Old mania: the continuing story of Tory infatuation with the past
A little bit more on why the Tories are unfit for human office:
As regular visitors to this site will know, yours truly has been following the trail of service destruction left by the Hammersmith and Fulham Tories in that borough since they took the council in 2006.
What a scream it has been. Even as we speak, the H&F Tory circus is descending into farce, as staff and residents organise a protest this week about the service cuts they're having live with and the services they're having to pay more for.
Last week, the H&F Tories delivered the world of a press release (put out, with genius timing, as the Mumbai disaster took over the news) that rattled on about a three percent council tax cut for Hammersmith and Fulham tax residents. Alas, the press release failed to mention the part of the story that so infuriates locals: that the council now charges for services that used to be covered by council tax, and life is even more expensive than it was. The 50p a week the Tories 'tax cut' now 'saves' residents must be spent on increased parking, recycling, childcare, homecare and meals on wheels fees.
Our friends over at hfconwatch - among others - estimate that the H&F Tories have increased charges on more than 500 services since they took office. If the Tories manage to close down one or other of the comprehensive schools they've been after, locals will doubtless have to stretch their returned 50p a week to cover private education and/or transport out of the borough for their children. What a deal.
The Tories would, of course, argue that shifting costs to services gives residents 'choice' about paying the council, because they can choose whether or not to use charged-for services (although they rarely mention the service charge increases without a prodding).
The problem with the choice argument, of course, is that few people have desirable choice in these matters unless they are millionnaires.
You can choose not to bag your rubbish up, I guess, and you can choose to cut Grandma's food off when she gets to the Meals on Wheels stage, and you can choose to take on an extra five jobs so that you can pay for private schools, and homecare for your disabled child, etc. You can make those choices if you want to. The point Hammersmith and Fulham residents are making is that they don't want to. Public services were put in place, and run on pooled funds, so that people who couldn't afford to pay privately for health and education, etc, didn't have to go without, as they will ultimately have to in Hammersmith.
That is why locals take such issue with the Tory claim that council tax cuts are about serving residents. In fact, they feel that they're paying more for less - and, perhaps more to the point, that the council wants people who can't afford to do that to get out of the borough. Rumour has it that councillors and management are shocked at the anger that their filthy little programme has provoked.
So.
Let's go to a local meeting now, and find out a little more:
Tis another frigid afternoon down the distant end of King Street in Hammersmith, and more than 300 people are parked up in the Town Hall's abyssal Assembly Hall, all set to hear the latest on local worker and resident rape.
Most people here are union members, many are Hammersmith residents, and all are fit to be tied.
'I've lived here for more than 20 years, and this bloody is a class war,' one of the parking boys mutters to me, giving voice to a widely-held local sentiment that the Hammersmith service cuts programme is less about council tax cuts than it is about moving community and union-minded people out, and rich and reactionary people in - a la Wandsworth and Westminster, etc. Thus flourishes the yuppie colonising model around the globe.
They're sending Hammersmith working people to Rochdale first. Union organiser Krissy O'Hagan takes the mike to tell us the council has announced its plans to move the council's switchboard and part of its contact centre to Rochdale 'they say to save accommodation costs,' O'Hagan says, although the paltry £150,000 per annum that the council's own cabinet reports estimate the move will save rather pales alongside the many millions the council proposes to find for a new civic centre (ie, shrine to itself) and more of the horribly unimaginative monuments to the 'get the masses in debt' theory for which it is already legendary. Also - there are only nine full time staff in the part of the contact centre that is headed for Rochdale (188 years of service at Hammersmith between them, and seven are Hammersmith residents). Why bother to shift them at all?
Tis fascinating, too, as O'Hagan notes, that the council plans to keep the contact centre staff who handle council tax and business rates inquiries in Hammersmith. That's the part of the council that is all about taking your money, and chasing you down like a dog if you miss your payments. ('It was found that this service area was not suited to a contact centre environment in the way that we wanted it delivered,' is the way that the council puts this in cabinet reports).
The parts of the contact centre that deal with less lucrative services, and are thus better suited to the abovementioned substandard contact centre environment, include rubbish collection and recycling services, anything at all to do with the environment, electoral services, and switchboard and general information. These, O'Hagan tells us, will be arseholed out of the borough to lucky Rochdale, where services will no doubt be provided to you by some underpaid and overworked local woman who has never set foot in Hammersmith, gets no overtime, is horribly distracted because she is terrified that her kids didn't make it to afterschool club, and whose only desire at work is to get you off the phone.
O'Hagan says the union came up with an alternative proposal for cost-effective service provision, but alas, the council dismissed this out of hand - which rather underscores the point that these outsourcing exercises are less about finance than cleansing.
'On the morning that management gave the staff this notice [about the transfer to Rochdale], they gave them their redundancy figures as well. This is even before they started talking about other options.'
Suffice to say, O'Hagan says, that 'if they get away with this for these group of workers (all the people who the council plans to move to Rochdale are union members who joined to protect themselves from contact centre conditions), then none of us is safe.'
Which is precisely the point, as union branch secretary and long-time Hammersmith resident Noreen Morris observes. It ain't about destroying a community in one afternoon with one A-bomb. It's about taking it apart 'in dribs and drabs.'
Dribbling out the door next will be the cleaners who work for Hammersmith council, says deputy branch secretary Paul Widdrington. The Hammersmith cleaning service put in a tender to provide a cleaning service for buildings and schools which Widdrington describes as 'very competitive.' They didn't win it, though, and so will be outsourced to private company Turners.
Outsourcing is always of tremendous concern for cleaning staff, not least because the private sector has mighty form when it comes to treating cleaners like garbage. Widdrington tells us the council will also outsource its highways contracts and security services.
So -will the good people of Hammersmith benefit if the private sector provides their services? Will they hell. They'll find themselves subject to substandard services provided by exactly the sort of grasping butthole who brought you the banking crisis - the kind of charmer who wins contracts by submitting loss leaders, then bleeds staff and buggers services by cutting corners and the already-low wages of poorly paid workers, and then pursues the council for bigger settlements when the well runs dry.
'We know that the Tory council says that with the contact centre, they are serving the residents,' Morris says. 'But there are many of us in this hall who are residents. They are not serving us by privatising our services. All that [privatisation] means is that they are going to give our money to the private companies. It doesn't mean that we're going to get any better services, or that they are going to be any cheaper. It just means that profits are going to private companies.'
The people aren't stupid, people. They know the market will shaft them.
Anyway - let's finish up today by making the point that it's hardly surprising that those who perceive themselves as workers believe that they're on the rough end of a good old-fashioned class attack in dear Hammers. The cuts programme here is not, alas, about anything as romantic as modernising public services, or saving the public pound. It ain't that clever. It's just good old upstairs-downstairs stuff. It's about slapping the working class into line, and - even better, if you're rich and wanting the masses at a distance - running it out of town.
