Today sees the launch of a new London Labour campaign on cuts to emergency services in London – 999 SOS – with London assembly members joining our Croydon North candidate Steve Reed at South Norwood police station. The campaign launch is sandwiched between a Met announcement on Monday of cuts to a quarter of remaining police sergeants and 3,500 civilian staff and this Thursday’s Fire Authority meeting where the scale of the cuts coming round the corner to a fire station near you is likely to be hotly debated. It comes on a day when assembly members have raised the cuts with Boris Johnson at Mayor’s Question Time, a day on which I predict the mayor will refuse to take responsibility for his cuts to the police and fire services and will refuse to take responsibility for standing up for Londoners on the NHS.

I should stress that this is the latest in a series of campaigns because around the capital – and indeed around the country – people are already campaigning against cuts to their local services. Local people, local groups and local Labour parties objecting to cuts to local fire stations, cuts to the police and cuts to services provided at local hospitals. Some areas are more organised than others but Facebook has a wide range of pages linking to local petitions supporting frontline services that you don’t need every day but that when you do need, you need desperately.

Local is good. Local demonstrates that local services have support locally and are needed. Local demonstrates that objecting to their removal is a practical and not an ideological response to planned cuts. Because locally it is obvious that the distances people are going to be expected to travel to police stations and A&Es where they are closing are impractical and that fire attendance times will increase where fire stations are being lost. And obvious that this won’t just lead to inconvenience, it will jeopardise lives.

However, it is important to provide a mechanism to link all the local campaigns together to demonstrate the huge opposition to the scale and speed of the cuts. Only by doing so will we avoid the Tories (forget the Lib Dems, they are increasingly irrelevant) setting different areas against each other when it comes to implementation of cuts on the ground.

By linking campaigns together we can ensure that the weight of the opposition is taken in to account. 999 SOS is intended to provide a mechanism to do this; to provide resources including a Londonwide petition on the website at www.999SOS.org.uk for those areas which don’t have campaigns set up already; and to provide a forum via the Facebook page and Twitter account – @999SOSLondon – for people to post information about their local campaigns. It is not intended to replace local campaigns.

Linking our collective voices together shows that not only does the scale and speed of the cuts not make sense for local services, they don’t make sense as a whole. If we are a One Nation party, then we need to defend the services that all sections of society rely on and support. We are now seeing the impact of the government cutting too far, too fast. Now is the time to campaign with people across the capital to give voice to growing anger at cuts to our 999 services. Together we really are stronger. If we don’t save the emergency services, who will?

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Fiona Twycross AM, is City Hall Labour’s campaign coordinator. She tweets @fionatwycross. You can read her other contributions to Progress here