Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives

A few more Hammersmith and Fulham goodies for you, comrades:

We hear that the New Labour guns who run Unison have finally given beleaguered workers at Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council permission to ballot for strike action.

The strike will be in protest at a major downgrading of staff terms and conditions - a slash and burn of decent working standards that the council has been threatening for about a year.

It's all surely on now.

We trust absolutely that the regional officers that Unison's London office has parachuted in to help run the leftwing Hammersmith Unison branch are up to the sober task of organising strike action.

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As it happens, Hammersmith and Fulham staff have already chucked a spanner in council leader Stephen Greenhalgh's works with a brilliant little action of their own.

Last week, they were all - technically - sacked, then re-hired on the lesser terms and conditions. They had to sign up to the lesser terms and conditions if they wanted to be rehired.

Staff didn't make this quite as easy for the council as it sounds. It seems that as they signed, hundreds of them also noted that they were signing under duress. Then, they each lodged a case form for unfair dismissal - the argument being that they were sacked, unfairly, before being forced to sign up to the new terms. 

Now, the council has a great big pile of forms to process. That's got to be a pain in the butt. HR will surely lose its rag. 

Enough for now: suffice to say that it takes an awful lot of anger and energy to organise the sort of Up Yours action we've described above.

We expect plenty more of the same.

We've said it before, comrades, and we'll say it again - people who use and provide public services have no time for the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem line that they and the public sector must be destroyed if the nation is to be saved. Take it from those of us who talk to people who use and provide public services. They don't believe they're responsible for the recession. They want the banks to pay.

More to come.

News reaches hangbitch that Hammersmith and Fulham's Tory council has derecognised H&F Unison branch secretary Noreen Morris and two other branch officers.

These are most unpleasant times. 

The derecognition is punishment for a post that appeared on the H&F Unison blog last year. The post (rightly) slagged off several overpaid management sycophants who had helped rush through plans to shift the council contact centre to Rochdale. Management insisted that the union branch turn the post author in. The union branch told management it was unable to comply.

Now, Hammersmith and Fulham Unison has effectively lost its branch secretary and two of its best officers - at a time when H&F jobs and public services are being annihilated by the Conservatives, too.

And what is Unison's regional office doing to help its beleaguered branch comrades? Is it offering its considerable legal and financial resources to help these three officers mount a defence against this most wretched of Tory councils?

Is it hell. It has sent in a couple of regional officers to negotiate on employee matters directly with management, circumnavigating the branch.  

More soon. 

Photo: users of Hammersmith voluntary services protest in April about funding cuts

So... your funding dries up on Monday if you're one of the Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector groups that Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council has targeted for funding cuts.

It's been six months since the council's cabinet voted to direct funding away from longstanding, left-leaning groups like the Hammersmith Community Law Centre and towards less bolshie organisations. (The Tory council claims that it's not cutting funding overall to the voluntary sector, but the Labour group begs to differ: they say funding drops significantly from October (ie Monday) and even more significantly in the 2008 to 2009 year, when projections are for an overall cut of more than 25%).

The legal action taken against the council by three people who've used voluntary sector services in Hammersmith and Fulham came to very little this week. The three aimed to argue that the council hadn't consulted properly about the cuts, or talked with the people who were going to be most affected. This seemed a likely argument - a fair few organisations heard about the proposed cuts to their funding on the grapevine, not through any formal council process.

In April, when the cabinet voted for the cuts, people like Helena Ismail from the Somali support group Horn of Africa, which lost all its funding, said they hadn't received as much as a phone call from the council about it. She found out when the Hammersmith Community Law Centre rang her and told her. The Hammersmith Community Law Centre only found out because one of its lawyers happened to see the council report that recommended the cuts.

...you terrible Tories.

A decision on the legality of the Hammersmith and Fulham Tory council's decision to cut funding to the voluntary sector is due on Monday.

More soon.

Wondering
What will happen.

The Hammersmith Law Centre is due to lose 60% of its funding in cuts voted for by the Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Thousands of poorer people in the borough will lose access to the free legal advice, support and representation that the centre has provided for nearly 30 years.

This site is now adding interviews with people who have gone to the law centre for legal help and advice over the years.

Below, law centre clients Vanildo and Claudia Fernandas explain why they sought help from the law centre. They took advice from the law centre this year about emergency housing and benefits.

Vanildo Fernandas was waiting for a bus on Fulham Palace Road very late one night last October when two men walked over and attacked him with a couple of knives. 'Maybe for a robbery,' Vanildo's wife Claudia says. 'I don't know what they did it for. He was waiting by himself for the bus. There was one Iranian guy and one Afghan guy.'

Vanildo, 29, had just finished a night-shift in the restaurant kitchen he'd been working in for about a fortnight. 'When he finished the night, he called me to say that he would be home in about 30 minutes,' Claudia says. Needless to say, he wasn't. 'They cut him everywhere – here, on his throat (they cut his oesophagus open), on his arms, and down his chest. There is nerve problems in his arms now. He has to also have food and drink through a tube in his stomach [because the cut to his oesophagus is still open]. It is [going to take a long time] for him to heal. He is frightened, very difficult. I worry about leaving him alone. There is, um, how do you say it, his imagination?'

