Save Our Services in Surrey (SOSiS) meeting in Staines on 3rd March 2011.

Notes from Save Our Services in Surrey (SOSiS) meeting in Staines on 3^rd March 2011. Recorded and typed by Paul Couchman.

We had expected a smaller turnout than usual due to the long distance from other parts of Surrey but there were about a dozen activists present – almost all from the Staines and surrounding area. A number of people from the newly formed West Surrey branch of the Revolutionary Socialist Youth group also came along and were fully involved in the meeting. A key decision to advertise anti-cuts council candidates was taken, see below.

AROUND THE TABLE
There were reports around the table about cuts taking place (or planned):
*Staines Fire Station (and other Surrey stations) threatened. Night fire cover being axed.
*Cuts in colleges and universities – the University College Union (UCU) balloting for strike action.
*Threatened closure of 11 libraries
*Axing of the entire Mobile Library service
*Commissioning of Youth Services
*Closures of Childrens Centres and Surestart Centres
*Childrens Homes
*Adult Social Services – major job cuts and changes threatened in terms and conditions – UNISON balloting members around industrial action.

OFFICERS REPORTS:
CHAIR
Chris apologised for tinkering with the SOSiS website and bringing it crashing down. A replacement website has been set up and Chris is working on saving all the original information. Coach tickets for 26 March can still be bought online and the mailing list is unaffected.

 ORGANISER
Paul outlined some of the people and organisations he has been making contact with on behalf of SOSiS:
*Staines Labour Party (LP) – Paul spoke for SOSiS at the demonstration organised by the local LP to save night time fire cover at Staines Fire Station. One of the organisers was at the meeting.
*Close contact has been made with the ‘Friends’ groups at New Haw and Godalming libraries.
*A letter appeared in the local paper from the Surrey NetMums group saying they were fighting cuts to childrens centres and Surestart. Paul has made contact with them.
*MenCap (learning disability charity) have organised a series of anti-cuts roadshows and Paul is attending the Surrey event this Tuesday.
*Paul and Chris met with the leaders of Save Our Surrey Community Hospitals, which has organised big demonstrations in defence of local health services. They are open to joint activity around the NHS.

Surrey County Council Trade Union group (SCCTU) have always bee fully supportive of SOSiS and again pledged support at their last meeting – with a specific motion passed to support the Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance in their difficulties with the university management. The UCU reps said they wanted to work more closely with SOSiS around their current dispute.

Lastly, Paul was hoping to get a local NW Surrey anti-cuts group off the ground and the support and turnout at the meeting made that look very likely.

 TREASURER
Thelma was unable to make this meeting. It was reported that we have around £1,000 and that local groups and campaigns should make use of this by requesting funding for specific leaflets etc.

YOUTH AND STUDENT ORGANISER
Craig gave a full and detailed report of the amazing work and activities going on in Royal Holloway (RHUL) and in other universities and colleges in Surrey and in London.
* Lots of students turned out from RHUL and Strodes to an anti-EMA demo in January in London.
* Dan Cooper, leading anti-cuts campaigner, was elected President of NUS at RHUL.
* RHUL organised a debate on the ‘Big Society’ with a range of speakers, including from SOSiS, from the RMT and ‘False Economy’.
* RHACA (Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance) organised an occupation of a university building in London (with other * London students), setting up an anti-cuts space which was ended by bailiffs coming through skylights and dragging people out.
* It was also reported that leading anti-cuts campaigners and the RHACA have come under attack from RHUL management. SCCTU sent a message of support to the students.

REGIONAL ANTI-CUTS ASSEMBLY
It was reported that plans were under way to try to organise a regional assembly at RHUL but due to the management position this was now very unlikely. An offer has come from the UCU at University of Surrey (Guildford) to try to secure space there for an assembly after March 26^th. Craig suggested that close links with the UCU at RHUL may mean pressure could still be brought to bear on the management there to allow the meeting to take place. Negotiations continue but it is our firm intention to hold a regional assembly in the near future.

 MARCH 26^TH TUC DEMONSTRATION
A discussion took place and it was generally agreed that we believe this will be the biggest demonstration in the UK for decades. Coaches and trains have been booked from cities, towns and villages across the country. Every trade union is mobilising their members. UNISON in Surrey have booked four coaches from Staines, Woking, Guildford and Redhill – tickets are £2 each and selling fast. Craig informed the meeting that a student feeder march was planned on the day.

