The timeless Tories
Why the Tories will forever be old hat.
Hello, all.
This lengthy piece (tis a bit long - got carried away) is the first in a number that will look at Conservative behaviour on the ground. Yours truly wonders if the Tories are fit for public office, exactly, and/or if social responsibility is really their bag...
This week, staff at Tory council Hammersmith and Fulham will meet to organise a response to the latest attack by the council's Conservative leadership. What a distasteful attack this one is, too - all council staff have been told they will be dismissed and forced to sign new employment contracts on much-reduced terms and conditions.
So.
I know exactly how the Tory trollies among you will greet this news: you'll say (sans deliberation, as always) that lazy, fat arsed public sector staff - those you doubtless imagine operate the schools, housing offices, libraries, street cleaning and social services at Hammersmith and Fulham - deserve it (do you class bankers as fat arsed, overindulged public sector workers now, btw?). You'll say that public sector workers deserve the awful hours, and the lack of union representation and employer sympathy and flexibility that your average working stiff in the private sector gets.
But do they?
I think not.
I think - like anyone who thinks even a tiny little bit - the exact opposite.
I also think something useful is happening for the left at Hammersmith and Fulham. The rabid H&F Tories - and the privatisation and service-cutting programme they've pursued there since they took the council in 2006 - are shaping up as quite the godsend for those of us who want to poke holes in the 'public sector needs private sector/freemarket ideology' theme that has defined public sector thinking for the last 30 years.
Poking holes in any programme based on the Market is Christ thesis shouldn't too be difficult - especially now that we know that the Market is Christ thesis fragged even the markets. What is so interesting is the energy that low-rent politicians put into trying to prop up the corpse. The horrible truth is that these mighty local neocons have nothing new to show us, and nothing new to say. The maniacs the Tories already have on the ground still behold the private sector with rapture.
And they have maniacs galore at Hammersmith and Fulham, all right. The charismatic (ahem) Stephen Greenhalgh's Conservatives took office in 2006, and went after public services with a steamy animalism that surely spilled over at home...
Right out of the blocks, they tried to close the fast-improving Hurlingham and Chelsea school - amid rumours that they wanted to replace it with an academy, or another form of up-market institution that would appeal to a better class of person than wasters who'd happily send their kids to a large comprehensive like H&C (although one assumes that a few well-heeled whites numbered among the very large number of local people who fought the closure, because the council backed off in the end).
Onwards, nonetheless: they attacked hostels for the homeless, closed and sold the Castle youth club (leaving bored youths to wander the streets - a telling move by a party supposedly concerned about bored youths and youth violence), and stopped the mobile library service. In the same spirit of community, they went after housing and sheltered housing caretakers - the people most likely to foster a sense of safety and community in areas most in need.
The voluntary sector also hit the hit list early - at the beginning of 2007, the council unveiled a programme of cuts that seemed particularly to target immigrant support groups, and - significantly - the socialist-minded, too-smart-for-their-own-good lawyers at the Hammersmith Community Law Centre. The Tories lobotomised the Hammersmith voluntary sector when they cut the law centre out - doubtless the point of the exercise.
The Hammersmith Law Centre was made up of community-minded, campaigning lawyers and law-lecturers who were easily the council's match and gave free legal advice to most people and vountary sector groups who asked for it. (I was at Hammersmith and Fulham Unison for several years, and the law centre's employment specialists were very forthcoming with free legal advice for us - considerably more so than Unison's often-useless and distinterested legal team).
For 30 years, the law centre had taken cases for local people who were struggling with benefits, housing and immigration issues. They helped campaign on local issues like housing, and to clean up estates.
They were also prepared to take on politically-unpopular cases - to defend, if you like, the law, in the face of public and political opposition. They specialised in immigration law and human rights - not fields where anyone's made a lot of political friends in recent years. (I did a lot of interviewing at the law centre and on the voluntary sector cuts in Hammersmith last year. You can read that here).
Anyway.
Time to end this post. Suffice to say this is as auspicious a time as we've had to think about the on-the-ground realities of neocons in public services, and this weird preoccupation with the private-sector that has held so many for so long.
We can also look at the facts of the Hammersmith Tories' much-trumpeted tax cuts while we're at it (famously, they put an (unintentionally) hilarious music vid about Hammersmith council tax cuts on You Tube. Sadly they had to pull the vid, because they left the comments open, and excited record levels of unmonitored abuse. Happily, someone's replaced it with this).
The question we'll be asking, of course, is whether tax cuts need be made at the expense of services - a question we really need to be thinking about on the left. Hammersmith is, after all, the council that decided there was enough cash around to pursue pay rises for itself even as it masterminded the cuts programmes we've looked at today. It's the council that has found millions to regenerate King Street - and its very own council buildings.
At the same time, residents are using council-tax savings to pay increased charges for recycling, meals on wheels and homecare services. Are we talking about real cuts in that case, or theory for the hell of it?
I wonder about the real heart of this beast. This is, after all, the council that set the local equalities scene last year when its very own Lucy Ivimy observed in an email that Shepherd's Bush was a mess, because immigrants from India chucked rubbish out of their windows: "I know that in India throwing rubbish out of a window and total disregard for the cleanliness of a public area is normal behaviour...' Is this the sort of thinking we need from people providing public services at a time when public services will be sorely needed? Will these people make useful government?
Hell - maybe they will. Maybe the scene is set for something majestic in Hammersmith and Fulham - Westfield at one end, and a streamlined council at the other, and endless happy families in between. But let's see. Let's follow Hammersmith and Fulham over the next year or so and find out what cutting public services is all about. Let's think about the services that most of us will need at some point or another - schools, homecare, and clean streets. Let's look at councils that have started to think outside the Market box, and that are managing to provide good in-house services at reasonable cost. Let's think about the money we've spent bailing out bankers and other rich wankers and the dated thinking that got us there.
We'll be tracking Barnet council as well, btw. They are also bandying the 'sack all staff' idea around - and have the added frisson of a great deal of money tied up (gone forever?) in Iceland. Let's see if these Conservatives can impose order with the old order. Let's see these Conservatives making it real.
