No lead from Camden councillors on anti-cuts

Last night's Camden Council budget meeting

A lively 1,200-strong march from Mornington Crescent through the backstreets of Camden to the Town Hall was followed by a protest as cowardly council held their final budget meeting behind closed doors.

A thick yellow line of police prevented the protesters entering the public gallery meaning that the vote was taken in secret. Luckily, one activist from Beyond Clictivism, Tim Hardy, managed to get in with a handful of others and Tweet reports using the #camden hashtag from the meeting, exposing what a sham of democracy this was.

"over £100,000,000 in reserves but they refuse to use them to protect the vulnerable", he tweets, and your blood runs cold at the level of cowardice in the council's quisling complicity.

'It was painful to witness Labour’s spineless failure to take a stand,' writes our intrepid reporter at the blog, aghast at the empty public gallery and the even emptier hearts and minds of the robo-councillors. Apparently a Green councillor was the only one to vote against the cuts.

Harpy Marx has some thorough reportage at her website with photos and now some great videos. In her third video, hospital worker Candy Udwin reports back on the meeting to the remaining protesters, and actor Roger Lloyd Pack urges councils to refuse to sign off on the cuts. The same old tired argument is that if Labour doesn't implement the cuts then Eric Pickles and his Tory cohort will set the cuts at an even more devastating level. But as Pack points out, "if they refused to vote this budget in they would set a ball rolling that would be impossible to stop. They'd be national heroes and would set an example for the rest of the country."

Wisconsin and the UK students have set the bar which our elected representatives miserably fail to match.

Labour — putting the 'u" into spine.

Afterwards, about fifty protesters blocked Marylebone Road outside St Pancras for an hour, dodging angry taxis and white van man who tried to drive through while the police watched and did nothing. The fight goes on. Watch out for the anti-cuts space.



UPDATE: "No ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts." "London, Cairo, Wisconsin. We will fight, we will win." Excellent short film from thegabber.com via Open Democracy.

'Go Wisconsin. You Are fighting For All Of Us'

'Go Wisconsin. You Are fighting For All Of Us'.

So says Chicago trade unonist Clancy Segal in the Guardian today. And he is totally right.

So appalling is the onslaught of capital on labour that even the police have joined the 600 protesters occupying the State Capitol building, while outside thousands of workers brave the freezing conditions in sleeping bags.

Clancy Segal writes:

This assault is essentially an ambush of the working middle class. It is openly financed by Big Money, like the hard-right multibillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who also fund – courtesy of the US supreme court's Citizens United decision – the Tea Party groups that supply anti-labour's ideological storm troopers. ... it comes as no surprise when Jeffrey Cox, Indiana's deputy attorney general, calls Wisconsin public sector workers "thugs" against whom he advocates deadly force. "Use live ammunition," he tweeted.

The fight is on. I'm going to my council's budget protest in Camden tonight to demand they do what their voters and ordinary people across the world are donig at the moment: represent us and fight back. Do not do their dirty work for them.

In Hackney, six councillors have signed a letter against the cuts. They write:

Some think we should protest - and wait for the next election. Our view is that we cannot wait until the damage is done. Nobody voted to privatise the NHS or make our communities pay for the bankers’ crisis. The government has no mandate. The bankers’ greed caused the crisis - they and their rich friends should pay for it through targeted taxes and a crack down on the tax loopholes used by millionaires and big corporations. As Labour Councillors, along with supporters of the Labour Representation Committee, we support a campaign to defeat the policies of this government through public protest, opposition and defiance. ... We would like to see local Councils across London leading the charge and refusing to adopt cuts budgets as a result of government enforced policies and producing a Needs Budgets to show what should be funded.

It's not without a little pride that I read the Wisconsin movement was inspired by the UK Uncut actions. Well done, guys and gals.

Wisconsin and Hackney are drawing on the power unleashed in recent events in the Middle East and picked up by UK Uncut. Carry on, you are doing this for us and we are there with you.