Stephen Greenhalgh

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.

This is a nice post on climate camp. The pictures were taken on a pinhole camera.

Have slowed up a bit for 'summer' but will be back on deck soon.

In the meantime, if you're new to this site (lots of people have turned up here since the Guardian started running stories on Barnet council's cheap and cheerful service charging plan), wander around and read all you can about the devastation Tories have wreaked at Hammersmith and Fulham and Barnet.

There are a lot of interviews and photos on this site with service users who have been on the receiving end of Tory cuts and the privatisation agenda at those councils:

For those who have asked, here is the photo essay on Barnet's Fremantle careworkers and their two year dispute on pay cuts. 

The stories on the Barnet cuts to sheltered housing wardens start here.

If you run a search for 'Hammersmith' on this site, you'll find all the interviews with people who have had to deal with massive service cuts at Hammersmith and Fulham council since the Tories took power in 2006. 

Back soon.

Meant to publish this at the beginning of the year, but forget to queue it over Christmas.

It's a report from a December 2008 Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting where local spoke against council plans to move the council contact centre to Rochdale.

Thought it might be a timely reminder of the realities of Hammersmith and Fulham council's much-vaunted council tax cuts: 

We go to a mid-sized meeting room at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall, where a group of local people and council contact centre staff sit before the cocky, elitist and - in the case of councillor Lucy Ivimy, racist - Tory cabinet, to beg to keep the council's contact centre in Hammersmith, and to keep their jobs.

The locals have exactly five minutes to talk the council out of its plans to move its local contact centre to Rochdale. Those plans include making everyone who currently works in the contact centre redundant, and doubtless form a crucial part of the council's ongoing campaign to move moneyless people who use and provide public services out of Hammersmith, and rich people who don't need public services in, a la Wandsworth and Westminster, etc. 

The local people in the room aren't talking about that at the moment, though, because they're being distracted by an unexpected, if revealing, side act. The council's deputy leader - one Nicholas Botterill, who sits alongside council leader Stephen Greenhalgh - is pulling faces and laughing at the local people who've turned up to address the cabinet. It's an extraordinary display, and not a heartening one. Botterill is giggling at the the locals and their plight and screwing his little rat face up at them, presumably for the benefit of Tory sympathisers in the audience. Krissy O'Hagan - the locals' spokesperson, and contact centre union rep - is reading, nervously, a speech in favour of keeping the contact centre in Hammersmith, and public services generally, and Botterill is wrinkling his face up and laughing at her.

He makes such an ass of himself that council leader Stephen Greenhalgh is forced to tell him to shut up.

'No! No! Don't!' Greenhalgh hisses in full view of all. Greenhalgh has grasped that it's no longer the done thing to jeer publicly at low earners, but maybe the message hasn't trickled down to Botterill. Greenhalgh's cabinet has learned that mocking black people isn't on - a full year has passed since the earlier-mentioned cabinet member Lucy Ivimy revealed the H&F Tory hand on race with a remarkably bigoted commentary about Asian hygiene standards - but low earners with working class accents are still fair game.

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. 

Just heard that all 4200 employees at Hammersmith and Fulham council have been issued with redundancy notices, as the charming Tory council there pushes through new contracts and worsened terms and conditions.

My contacts tell me the unions have been told that staff must sign new contracts, or get lost.

You can expect standards in care, education, and housing services, etc, in Hammersmith to take a dive (if they continue at all) from now on.

Have a look at this if you want to know more about the terrible effects that Tories cuts are having on staff and public services at local councils. Don't EVER buy into David Cameron's fluffy Tories salespitch - these people are vicious, and interested only in destroying the health, education and care services that people who aren't fillthy rich (ie most of us) need.

Am going to do some interviewing this weekend on this, so will be back with more soon. 

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

This story: the Cabinet at Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative Council meets to accept the Voluntary Sector Funding report which cuts funding to central and longstanding voluntary groups.

Photo: Hammersmith and Fulham Council leader Stephen Greenhalgh.

Introduction and background to the voluntary sector funding controversy at Hammersmith and Fulham

Photos from the protest at the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting

Splendid scenes at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall this week, when several hundred furious locals shouted the council's largely pale and male Tory cabinet members out of the meeting hall, and down towards the Town Hall latrines - the very place (I'm sure I've got this straight) where the H&F Tories first spawned.

The locals had turned up to protest about the council's plans to cut ('prioritise' is the word that the Tories are using at the moment) funding to Hammersmith and Fulham's voluntary sector.

Groups that work very closely with some of Hammersmith and Fulham's poorest communities have lost all their funding, and they are not thrilled. The Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre - a group of 12 experienced and committed lawyers that has been the legal brain of the Hammersmith voluntary sector together for nearly 30 years, and so often successfully highlighted council and government uselessness - has lost 60% of its funding.