6 billion last year and they set aside over £2 billion for bonus payments. This is in the middle of a wage freeze.
It's outrageous and if you pose an alternative to the mass of the population, as we did in Liverpool, in a clear fashion, a campaign to get the cash back from the fat cats then you would receive an enormous response. We demonstrated that.
If that means demonstrations and strikes, and I think ultimately it will do, then I think that is the way the labour movement should organise itself; with a clear programme of industrial action, of strike action, to force the Tories back, and in fact raise the question of an alternative party that is capable of carrying through these policies.
The Liverpool Labour councillors were banned from office and surcharged by the district auditor. Wouldn't any councillors who refused to implement cuts face a similar fate?
We've got to draw lessons from history and draw on the positive features, but also examine the reasons why ultimately the Liverpool city council was defeated. The reason for that was the isolation of the council.
The major councils who started the campaign with us, backed down one by one and in fact implemented the cuts. Councils led by people like Ken Livingstone, David Blunkett, [Graham] Stringer in Manchester, the leader of the Newcastle city council. All of these entered the campaign opposing Tory cuts but succumbed one by one to the pressure. Most of those leaders ended up as MPs or in the House of Lords.
It was clear that once Liverpool was isolated the Tories, in conjunction with [then Labour Party leader Neil] Kinnock, gave the green light to the district auditor to attack Liverpool. It was the biggest demonstration of the dismissal of the democratic process, the removal of 47 councillors from office and surcharging them on the basis of a complete fabrication. It was actually a frame up.
We were accused of losing the city council £106,000 but that in fact was not the case. The Liverpool city council never lost a penny as a result of our actions. It was the actions of the Tories who deprived Liverpool because we set our rate late. There was nothing legally binding us to set it in May. They withheld funding that should have been given to Liverpool, put in the bank to generate interest to the tune of £106,000.
After being in Liverpool for three months, the only thing the district auditor could grasp at was this phoney notion of £106,000 loss of interest. That demonstrated they were prepared to use any device, any measure, to remove us from office, clearly with the collaboration of right-wing trade union leaders and people like Kinnock, and of course the Tory Party themselves.
There's no question in my mind that if three, four, five or six of the major authorities would've stood firm, Thatcher would've been compelled to retreat, as she did in relation to the poll tax.
What happened to us in Liverpool shouldn't be reasons for not struggling in the future, for not struggling at the present time and preparing ourselves in an even broader way, involving the mass of the trade union movement and the mass of the working class, and ensuring that no individual council is picked off.
So if some local authorities refused to implement cuts do you think that could have a national impact on the Con-Dem government?
I don't think there's any doubt that such a move and such a campaign which had broad support would compel to Tories to retreat. It's not the first time we've heard about 'there is no alternative' because that was Thatcher's mantra.
Clegg and Cameron say they're in this mess as a result of the spendthrift policies of New Labour. But under New Labour there was the greatest bonanza for the bankers in history with the lowest form of regulation, supported by the Tories and Liberals. All this needs placing firmly on the agenda in front of the working class so they understand the process that is going on.
I'm convinced that if the leadership is given from the top, and the issues were clearly explained, there would be an immediate response by the working class in opposition to these attacks. Unions like the PCS, the RMT, can give the lead and galvanise action by other unions. I think that's what we've got to concentrate on and point to Liverpool's history to show what can be achieved by a single council in a very short space of time.
Achievements of the 1983-87 Liverpool Labour council include:
6,300 families rehoused from tenements, flats and maisonettes.
4,800 houses and bungalows built.
7,400 houses and flats improved.
600 houses/bungalows created by 'top-downing' 1,315 walk-up flats.
25 new housing action areas developed.
Six new nursery classes built and open.
17 community comprehensive schools established following massive re-organisation.
£10 million spent on school improvements.
Five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached, built and open.
2,000 additional jobs provided for in the Liverpool city council budget.
10,000 people per year employed on the council's capital programme.
Three new parks built.
Rents frozen for five years.
