The elephant in the room

I read this with some horror. It's by Tracie Evans, director of finance and commercial services at Barking and Dagenham... you know, the London borough that would have fallen into the hands of the BNP last month if it hadn't been for half the London labour movement turning out week after week to campaign against them - where are the thanks?

Anyway, as well as revealing that on her bank holidays she sips sparkling mineral water and covers up with sunscreen (so responsible), Tracie says:

...the Government will give us an in-year savings target and we will make them from wherever we can, although clearly, frontline services are also out of scope for savings.

So, where does that leave us? Up the Swanny without a...

Well it’s obvious, we can make even more back-office efficiencies on top of the ones we have already been making over the past few years. But seriously, how are we going to find an unplanned few million pounds. Perhaps it really is time to flush out all of those issues that have given local government its bad name in the past.

I would like to start to tackle the really big elephant in the room – staff terms and conditions. Government is consistently lambasted by the public for the generous conditions it allows its staff at the expense of the taxpayer – regardless, actually, of whether our overall conditions are, in fact, still that generous. Are we really ready to start increasing working weeks, reducing allowances, decreasing leave entitlements and probably the most contentious, abolishing free staff car parking.

Very droll. The last bit, not what went before.

It is in our interest to ensure that as little money is spent on back-office functions and as much money as possible is spent on service delivery. It is time to tackle the really hard stuff. Onwards and upwards – any other boroughs fancy a merger?

The elephant in the room, my arse. A herd of elephants is roaming around Westminster, tearing up trees and crapping all over College Green. Has been since the general election.

Why do public services have to pay the price of the bank bailout and all the crap that went before that? That's the real elephant. I remember how hard they pushed credit at us - "Why wait? Have it now!" - and that was just the advice of my bank to its high street customers. Never mind the rest of the rubbish that went on.

Now they are building up their reserves again, preparing to pay dividends to shareholders, and paying top bankers big bonuses.

But John Burgess, secretary of Barnet Unison branch, describes the scandal rather better than I can do in my current, rather ranty mood.

£1.3 Trillion (1,300,000,000,000,000) public money given to the banks.

£153 Billion (153,000,000,000) the Public Sector deficit that is driving the Con-Dem Governments Cuts Agenda

If I didn’t know better I sometimes feel the politicians almost relish the massive cuts packages they have been promoting for almost a year! Now is not the time to panic, and scaring citizens that we could be worse than Greece is just the act of a bully hoping that when they announce the cuts we will all roll over and accept anything they propose.

We must not roll over. When I return from UNISON Conference I hope to report that our newly elected General Secretary will have provided a plan for how we are to defend public services and jobs.

...I don’t know if it is just me but I am getting increasingly irritated by politicians talking about cuts in the public sector. What annoys me the most is how they talk about cuts to jobs and job creation in the same sentence! Just how does making 300,000 jobs redundant create jobs?

...I know what I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to hear politicians trotting out glib sound bites like “more for less!” Where does this myth that council workers have been having it easy all these years come from? We may have the easyCouncil tag but working in Barnet is not easy - it is hard work. Everywhere I go to meet members I hear the same message: ‘over worked, not enough time in the day to do the work.’

The choices we make - why Dismore has lost Hendon

Andrew Dismore very narrowly losing Hendon is depressing news. Three Tory MPs in Barnet - argh! They'll be cock-a-hoop.

I don't think if I'd stayed in the constituency and knocked up for Dismore yesterday I could have won him the seat! But if I'd known it would be so close, I might well have stayed and tried... We choose what to do based on assessments we make and we sure as hell don't have perfect knowledge.

I said I would go to Hayes and Harlington to knock up for John McDonnell MP. The local Labour Party was nervous that he might lose; the Tories were suggesting they might win.

In addition to the general disillusionment among previous Labour voters (not, as it turns out, as deep as we all predicted), McDonnell had particular pressures on him.

With the Labour government proposing the third runway at Heathrow, a significant chunk of the constituency was in danger of being literally obliterated. The Tories were oppposing the runway. And there are two immigration detention centres close to the airport, so the anti-im/migration rhetoric in the election has had particular resonance there.

John McDonnell opposed the third runway - from conviction, not just professional self-interest! - and is not anti-im/migrant. In the event, he has won with a stonking majority, his share of the vote only slightly down.

So, I wasn't needed there at all!

However, as miserable as I am about Matthew Offord's wafer-thin win, I don't feel too guilty personally about Dismore. I did things in his favour which in their very small way might have helped to make the vote close.

The local Labour Party should reflect hard on whether it is doing enough to engage local members and residents. Do Labour voters feel any ownership over the party? I certainly don't. Not so long ago, trade unionists would almost automatically have turned out to canvass for Labour. Trade union branches would have sent delegates to the Constituency Labour Party meetings. Those days are passed - can we get them back?

Dismore is reported by the Times series as saying:

“I don't think there was anything me or my team could have done. If we had had more support in door knocking I think we could have won.

“The Conservatives had the Ashcroft funded billboards all over the borough and we just couldn't compete with that sort of money.”

Dismore and Labour politicians like him need not just to seek scapegoats and apportion blame, but to think about what they can do to revive active support for Labour at the grassroots.