Barnet Public Services Alliance launch, Thursday 23 September - and why we need it

Last post for today, on a busy news day in Barnet. This only reflects the quickening pace of the cuts, privatisations, fake consultations, etc, that are going on, and that's just in our little London borough.

This story, again culled from the Times series, is about the cuts in pay and conditions of the Street Scene Department. This is basically the blokes (mostly) who clean the streets and do the dirty jobs that others would rather not do.

They are angry at the cuts that are being threatened to their pay, particularly in the light of the rise Tory councillors have voted for senior councillors' allowances, and they are muttering darkly about strike action. (This is not just rhetoric: staff in LB Barnet really are miffed at what they see as councillors' hypocrisy.)

Read the story here.

This only makes me all the more happy to tell you of the public launch meeting of the Barnet Public Services Alliance. This is an anti-cuts, anti-privatisation campaign for residents and workers in Barnet. The meeting is on Thursday 23 September, from 7.30pm at the Emerald Suite, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, N11 1GN.

We are lining up guest speakers now, but the main business of the evening will be to share ideas for concrete campaigning. For more information please email info@barnettuc.org.uk. We will have street stalls around the borough on Saturdays 4, 11 and 18 September to build for this.

There is a statement to sign, which reflects the core positions of the trades council. If you or your organisation or campaign would like to sign, please email info@barnettuc.org.uk. We would like to publicise the names of those who have signed, so please get in touch if you are happy to go public!

You don't have to agree with the full statement in order to attend the meeting or get involved with the Alliance. We hope we can provide a meeting point for disparate groups and views.

Statement:

We champion democratically accountable, high quality public services. We reject the idea that public services should be cut in order to bail out the banks.

We reject Barnet council’s plans for mass outsourcing of its services – no to easyCouncil!

We oppose privatisation and cuts to public services, whether NHS, education, or local authority, and will resist them.

We oppose free schools and the extension of academies.

We demand that Barnet council reverses its recent decision to pay the council leader and cabinet members higher allowances.

Blimey, was he talking about Neil Kinnock?

I chanced upon this impressive poem by Adrian Henri at the start of the Labour Party's 1992 election manifesto "It's time to get Britain working again".

The poem is called "Winter Ending". It's apt to read this poem now because, good as the poem is, I don't want to go through that cycle of winter and spring again. Shall we strain every sinew to make sure we don't have the cardboard cities, leaking classrooms, peeling waiting-rooms and polluted streams (?) this time around?

Barnet trades council is hosting a meeting on Thursday 29 July at 7.30pm in Committee Room 1, Hendon Town Hall, the Burroughs, London NW4. We aim to set up a Barnet Public Services Alliance to head off cuts to public services, and privatisation. Any organisation that would like to send a representative and interested individuals are invited to attend. For more details email info@barnettuc.org.uk.

And if anyone doubts there are other sources of wealth sloshing about that we could tap to pay for public services, check out today's news on Goldman Sachs.

Winter Ending

'A cold coming we had of it'
huddled together in cardboard cities,
crouched over shared books in leaking classrooms,
crammed into peeling waiting-rooms,
ice stamped into crazy-paving
round polluted streams.
Winter ending:
paintings, poems bud hesitantly,
tentative chords behind boarded facades;
factories open like daffodils,
trains flex frozen rheumatic joints,
computer-screens blink on
in the sudden daylight.
As the last cardboard boxes
are swept away beneath busy bridges,
the cold blue landscape of winter
suddenly alive with bright red roses.