Some of the achievements of the council in this 5 year period (as listed at the end of the article) are quite impressive and I can understand how such actions are conducive to wider support, thus when the organisation with members on a council leads a demonstration or something similar it's easier to get a heavier weight behind it. And it's also understandable how many CWI members are proud these achievements. However, on the other hand, giving this as an example of how cuts can be fought is somewhat problematic. Rather than calling upon the lefter portions of New Labour (or any other big centre-left party) to fight cuts (which at the moment I can't really see as anything but reformism), why not just call for grassroots action, from below? Although in Liverpool grassroots action was coordinated in tandem with the councill improvements in housing, employment etc. etc.
Also, I think it is often inherent in bourgeois political structures for "betrayals" (f.e. the selling-out of Kinnock and such) to occur in such circumstances as the Liverpool Labour council found themselves. So in a way such action as calling upon "socialist" councillors to fight cuts (on behalf the working class) can be self-defeating because said socialists are dropped into a sea of capitalist politicians who will defend capital and bourgeois interests as and when said socialists come into conflict with them. Now, there is a slight distinction here between a thoroughly reformist party (the Tories) and a reformist party with proletarian elements (the Labour party of the 80s with Militant inside it) because, due to pressure from the proletarian elements in Labour/Militant, the (class?) interests of the opposing parties came into conflict and so a few gains were made for the working class in Liverpool.
Furthermore, another problem with calling upon councillors to fight cuts is it will localised, as seen in 1980s Liverpool. So it's not something that can established across a large region or country. To add, half of me thinks that the working class movement should try and defend itself and fight every gain possible in the here and now, rather than just sit around complacently as public services are axed. I mean, if Militant are on the council why not just use them? But having said all this, if Militant's position on Liverpool council was ultimately utilised to effectively put socialism on the agenda then I'm not sure if there's any qualms that can be found in what they did. What does anyone else think?
Anyway, I am confused and may have tripped up on my words and/or confused some people (myself included) in the process. I am not sure what to the think of this article and nor can I work out a concise position of anti-austerity for myself, still. A few things to discuss then: what lessons can be learnt from the experiences of the Militant-led council in the 80s? Secondly, did they succeed in fighting cuts, ultimately? Lastly, and most importantly, what do you posit as a concrete strategy for fighting austerity? This is a bloody important issue, and the actions that try to prevent cuts do imply some sort of theory behind them, so it's an issue that needs ironing out for sure.Furthermore, there was this article in this weeks edition of The Socialist, SPEW's weekly newspaper:
Link to this page: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/647/10621
From The Socialist newspaper, 17 November 2010 (http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/647)
We need councillors who will fight the cuts!
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition launches its campaign for the 2011 local elections
"These cuts will hurt", warned the Tory chair of the Local Government Association, Lady Eaton. "Up to 100,000 jobs in local authorities will go. That's one in ten of the workforce".
Clive Heemskerk
The Con-Dems' savage austerity plans announced in October's comprehensive spending review put local councils firmly in the front line. Funding for councils from the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) will be cut from £31 billion in 2009-10 to £22.9 billion in 2014-15 - a 27% fall, the biggest 'departmental cut' of all.
At the same time councils will be expected to administer many of the cuts announced under other budget headings. These include the cuts to housing benefit funded from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) budget but administered by councils; the Department for Education's 12% cut in 'non-school' spending on young people (including the abolition of educational maintenance allowances for 16-19 year olds); and a 're-adjustment' of NHS social care funding.
Setting council tax benefit, averaging £900 a year and currently paid out by councils on behalf of the DWP, will be devolved to councils, but with a 10% cut in overall funding.
Councils will also become the final agency to apply the £500 'total household benefit' cap, through housing benefit deductions. "Outsourced", was an apt headline in The Guardian - "town halls must do Osborne's dirty work", it went on.
To say councils "must do" this dirty work, however, is wrong. Not unexpectedly, Labour councillors are already saying there is 'nothing we can do' to stop the cuts from being implemented locally, even where they control the council. But that is just not so. Councillors have a choice.