 MAY COUNCIL ELECTIONS
A discussion was started by Paul and Chris and a motion moved by Paul regarding how SOSiS can intervene in the May borough council elections without supporting any one political party. It was agreed by everyone that SOSiS needed to have a position and be able to inform the public and trade unionists regarding the anti-cuts position of candidates.

Paul moved the following motion, which was agreed unanimously after discussion:
That SOSiS puts aside a space on our website to list any and all candidates for council office who agree to sign up to the following pledge:
“If elected, I pledge to vote against ALL cuts in jobs, services, pay, terms and conditions. I will work with the trade unions and anti-cuts campaigners to defend all public services”.
That SOSiS circulates this message widely and invites candidates of all political parties and affiliations [except far right, racist and fascist parties] to contact us and sign our pledge.
This motion is completely in line with our founding principles and does not infer SOSiS support of any individual candidate or party.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS
Paul announced that there will be a lobby of the Labour Party Local Government Conference in London this Saturday 5^th March, organised by the NSSN, the RMT and other trade unions – calling on Labour Councils not to impose cuts.

NEXT MEETING
It was agreed that we should aim to hold the next meeting on 24^th March in Redhill and invite a speaker and use the meeting as a rally prior to the big TUC demo. We will also firm up and communicate any important information at that meeting regarding coaches, stewarding etc. Chris will make contact with the Redhill group to organise a venue and consider speaker/s. To make it more possible for people from this end of Surrey to attend, lifts can be arranged and/or a minibus booked. Activists who wish to go but need support to get there should contact us.

STAINES AND NORTH WEST SURREY ANTI-CUTS ALLIANCE
The majority of those attending were from the local area and, after the main meeting, all agreed to be part of a local group affiliated to SOSiS. We now have a solid group in Redhill and fledgling groups in Woking, Guildford and Staines.

There will be a SOSiS street stall on Saturday 19^th March from 11am till 2pm in Staines to advertise the TUC demonstration and recruit new local activists. More details will be sent out nearer the day.

For Updates, news and events visit www.saveourservic.es or join Guildford Against Fees And Cuts Facebook page.  Email: guildfordagainstfeesandcuts@yahoo.co.uk

REMEMBER: There are Subsidised coaches to the TUC National Demonstration in London, March 26th. All are welcome. Only £2.00 RTN. Coaches are leaving from Staines, Guildford, Redhill and Woking. Buy a ticket online using a secure paypal at www.saveourservic.es or email www.guildfordagainstfeesandcuts@yahoo.co.uk

 

UK austerity measures to throw 1 million into poverty

“The share of the national output going to wage earners fell from 65 percent in 1975 to 53 percent in 2007.” (New Political Economy Network)

The British Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s austerity measures will throw almost 1 million more people into poverty over the next three years, including hundreds of thousands of children.

These are the findings of a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think tank, produced in collaboration with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

In October, the coalition government announced public spending cuts of £83 billion, including significant cuts in welfare benefits and a wage freeze across the public sector. The measures are not only a deepening of efforts to force working people to carry the cost of the Labour government’s multibillion-pound bailout of the banks. They mark a significant escalation in the attempts of successive governments to force down wages and fully dismantle essential social and welfare provision.

The IFS forecasts that there will be an exponential increase in the numbers of children and adults living in absolute and relative poverty, and a stagnation in the incomes of the broad mass of the population.

The numbers in absolute poverty—defined as households with income of less than 60 percent of the median in 2010/2011, adjusted for inflation—will rise by 900,000 by the end of 2014. Of these, some 200,000 will be children, the first rise in absolute child poverty in 15 years.

The numbers forecast to be pushed into relative poverty are just as damning. The benchmark for relative poverty is determined by median income. But, the IFS states, this target will itself fall, due to the decline in real earnings. As a consequence, relative poverty is forecast to rise by approximately 800,000.

The government’s cuts in housing and welfare benefits, combined with the previous Labour government’s decision to raise National Insurance contributions from next year, hit across the board. Poverty amongst working-age adults without children is expected to rise by 300,000 and 200,000 for absolute and relative poverty respectively.

Families with two children on “middle-incomes” have already suffered a 3.4 percent decline over the past two years, the IFS reported. They earned £988 a year less in 2010 than in 2008. They are expected to lose a further £300 in real terms over the next two years under the government’s spending cuts.

The IFS predictions come under conditions in which almost 2 million children in Britain are already living in conditions of “severe poverty” and fully 4 million are living in poverty.

The government’s measures have been condemned by anti-poverty charities—the very organisations tasked with filling the gap of declining social provision under the coalition’s grotesquely named “Big Society” plan.