This is the latest article in a series about Hammersmith and Fulham Council's cutting of funding to voluntary sector organisations, and its targeting in particular of the Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre, which is about to lose 60% of its funding.

There are links to the earlier articles in this series at the end of this story. There are also links to the Conservative blogs that have been discussing this issue and these posts.

Community law centres aren't always popular with the national and local politicians that fund them, but surely that's par for the course?

Law centres were set up to provide free legal advice to people who can't afford to pay for legal help and representation. Often, these people are users of public services like immigration services, council housing, and welfare. And there are, unfortunately, times when these people are not given the right advice about their immigration, housing and welfare entitlements.

The truth is that government agencies and councils are as capable of cocking up as the rest of us, and on an awesome scale when they really give it a go. They wrongly deny people their entitlements to housing benefits, or at work, or they don't act on complaints with quite the vigour you'd hope.

And who can blame them for these shambles? Times ain't exactly high in the public-sector trenches. Frontline staff - people who know as much as anyone about the ways that complex benefits systems work and combine - are being culled at a majestic rate. God only knows what is happening at the Home Office. Councils are a riot

Having a discussion with Hammersmith and Fulham Tory councillor Paul Bristow over at his blog at the moment. We're talking about the proposed voluntary funding cuts at that council and the effect this will have on the Hammersmith Law Centre in particular. (Naughty Paul actually pinched a photo taken by one of the contributors to this site and put it on his site - see right. That was kind of how we all met each other. Ten points for taste, though - they are pretty good photos).

Anyway - trying to get Paul and council leader Stephen Greenhalgh to agree to an interview on the voluntary funding at Hammersmith and Fulham topic.

Hangbitch New Statesman watch on the Hammersmith and Fulham Tories

Introduction:

Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative council is planning to cut funding to a mighty range of longstanding local voluntary groups. That’s no big surprise from a Conservative council, although it was certainly delivered as one. Some groups have only just heard that they’re about to lose their funding, and mostly, they’ve heard it from each other. The council has not been too quick to let these applicants know that their money has gone.

The worst hit by far is the Hammersmith Law Centre – a longstanding charitable organisation that has been providing Hammersmith’s community and voluntary sectors with advantageous legal advice since 1979, and tormenting various council kaisers for about as long. The Law Centre is staffed by 12 lawyers - 12 experienced persons who know the law, continue to set national legal precedents with their work, give free legal advice to charities, unions, right-minded council officers and anybody else who suspects that the council or government office that they’re having to deal with is talking neocon garbage. It is perhaps needless to say that the Law Centre poses a problem for the council.

And so it is that the Law Centre is due to lose 60% of its funding. The Tories will try to point out (as their officer report on voluntary sector funding to the council’s Cabinet on Monday 16 April does, all over the place) that they are not cutting funding to the voluntary sector as such – they are merely redistributing it. Alas for council leader Stephen Greenhalgh, it is hard to mask this sort of surgery. The truth is that if you get rid of the Hammersmith Law Centre, you lobotomise the community and voluntary sector in Hammersmith and Fulham. You don’t need a lot of brain to get it around that one.

We will be looking at this issue in more depth over the coming weeks and talking to more of the people who are affected. This first story begins the discussion.

Note: voluntary groups affected by the proposed funding cuts will hold a protest at a Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting on Monday 16 April at 7pm in the Assembly Hall in the Town Hall on Kings Street in Hammersmith. This is a public meeting, and the affected voluntary groups would welcome support.

Hammersmith Law Centre

The Hammersmith Law Centre discovered that it was about to lose 60% of its funding not long before Easter. Staff there appear to have found out about on the day that long-time centre lawyer Tony Pullen just happened to see the council report that recommended the cut.

The centre is on the mailing list for Hammersmith and Fulham council agendas, and the agenda for the April 16 2007 cabinet meeting had come through the door, as the council agendas usually do. Pullen decided to thumb through the agenda - mostly, it seems, for the hell of it. He noticed that there was a report in the agenda called 'Voluntary Sector Funding, 2007 to 2009.' 'I thought 'that looks interesting,' Pullen says, raising his eyebrows.

Indeed it was. The report, which is still due to go before the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting, recommended a £159,000 cut to the Centre's annual £261,000 grant – the most substantial in a list of very substantial hits. Pullen found himself a little flustered. 'We hadn't had any warning, and we hadn't heard anything from the council. This report was saying that we were going to lose 60% of our funding, and the cabinet meeting (where a vote would be taken on that recommendation) was only a few days away when I saw that report. I don't know how we would have found out if I hadn't seen that report.'

...to do a bit of anti-Cameron publicity.

You have doubtless heard that Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council has spent the year since its election maiming public services. David Cameron says his Conservatives are lovely people. In fact, they remain the planet's leading arseholes, which is no small achievement.

Anyway, the whole nightmare is laid out at hfconwatch.blogspot.com, which has been watching it all hit the fan since October last year and should have been linked to ages ago. Fucked up a bit on that one.

Their latest entry details now-legendary Tory plans to murder the Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre.

Which we will be getting into in more detail in the next week or so.

Bye again.