That's why the decision of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC - see box) to facilitate the widest-possible challenge in the local elections that will take place in England next year is an important part of building the anti-cuts movement. 32 million people will be able to vote in these elections, in every part of England bar London. TUSC is also involved in discussions to ensure an anti-cuts challenge is organised in elections to the Welsh assembly and the Scottish parliament, also in May 2011 (there are no local elections in Wales and Scotland).
The TUSC steering committee has agreed a draft policy platform for the English local elections, which will now be open for discussion in trade union branches and anti-cuts campaigns and finalised at a conference of prospective candidates in January.
It starts from the basis that councillors can refuse to pass on the cuts. Voting in May, it argues, can be not just a 'protest vote' but can actually stop cuts to local jobs, benefits, and services. Building support for TUSC candidates can be an important means of putting pressure on current councillors when they decide council budgets in March, and in shaping how they respond to the 'new responsibilities' they will have to administer.
What can councils do?
WHAT ROLE could councils play to stop the cuts, if the political will was there to seriously oppose the Con-Dem government's austerity measures?
Over the years councils have been stripped of direct funding responsibility for many different services. The TUSC election platform notes that former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who began this process, famously said: "I must take more power to the centre to stop socialism" - in other words, that public services that 'crowded out' the private sector should be curbed or, where they exist, should be opened up to private companies to make profits from public needs. New Labour continued this process throughout its 13 years in office - the turnover of private companies running public services reached over £80 billion in 2008, for example, 126% higher than 1995-96 under the previous Tory government. Now the Con-Dems' spending review announcement includes plans for 'private provider quotas' for councils' elderly care, early years, youth and family support services.
Despite this however, as the TUSC election platform states, councils still have enormous powers and responsibilities. They control budgets totalling billions of pounds spent on services from housing to schools, youth clubs, libraries, adult social care, crime reduction, sports centres, highways maintenance and refuse collection, to name but a few. They have legal powers over non-council provided services, including many of those now 'outsourced' that could be used, if the will was there, to defend jobs and services.
Councillors could - and TUSC councillors would, as the policy platform states - "vote against the privatisation of council services, or the transfer of council services to 'social enterprises' or 'arms-length' management organisations, which are first steps to privatisation". They could - and TUSC councillors would - push for councils to "use all their legal powers available" to "oppose both the cuts, and government polices which centrally impose the transfer of public services to private bodies".
That could mean that, for example, faced with the Con-Dems' housing benefit cuts, councils would refuse to evict council tenants who fall into arrears as a result of the changes - and withdraw from 'partnership agreements' with housing associations (HAs) and other 'social landlords' who fail to do likewise (and actively support HA tenants' organisations to fight for this policy).
Councils could also intervene in the private rented sector. The government hypocritically claims that its aim is to 'bring rents down', after housing benefit payments have ballooned to £21 billion - although the Tories began this by abolishing rent controls in 1988 and slashing council house-building (policies not reversed by New Labour). Councils cannot impose a legally-binding private rent limit but they could, for example, threaten compulsory purchase proceedings against multi-property landlords who move to evict tenants suffering housing benefit cuts.
But housing is just one area where councils with the political will to oppose the Con-Dem government could play a key role in resisting the cuts. They could use their powers to 'call in' and refer local NHS re-organisation proposals, for example. With a King's Fund survey showing that fewer than one in four doctors believes the government's new GP consortia commissioning plans - opening up £80 billion of NHS primary care funding to private companies - will improve patient care, councils could galvanise opposition to the Con-Dems' dismantling of the NHS.
Defending councils' budgets
Even some Tory and Lib-Dem councillors are criticising the government's 'free schools' plans (particularly in relation to faith schools) as endangering socially cohesive local education. Councils could use their 'schools organisation' and admissions monitoring powers, governor appointments etc - and initiate consultative parents' ballots, for example - to build a public campaign of opposition to these and the equally divisive accelerated academies programme. Councillors, it is clear, have a choice - they don't have to do the government's 'dirty work'. They can resist.
But what can councils do when faced with government cuts to the centrally allocated 'revenue support grants' they receive to pay for council-funded services? The TUSC draft election platform states that councils should refuse to implement these cuts, and reject above inflation increases in council tax, rents and service charges to compensate for them. If even a handful of councils were to make such a stand it would electrify the mass opposition to the cuts that is developing.