They complained that the IFS projections will place the government in breach of the Child Poverty Act, passed into law earlier this year, which commits current and future governments to cut relative child poverty to 10 percent and absolute child poverty to 5 percent over the next decade.

But the government has already stated that it intends to redefine poverty so that “isn’t just about getting above an arbitrary line, but is about improving people’s life chances.”

It was Conservative Howard Flight who gave vent to the class sentiment motivating the assault on welfare. Speaking last month, just after he was selected as one of more than 20 new Tory peers, Flight complained that child benefit was being removed from higher earners. “We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible”, he said.

His remarks came barely a week after Lord Young, one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s senior advisers, was forced to resign after stating, “For the vast majority of people in the country today, they have never had it so good ever since this so-called recession—started.”

A Treasury spokesperson dismissed the IFS report, claiming that “uncertainty” in the model it had employed meant that the “small differences they identify may not be meaningful”.

Elements of the coalition’s cuts package were also criticised by the Labour Party. The real measure of its stance, however, is made clear by the fact that it is Labour MP Frank Field who is drawing up the government report on “redefining” child poverty.

The coalition’s austerity measures come after a 30-year period in which successive governments have conducted a systematic assault on the social position of working people.

According to a report by the New Political Economy Network, the share of the national output going to wage earners fell from 65 percent in 1975 to 53 percent in 2007. It was Labour that fuelled the increase in the “working poor”. Through its various welfare “credits,” it ensured that business had access to a large army of workers on minimum pay, funded at taxpayers’ expense.

During the same time frame, as wage rises fell behind productivity, personal debt as a proportion of disposable income rose from 45 percent in 1980 to 160 percent in 2007.

As the report noted, “People did not borrow to increase their consumption. They borrowed to compensate for wages that were increasingly falling behind productivity increases. As household debt rocketed between 2001 and 2007, levels of consumption as a proportion of GDP actually fell”.

Even prior to the 2008 financial collapse, Labour’s policies had led to a vast increase in social inequality. A survey by the National Equality Panel based on figures from 2007/2008 found that the richest 10 percent of the population were over 100 times wealthier than the poorest 10 percent, and that income inequality had reached its highest point since the end of the Second World War.

Now, unemployment has crossed the 2.5 million mark, rising by 35,000 in the three months to October. Much of this was accounted for by the fall in pubic sector employment by 33,000, as the spending cuts began to make their mark.

The situation is even worse amongst the young. The number of 18- to 24-year-olds claiming unemployment benefit has quadrupled since 2008, from 5,840 to more than 25,800. In July, UKJobs.net reported that the average annual salary had dropped by more than £2,600 in the past six months, with across-the-board wages falling from £28,207 to £25,543.

As a consequence of huge levels of indebtedness, rising unemployment and the undermining of welfare provision, millions are now threatened with penury.

According to the Independent, the number of emergency welfare loans paid out to people in dire distress has almost trebled in the last five years. More than 3.6 million “crisis loans” were made in the last financial year—up from 1.3 million in 2005/2006. The government has now said that, from April, Job Centre staff will begin issuing vouchers for people to exchange for emergency food supplies.

The Bank of England has also forecast a tightening financial squeeze on many families due to soaring commodity and utility prices, and the planned Value Added Tax hike to 20 percent from January 1. It warned that more than one in two people with unsecured debts are struggling to cope. This is especially the case where some credit companies are charging up to 2,600 percent interest a year.

On Monday, the Confederation of British Industry warned that interest rates would have to rise almost sixfold due to inflation over the next 24 months—from 0.5 percent to 2.75 percent by 2012. This would mean millions of homeowners facing a hike of almost £200 on the average monthly mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, the directors of the FTSE 100 companies have seen their total earnings rise by an average of 55 percent over the past year. The Incomes Data Services revealed last month that chief executives at the 100 most highly capitalised firms on the London Stock Exchange had received an average of £4.9 million in total in the year to June.

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Email: guildfordagainstfeesandcuts@yahoo.co.uk

Plans to introduce “work for your dole”. – Guildford Against Fees And Cuts

                                     Workfare to be imposed in Britain

Britain is being subjected to a savage programme of social engineering, designed to create an economy where millions work for much less than the present £5.93 an hour minimum wage. This centres on plans to introduce workfare for the long-term unemployed, who will be forced to work for their benefit plus a £1-an-hour top-up.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is set to introduce US-style compulsory “workfare”, under threat of withdrawal of benefits to entire families. A new “claimant commitment” will include sterner conditions, notably the threat that unemployed people who refuse community work or the offer of a job may lose their jobseeker’s allowance for three months; if they refuse twice, six months; and three years on third refusal.

