The devastating impact of the comprehensive spending review is becoming horrifyingly clear. Cuts to social security will leave the most disadvantaged families under huge financial pressure, with the poorest, children and the sick and disabled bearing the brunt of the cuts. Equally devastating are the cuts to local authority budgets, facing a 28 per cent funding decrease. Local jobs and local services relied on by ordinary families, are under serious threat.
Labour cannot waste a day in exposing the dangerous cruelty of these cuts. That means a concentrated, sustained and determined campaign to expose every cut, to highlight the individual hardship behind the figures, to point up the damage that’s being caused.
But we must also think urgently about how we mainstream and build a broad base for our position, harnessing the widest possible public support. For, as many commentators have noted, it’s the coalition government that’s winning the public argument. If we’re to bring home the impact of cuts to every voter, we’ll need broad-based and sustained local campaigns, in the workplace, on the high street, at the school gate, in the doctor’s waiting room, highlighting what the cuts mean for individuals and families.
One plank of building that broad-based campaign must be to use our union links. We need all the resource we can get to fight the cuts – and unions have lots to give. In my own constituency, it was the Usdaw literature, the GMB footsloggers (and the financial support of both unions) that made a huge contribution during the general election campaign. In parliament, the PCS is making the running on the loss of public sector jobs, while last week’s TUC lobby of parliament showed Unite, the GMB, Unison and a host of other unions, large and small, organising to expose the scale and impact of the cuts.
It’s not just the campaigning and organising, but the reach to individual union members and their families that matter if we’re to get our message across. For contact with every individual union member helps to build broad public awareness of and opposition to the cuts – an awareness that they can share with their families, colleagues and neighbours.
The TUC’s lobby last week demonstrates the priority unions are giving now to campaigning against the cuts. But high-profile national events are not the whole story – for effective local campaigning, Labour activists need to cement their local union links fast. Well-functioning local links are lacking between union branches and many CLPs. There’s no doubt such links, when they work well, are extremely effective, but for too long we’ve neglected both the structures and the personal relationships between union activists and party figures at local level. We’ve failed systematically to plan or campaign together as a result.
So the party must work with our union allies, not just nationally but at local level too. Yet how good are we at doing that, how well have we embedded the links? In my own constituency last month, we held a highly effective planning day for our members to look at the effect of the Tory council’s cuts. But why didn’t we think to invite the local union activists, to make contact with local union branches? The union activists in our local hospital are well informed about the effect of the far-reaching changes the government’s proposing for the NHS, and what they mean for patient care – several of them attended the TUC lobby and met me in parliament last week. There’s a relationship there that’s the basis for a joint campaign between our local party and local NHS staff – we need to exploit that. At our weekly street stall this Saturday, a teacher came up to me to explain what the government announcements on schools funding mean for my constituency. A well informed union activist, he was keen to share his expertise and to campaign jointly with us – that’s something we can build.
Joint working with unions must lie at the heart of our local campaigns, and we need to embed the links. For the top priority that we both share is to dislodge this divisive, damaging and unfair government. Trade unionists know that campaigning to return Labour to power at the earliest opportunity is the best protection we can offer to the poorest, to society as a whole, and to people’s jobs. The unions have the reach, the resource, the commitment, the knowledge, they are part of our Labour family. Let’s ensure we work systematically together, nationally and locally, to get this government out.