As Margaret Thatcher's resignation 20 years ago this November shows, in the face of mass non-payment of the poll tax, even the seemingly most imposing government - and the Con-Dem coalition is not that - can be forced to retreat if it faces a sufficiently powerful mass campaign of opposition. Not only was Thatcher removed but the Tories were forced, within weeks of her downfall, to put an extra £4.3 billion into local government funding (around £7 billion today) to finance the abolition of the poll tax.
The TUSC policy platform argues that the best way that councils can contribute to mobilising the mass campaign necessary to defeat the cuts is to set budgets that meet the needs of their local communities, without massive council tax hikes, and combine together to demand that the government makes up the funding shortfall. That is the 'Liverpool model' which in 1984 enabled the city's Labour council, led by Militant supporters, the predecessor of the Socialist Party, to compel Thatcher's government to concede extra resources to the city worth up to £60 million (£98 million today).
But the campaign in support of Liverpool's 'needs budget' had been long prepared, even before Labour won a majority on the council in 1983. A 25,000-strong demonstration was organised in November 1983 and the budget meeting itself, in March 1984, just weeks after the start of the miners' strike, took place against the backdrop of a city-wide one day strike and a 50,000-strong march to the town hall. The anti-cuts movement will grow rapidly, given confidence by events such as the student demonstration in November and the combative stance of unions such as the Fire Brigades Union, the PCS civil servants' union and the RMT transport workers, but it is still at an early stage. There is certainly no group of councillors who have prepared the ground as the Liverpool councillors had in 1984.
So, for the next budget-setting period, the draft TUSC policy platform also includes support for councillors who are prepared to use councils' reserves and 'prudential borrowing' powers to avoid passing on government cuts. Such a policy is completely within a council's legal powers.
Council finance officers can challenge a budget they believe to be 'knowingly unbalanced', in other words, a planned deficit - which a 'needs budget' without massive council tax rises would be - but they can only question an individual council's ability to meet short-term debt re-payments. The use of reserves to meet such initial debt re-payments, for example, is legally a 'matter of judgement' for councillors to make. Councillors have a choice.
In some respects this approach would be a 'Liverpool in reverse sequence'. In 1984 the mass campaign led by the council was able to extract extra resources from the government. The campaign continued in 1985 but, with the defeat of the miners' strike, and under ferocious attack from a Labour Party leadership doing Thatcher's work for her - effectively, with Liverpool left isolated - the council had to resist cuts and sustain its house-building programme for a second year by using its borrowing powers.
'Legality' and a mass campaign
COUNCILS USING their reserves and borrowing powers to avoid making cuts in this budget-setting period would only be buying time before they faced an inevitable showdown with the government for extra resources. Ultimately, there is no 'clever tactic' that can avoid the need to build a mass campaign against the cuts.
There is, of course, no guarantee in any struggle. Most Labour councillors are 'New Labour', indistinguishable from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in their pro-market policies and outlook. But even those who sincerely want to oppose the cuts still hesitate before the Liverpool road. Eventually, having defied the government for four years and won lasting gains for the city, the Liverpool councillors were surcharged and dismissed from office in March 1987.
The law has changed since the 1980s. The 2000 Local Government Act abolished the power of surcharge, for example, except for cases of personal gain. As importantly, the actual course of the events in Liverpool needs to be rescued from right-wing myth-making. It was not the setting of a needs budget or the later decision, in 1985, to fall back on the council's borrowing powers, that the councillors were surcharged for. It was the decision to delay setting a rate at all (rates were the local tax levy then), that was used as the legal pretext to charge the councillors with 'wilfully incurring financial loss' to the city.
This 'no rate' strategy was decided on by the leaders of 20 other Labour councils, ironically against the Liverpool councillors' advice (Liverpool went along with it to keep a united front), who then all - bar Lambeth council - backed down to leave Liverpool to fight alone. Nobody is proposing not setting a council tax rate today.