The £30 or £40 a week, or £1 an hour, those forced to do such work will receive is one sixth of the present minimum wage and sets a new benchmark that will see it effectively nullified.

The meagre £65 a week unemployment allowance will be removed for three months on a first “offence” of refusing work, six months the second time and three years after a third breach. People will also be subject to penalties for failing to turn up on time or not working hard enough. Those convicted of benefit fraud could also have their benefits stopped for three years. There will be no right of appeal.

The net result will be the mobilisation of the unemployed, including single mothers and over a million of the sick and infirm on incapacity benefits, as a “reserve army of labour”. They will either directly replace existing workers’ jobs or be used to depress wage levels.

This exercise is being sold first of all by whipping up populist prejudice against the supposedly “workshy” and the “feckless”, who are unemployed as a “lifestyle choice”. Prime Minister David Cameron declared that “a life of benefits will no longer be an option”. People “don’t pay their taxes to pay for people to stay on benefit”, he said.

Secondly, the government is packaging the measure together with a pledge to introduce a single universal credit that will replace at least 30 existing benefits, including jobseeker’s allowance, housing benefit, child tax credit, working tax credit, income support and employment support allowance. This is claimed to guarantee that those who move into work but still need to claim benefits will be penalised less heavily than at present for the wages they earn above benefit level. Presently this penalty can be as high as 90 percent.

Smith also played the anti-immigrant card, saying that it was “a sin” that 70 percent of the extra jobs created over the last 14 years had been taken by immigrants. He claimed that this was because British people were not “capable or able” to do them, when for the most part the issue was they were so poorly paid.

The supposed “carrot” cited by the government is nothing of the sort. “Making work pay” in fact means a subvention to employers who pay poverty wages. As for working while claiming benefits, people coming off welfare into work would still lose 65 pence of each pound they earn on top of their benefit. The Economist pointed out, “Even when the universal credit is introduced, claimants earning enough to pay the basic rate of tax will face a marginal deduction rate of 76 percent.” Around 300,000 people in work earning below the tax threshold would also face an actual increase in the rate at which they lose income in benefit abatement and taxes.

An additional iniquity is that the new system will be based on making claims and checking payments online. An estimated 1.5 million unemployed people do not currently have Internet access, according to the government’s own figures.

The provisional timetable for introducing a universal credit will not begin until October 2013 and will not be completed until October 2017. In contrast, punishing those who “refuse” jobs will start immediately.

This potentially will have a direct impact on 5 million people—1.5 million on unemployment benefit, 700,000 single parents and 2.6 million on incapacity benefits.

The chancellor has already cut the welfare budget by £18 billion, which has hit the poor the hardest, including not only the lowest paid but all working families with a household income of less than £30,000, who, after the October Spending Review, are worse off by between £700 and close to £2,000.

The impact was spelled out by the heads of various charities. Oxfam’s director of UK Poverty, Kate Wareing, warned that the changes “will expose people to the risk of destitution”. Richard Hawkes, chief executive of disability charity Scope, said the “white paper does not address the state of the employment market today, nor take into consideration the reality of people’s lives.” He said the “regime of sanctions” would affect “disabled people who do play by the government’s rules …Who try repeatedly to get work but are not successful.”

Sally Copley, head of UK policy at Save the Children, said, “It is hard to see how Britain’s poorest children are going to be helped using sanctions creating a climate of fear. It is children who will suffer when a single mum is told to take a job, but there is not suitable childcare available. It is the children who will suffer when the safety net is withdrawn for three months, living in homes where mums and dads already struggle to put a hot meal on the table or buy a winter coat.”

Almost 2 million children are living in workless households.

The full impact can be measured by Duncan Smith’s claim that his reforms will reduce the number of workless households by 300,000, meaning at least that many will be forced into low-paid employment. But many more will be forced off benefits because they will be penalised for not taking jobs that are simply not there to take! Duncan Smith asserted that there are 450,000 vacancies for jobs, “even as the country is coming out of recession”. But there are 5 million out of work and this is set to rise by at least 1.6 million as a result of the impact of government cuts and an incalculably greater number in the event of a widely expected second recessionary wave.

Even now, the number of long-term unemployed alone has more than doubled since 2008, to 797,000—outstripping by 330,000 the 467,000 job vacancies.

