30% Cuts to Services in Southwark: Join the Southwark Save Our Services Campaign

[The Minkey]

I got this email notification yesterday. If you're concerned about the forthcoming cuts to services, please sign up.

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Southwark to cut 30% from its budget

Join the resistance with Southwark SOS

Southwark council faces a 30% cut in funding and is at this moment planning to slash 500 jobs and untold services. Many people with serious mobility problems and/or visual impairments which make using public transport unfeasible have already received notification of cuts to the Taxicard scheme, and other vital services will follow. It is frightening.

However, there is a tide of resistance and Southwark Save Our Services campaign is uniting council workers, community groups, disabled people, tenants, pensioners, college and school students in a campaign against the cuts and to fight for more resources. We did not cause the financial crisis and we don't want to pay for it.

If you would like to be kept in touch, please email [email protected] and ask to be put on the email list. You will then be kept in touch about activities and lobbies taking place to defend our services and benefits. It's not all protesting: we are making vibrant connections and getting very inspired to use our creativity in the struggle. Every bit of support and every bit of resistance counts.

You can find Southwark SOS on Facebook too.

[Marmora Man]

If the council website is to be believed the cuts are circa 11.5% in 2010/11 and a further circa 7.5% in 2011/12. Given the nature of local government bureaucracy and some of the high increases in government grants to Southwark over recent years it is a racing certainty that at least some of those savings are capable of being found in the back room operations or projects of marginal value - reducing the annual reduction in frontline costs of essential services to low single figure percentages.

I am not arguing that cuts are necessarily a "good thing" or that it won't be hard - but hyperbolic statements about 30% cuts aren't helpful. What would be helpful is to have a coherent alternatives proposed and not simply opposition.

"We did not cause the financial crisis and we don't want to pay for it" is a nice, factually incorrect, slogan but not a policy.

Sure the banks were bailed out - but it is almost another racing certainty that the government will sell of its shares in UK banks at a minimal net loss or even a gain over the next 5 years. The entire country wallowed in increased government spending and easy money from 1999 through to 2008 - the reckoning had to come at some stage and it did. The price has been and is reduced government spending across the board to reflect a reduced tax take and the growing cost of government debt.