It was also significant that the councillors were only taken on by the district auditor in 1985 and not in 1984, when they had also delayed setting a rate (as some Labour defections meant no party had been able to get a majority for its budget in the council chamber). It was only when the mass campaign had ebbed - not in Liverpool but elsewhere - after the miners had been defeated, the other Labour councils had capitulated and Liverpool had been attacked and left isolated by the Labour Party leaders, that the Thatcher government felt confident enough to 'apply the law'.
The situation today is different. The Con-Dem cuts are the worst in generations, permanently changing life in Britain, as Cameron himself has explained. They will be resisted, no matter what the axe men decide - in parliament or the council chamber - and the opposition has only just begun. Councillors who are prepared to fight could play a historic role in the inevitable resistance
Fight or stand aside - or face a challenge
THE CLAIM that there is 'nothing Labour can do' to stop the cuts 'until the next election' - leaving aside its support for 'less deep and fast' cuts if it did come to power - is disproved by one simple demand.
If Ed Miliband was to stand up tomorrow and commit an incoming Labour government to meet the debts incurred by councils who borrowed rather than made the savage cuts demanded of them, then not one council would have a reason to make the cuts. The same pledge could be made to other public and semi-public bodies like universities, health authorities, school governing boards, housing associations etc which incur 'temporary' deficits to avoid implementing cuts.
Many trade union leaders still hope that 'Labour will listen' and resist the cuts. Let them ask for such a pledge, which would, in local government, save the 100,000 jobs at threat and the services they provide. But if, as is almost certain, they don't get it, then they must admit that the only option is to fight and build a mass campaign, including standing or backing candidates in the 2011 local elections who will fight the cuts.
Some Labour councillors will no doubt sincerely wish to oppose the cuts but draw back at the prospect of taking a bold stand. They should resign and make way for those who will. Whatever, it should be made clear to all councillors: councillors can fight the cuts and TUSC candidates will - and will contest the seats of those councillors who vote for cuts.
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What is TUSC?
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition was set-up in 2010 to enable trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists who wanted to resist the pro-austerity consensus of the establishment parties to stand candidates in the 2010 general election. By registering TUSC with the electoral commission, candidates could appear on the ballot paper as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition rather than as 'Independent' which they would otherwise have to do under electoral law.
TUSC came out of a series of discussions by participants in the No2EU - Yes to Democracy coalition, which contested the 2009 European elections with the official support of the RMT transport workers' union, the Socialist Party, Solidarity - Scotland's Socialist Movement, and others.
TUSC is a coalition with a steering committee which includes, in a personal capacity, the RMT general secretary Bob Crow, and fellow executive member Craig Johnston; the assistant general secretary of the PCS civil servants' union, Chris Baugh, and the union's vice-president, John McInally; the vice-president of the National Union of Teachers, Nina Franklin; and the recently retired general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Brian Caton. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party are also represented on the committee.
TUSC was established as a federal 'umbrella' coalition, with an agreed core policy statement endorsed by all its candidates but with participating organisations accountable for their own campaigns. Its core policies include, amongst others, opposition to public spending cuts and privatisation, student grants not fees, the repeal of the anti-trade union laws, and a clear socialist commitment to "bringing into democratic public ownership the major companies and banks that dominate the economy, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the environment".
The draft local elections policy platform agreed by the steering committee is a supplement to the core policy statement. It will be finalised at a conference in January and will form the basis on which any prospective council candidate can stand under the TUSC name in May's elections.I am starting to come closer and closer to the view that Liverpool didn't really achieve that much in the wider scheme of things, especially in the volatile and quickly-changing landscape of 80s Britain. If, then, Liverpool was a failure, calling on councils to follow the "Liverpool road" is something of a moot point. And this is disregarding the fact that probably no council anywhere will refuse to implement cuts: whether a councillor is tory or at least nominally socialist they are constrained by the bourgeois economic formations they are working within, or at least to an extent. With the effort it would take to mobilise a campaign for councillors to reject local cuts, it would likely take just as much time and effort to organise a grassroots campaign from below (having said this, the Militant council did actually have broad support from the Liverpudlian working class). In part, I am also kind of a bit weary of standing on a platform like this anyway. I still haven't made up my mind entirely on this whole issue. What does anyone else think on the matter?