An insight into the long-term aim of these measures—targeting broad layers of workers—can be gleaned from the comments of Professor Lawrence Mead of New York University, one of the main influences behind “workfare” reforms in the US, who was consulted by the government on its planned reforms.

He told the Guardian, “People in the UK still think it is normal to go onto welfare. In the US they don’t. In the US it is a last resort. … They wanted me to talk about Wisconsin and New York. They really wanted to know how to do it”. The Guardian reports that he told the government to change people’s “mindset … so that they do not see welfare as a viable alternative”. This had been achieved in the US because benefits have been driven so low. In Texas, for example, the average monthly benefit is around £46 per person.

There is no precedent for such profound shifts. This would take Britain back to a situation before the welfare state was created, to the conditions that existed during the Hungry Thirties, when people starved on the streets, homeless and destitute. It is equivalent to the “shock-therapy” imposed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe following the downfall of the Stalinist regimes—which facilitated an economic crisis twice as intense as the Great Depression.

In the face of this assault, the working class is leaderless. The Labour Party has pledged its backing for workfare, with Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Douglas Alexander declaring, “We support the underlying principle of simplifying the benefits system and providing real incentives to work”—barely bothering to add the caveat that there must be jobs for people to take up for the scheme to work.

Meanwhile the trade unions continue their efforts to prevent any opposition to the government being mounted. Duncan Smith made his announcement the week after the Fire Brigades Union called off the strike by London firefighters and the same week as further strikes by BBC journalists were cancelled. The Trades Union Congress is not mounting a national protest against the government’s £83 billion cuts until March 26 next year.

The struggle against austerity must be waged as a united offensive to bring down the hated Tory/Lib-Dem government and replace it with a government answerable to working people and pledged to socialist policies. It means rejecting all attempts at pitting one section of workers against another and mobilising the employed in the public and private sector, the unemployed, students and pensioners. Achieving this demands a political and organisational break with the rotten organisations of the misnamed “Labour Party” and “trade unions” that are more properly understood as a specialist arm of management in disciplining workers into accepting “sacrifice”.
Join Guildford Against Fees And Cuts F/b Page for updates
By Chris Marsden
13 November 2010
WSWS

Guildford Against Fees And Cuts – Cuts In Surrey

Surrey University Student’s Meeting:
Save Our Services – Cuts In Surrey

26^th October,
Student’s at the university invited Chris Leary from Save Our Services in Surrey to address its weekly meeting at the University.  

Around fifteen students and supporters attended the meeting. Markus, Society President, opened with a short speech about some of the concerns he and his fellow students have about the cuts.

“Universities are about to receive a 40% cut in funding across the board”, he told the meeting. “The funding for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Technology) subjects is to be ring fenced, so that the Arts and Social Sciences will no longer be publically funded, but will be paid for through fees alone. This represents a decisive break from the liberal education ethos of the Post War University system”.

“As a consequence Universities like surrey are already concentrating on recruiting non-EU students, who are charged higher fees, in order to make up the shortfall”.“The Lib Dems are beginning to distance themselves from the recommendations of the Browne Report, fearful of the backlash that is gaining momentum. Ministers are talking about raising the cap on fees to £12,000 instead of a total abolishment of the cap. Meanwhile, the Scottish government voted to keep education free earlier in the year”.

“The University’s Vice Chancellor is keeping quiet about the cuts that are about to take place in the University. However, two Sociology lecturers have already been threatened with redundancy, with minimum redundancy payments, unless they take early retirement”.

“The head of the Law Dept. has been forced to take a sabbatical and her vacant post integrated into the Hotel and Catering Management Dept. Another lecturer was sacked on the flimsy pretext that a letter of complaint she wrote was insulting. Meanwhile, the School of Law has been integrated with the school of Management and is now called The School of Law and Management”. These moves represent “cuts by the back door” Markus told the meeting.

After a screening of some short films, showing how students around the country are resisting the cuts, Chris Leary from Save Our Services in Surrey addressed the meeting. He said “Social Services in Surrey are going to be hit hard by the Comprehensive Spending Review”(CSR).

“A report published by credit analysts, Experian says that Guildford is the eighth best placed borough to cope with public service cuts. However there are many pockets of poverty in Surrey”, Chris said. “Spelthorne, a borough in North Surrey was estimated by the report to be seventieth on the table”.

“For example Esher, a small town in the centre of Surrey, is divided by the railway that runs through the town. There is a ten year differential in life expectancy between the two halves of the town. Surrey is not all stockbrokers” said Paul.

“Surrey needs its public services to survive”, continued Paul. “And Council workers spend their money in the local economy, unlike Surrey’s stockbrokers, who stash their money in off shore accounts. Once the public sector redundancies start, the whole economy will suffer”.

“500 Local civil service jobs are due to go as town centre offices are closed. The job Centre is also due to be cut, just when unemployment is rising in the area. Funding for the National Tax Office in Woking is to be slashed, whilst corporations get away with massive tax evasion”.

“Vodafone for example, has recently had a six billion tax bill written off because the government claims it doesn’t have the resources to pursue the company through the courts”.

“The axe has already fallen in Surrey before the CSR was published. Surrey’s primary schools have been urged to become academies thus removing the council’s responsibility for primary education. Thirty Connexions careers and guidance centres are to be closed in Surrey, leaving only two centres for the whole of Surrey. The Council’s policy is cease providing all services that it is not required to provide by law. This includes bus subsidies and youth centres”.

“Road building projects have been scrapped. The Guildford town centre Council offices, employing 2000 staff is set to close. Community Support offices in Frimley, Farnham, and Staines are going to close. Family support and social workers’ funding is going to be scrapped”.

“A third of the Local Government and Communities budget is going to be slashed. Meanwhile Surrey Council has received the lowest Ofsted rating for its services- and the council’s response?..To discuss suing Ofsted for lying!..You couldn’t make it up! But the real reason for the lack of proper services is of course a lack of funding”.

“These cuts are ideological and politically motivated. The national debt is not historically high as the government would have us believe. It now stands at 48% of GDP. However, for most of the 20^th century the debt has been over 100% of GDP. Five years ago the debt stood at 38% of GDP, so when the government claims that New Labour has massively increased the debt and led us into this impasse, they are lying”.

“The debt is not a problem. The government could easily restructure the debt in order to pay it over a longer time if it chose. A 0.05% tax on speculative financial transactions, the so-called Robin Hood Tax, could net the country 30 billion a year, halving the deficit”.

“David Cameron, speaking on Radio 4 two weeks ago was asked if he was going to reverse the spending cuts once the deficit had been repaid- and of course, he said no”.

However Chris told us, “These cuts can be defeated. We have already had successes. Brooklands College when threatened by closure drew a huge reaction from the local community. A campaign spearheaded by Save Our Services in Surrey brought together staff, parents and students and forced the council to save the college”. “Shortwood School in Staines was saved through a mobilisation of the entire community”.

 “We need to link up all local struggles to save services. These cuts are a unified attack and they require a single unified response”. In the ‘90s we saw the defeat of the Poll Tax by the whole community coming together and refusing to comply. This is the response we need now”. Already we see ministers starting to backtrack on Child Benefit and University fees.

Redhill Coalition Against Cuts Meeting:
7pm on Tuesday 2nd November @ The Garlands, Brighton Road, Redhill.

North Sussex And East Surrey Anti Cuts Coalition Meeting:
8pm on Tuesday 2nd November @ St John Church Hall, in the Broadway, Crawley
(Sponsored by North Sussex and East Surrey Trades Union Council)

Join Save Our Services in Surrey on Facebook
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Royal Holloway University Anti-Cuts Alliance – Official Launch (Report By Guildford Against Fees And Cuts)

Public Meeting: Introduction To The Cuts

21^st, October 2010
Last night saw the official launch meeting of the Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance at the Royal Holloway University, Egham, Surrey. It was a fantastic meeting with over a hundred and fifty people in attendance.

So many meetings of this kind never go beyond phrasemongary, “Tories are bad, they eat your kids and kill your parents” etc. But every speaker was interesting and engaging. Each speaker brought a wealth of knowledge and loads of facts and figures.

The speakers spoke about the cuts from a variety of perspectives but all made the point that the fight against cuts in education and the rise in fees must be linked to the resistance to the wider public sector cuts.

The meeting heard speakers from Save Our Services in Surrey, UCU, BARAC (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts), The Student Union’s Women’s and Equality Officer, a member from the NUS National Executive and Ben Robinson from Youth Fight For Jobs.

Chris Leary from Save Our Services in Surrey gave an informative talk about what the cuts meant for the people in Surrey. Whilst Surrey is an affluent county said Chris, “there were many pockets of poverty”. According to the government’s survey of Boroughs, the Surrey Borough of Elmbridge was the ablest in the country to cope with the cuts. Runneymede, another Surrey borough came seventh. However Spelthorne came seventieth in the table. “There are 30,000 people working for Surrey County Council (SCC), many on low incomes, so not everyone in Surrey conforms to the stockbroker commuting stereotype” said Chris.  

“There was a move by SCC, earlier this year to force all secondary schools into a federation of academies thus divesting itself of all responsibility for secondary education. There was such resistance that the Council was forced to back down, but immediately approached the primary schools with the same proposal. Academies do worse in league tables”, Chris told the packed meeting. “They don’t even generate extra income”.     

Chris spoke of other cuts planned by the Council. “With regards to young people, the SCC has published the target of achieving zero needs for sixteen to eighteen year-olds, which means all young people will be in work or education. However the council is reducing the grant it gives to the private company that runs the Connections careers and counselling service. It is going to close twenty centres, leaving only Camberley and Epsom to service the entire county. We have already witnessed a reduction in social workers and their admin support”, Chris added.

“The council also plans to slash the grant it awards bus companies to provide non-profitable bus services. It has also announced it will scrap all of its education welfare officers”.

“The council is talking of scrapping its present library service and replacing it with mobile libraries that may only visit once every fortnight. SCC also plans to shut down its youth services, closing youth centres, some of which were  only opened two or three years ago”.

“These cuts are just a few of those announced following the Council’s Spending Review and come before the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review announced a couple of days ago”. “The government announced an unprecedented 20% reduction in revenues for local councils which will further devastate communities and local services”. Chris concluded that we need to link education issues with wider service cuts and build a coalition of resistance of students, workers and service users.

Next to speak was Duska Rosenberg, Royal Holloway Professor of Information and Communications Management and UCU member. She told the meeting that “whilst all other countries are investing in education, the UK is slashing budgets and predicted some Universities may close”. “This can only harm the future prosperity of the country”, she told the audience.

Professor Rosenberg spoke about the government’s plan to ring fence STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects whilst cutting funding for the arts and social sciences. As a professor whose discipline bridges the physical and social sciences, she told the meeting how the arts earn money for the economy.

“However it’s not just about economic growth, there’s also an issue of intellectual growth and education for its own sake. We need a government that respects this.

One cannot divide technology from social sciences”, she continued. “One needs to know how technological advances affect society”.

“A recent government think tank reported that the UK needs more graduates to compete in a knowledge economy, so each University needs to be preserved. However, it’s not just about academic staff, there are also thousands of administration and support jobs at stake. They are indispensible to Universities. It’s about all of us”.

A BARAC (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts) spokesperson addressed the meeting. He called the cuts disgusting. “According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies these cuts are the greatest since the World War Two”. The cuts, he said “will devastate all communities, but black people will be disproportionately effected. Black people already suffer from greater levels of unemployment. Black people die younger, and more black people go to prison than go to university”.

“Studies have proved that in times of recession racism increases and we can already see this dynamic taking shape in the way that asylum seekers are being scapegoated in the media. 80% of public sector workers are black and for the most part work in lower paid support jobs; these are the very jobs that are being targeted for cuts”.

He concluded that students have a proud tradition of anti-racism and urged all students to emulate the French and fight against the cuts. He finished with a quote from Nelson Mandela: “A society is judged by the way it treats its poor”.

We heard from the Student Union’s Equality and Diversity Officer that women will also be disproportionately affected by the cuts. “According to studies, 60% of students who are lone parents are considering giving up their studies due to the hike in tuition fees. Women already take longer to pay back their student loans.  Domestic violence services are also going to be cut, along with homophobic and HIV services”.

Ben Robinson from Youth Fight For Jobs also spoke from the platform. “The Education Maintenance Grant will be scrapped”, he told us. He said “the government has announced plans to cut a half million public sector jobs, but have not mentioned that it will have a knock on effect of creating another half million unemployed on top of this. Already there are 2.5 million people chasing a half million jobs. One quarter of all young people are unemployed, and for young black people it’s a half”.

“Presently, anyone under 25, cannot get housing benefit for their own home, they are limited to renting a room. The government’s spending review has raised this to 35 years. This means a loss of privacy, space and independence for claimants until they are 35 years old”.

“The government is only making cuts because they can get away with it”, said Ben. “The banks, still largely publically owned, have paid 15 billion pounds in bonuses this year. The richest UK banks are paying the lowest corporation tax in Europe”.

The last speaker to address the meeting was Sean, the NUS National Executive Mature Students officer. He told the meeting that the Browne Report meant that poorer students would receive a second class education because they will not be able to afford the higher fees charged by the leading Universities.

“The government’s emphasis on STEM subjects will mean only the richer Universities charging higher fees will be running Social Science courses. These will be unaffordable to most students, so that in future it will be the students from richer backgrounds taking the lead in politics and the media in later life.

The Tories, he told us “are finishing Thatcher’s job, marketising education and the NHS and attacking housing benefits, which are due to be capped at 30%  below the average cost of accommodation. “The UK’s structural debt stands at £100 billion whilst the richest thousand UK citizens have £80billion of personal wealth.

So, he concluded, “Lets all get to the demo on 10^th November and demand No Cuts And No Fees, and take this message to the Coalition Of Resistance conference on 23^rd November. And LETS GET FRENCH!!!!”
Statement of the Coalition Of Resistance
Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance
Save Our Services in Surrey
Join Guildford Against Fees And Cuts on Facebook

Official Launch Meeting: Save Our Services in Surrey (Report By Guildford Against Fees And Cuts)

Official Launch Meeting: Save Our Services in Surrey

The 14^th October saw the official launch of the Save Our Services in Surrey campaign. 80 people came together to discuss the governments planned public service cuts and plan a local response. There were delegates from a dozen local union branches as well as several community and campaign groups.

Apart from the many trade union branches that sent delegates, there were delegates from Surrey County Council Trade Unions (SCCTU), Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance, Peace & Justice Coalition, Peace Party, Guildford Transition Towns and Redhill Coalition Against The Cuts.

Save Our Services in Surrey has already been active prior to the official launch. It has successfully led campaigns that have saved Shortwood School and Ashford College and lobbied the council earlier in the year to oppose fire service cuts. 

The meeting took the form of an open discussion rather than having a panel of speakers.
Dan, from the Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance told the meeting that the coming marketisation of education and public services will have dire consequences for the young and the vulnerable in society. The Royal Holloway NUS president recently stated that the two successful anti-cuts meetings on campus gave him the mandate to take action not just over education cuts but public spending cuts in general. The NUS at Holloway was fully backing the Anti-Cuts Alliance and its public meeting arranged for the 21^st, October.

A Surrey County Council union official spoke about the Council’s “Public Value Review” whose conclusions are due out next week. She told the meting; “We must fight for every job, and if we save just one job it will be a victory. We must work with many other communities and groups, and be proactive if we are to be successful”.

An official from the UCU spoke to the meeting, she said “the managers at the University of Surrey pretend they don’t know what’s going to happen about the cuts in the University. Everyone knows there are cuts coming, but the management are not being up-front about them”.

Another local union official spoke about the national debt that the government keeps telling us about. She said “yes, there is a huge debt at 48% of GDP, but this is nothing like the national debt following the war. For much of the 20^th Century the national debt was running at over 100% of GDP- and for the ten years after World War Two the National debt was over 200%- peaking at 250%. During this time the country was able to build schools, roads, undertake a massive house building programme and create the welfare state”. These cuts she concluded “were political and not economically motivated”.A union official from the Royal Surrey Hospital Trust told the meeting that management was restricting union activity and its campaigns over closures. He spoke of eighty recent redundancies with another eighty planned for the near future.

A student told the meeting that we were in this position because of the banks. “It’s not my fault” he said, “It’s not my mistake”.

A Green Party councillor and member of the Redhill Coalition Against The Cuts related his experiences of council meetings where “alternative service delivery” was being discussed. “Council meetings are always about the best ways to make cuts, not if the cuts should be made”. The council at Redhill plans to cut 20% of its workforce.

A Surrey unison member said to the meeting; “councillors don’t use services themselves because they tend to be better off. They don’t really know what it means to have their services cut. They often think council services are luxuries. 52 libraries are under threat in Surrey. The number of Social Workers and their support staff are being cut and the Council’s adult service is being slashed. Staff are already exhausted with case loads exceeding 100 cases. Managers should come out of their offices and see what is happening on the ground”.

Chris Leary, from Save Our Services in Surrey urged everyone to join SOSiS and create a central campaigning hub. “We can support individual campaigns by picketing and putting pressure on councillors and Council managers. We need to be united, proactive, and demand the services we need”.Before the meeting closed there was a unanimous vote to adopt the draft constitution and three officers were elected. Chair, Co-ordinator, and Outreach/Campaign Organiser.

Two further meetings were announced:
Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance meeting in Egham, 21^st October.
A student meeting against the cuts at the University Of Surrey 26^th October.
Join Guildford Against Fees And Cuts
Save Our Services in Surrey
Redhill Coalition Against The Cuts
Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance
Anti cuts coalition in Sussex and Surrey Public meeting