When fighting cuts we can’t afford the luxury of division

Published: 11th March, 2011

• I AM one of the IHOOPS (Islington Hands off our Public Services) joint chairs but I write my own views here in response to the two letters last week that sought to drive a wedge between IHOOPS and the Labour Party in Islington. 

I welcome the maximum number of Islington people demonstrating on March 26, whether they be behind IHOOPS, Labour Party, trade union or other banners, or none.

The cuts are being imposed by the coalition government as it sees the opportunity to destroy the welfare state, while giving profits to its friends through privatisation of health, education and local services. 

The people of Islington are not to blame. The bankers are partly to blame, but even ‘nice’ bankers would have brought the same crisis. This is a systemic failure and will require a mass movement to reverse it and change the system.

IHOOPS has the job of building this movement and, as more and more people in Islington feel the impact of health, education and local government service cuts, we will be there to act as a focus for their anger.  

Labour voters and Labour Party members will join us and if we succeed the council will have no choice but to come with us. It may take some time but if we keep as united as possible and do our bit in building a nationwide movement against this government we can become strong enough to change the whole political agenda. 

The people (as in other parts of the world) may soon make demands, such as freedom from wars, the banning of Trident, tax payment by avoiders, a better welfare state and investment in transport and industrial infrastructure. Miliband and co would then have to follow.

IHOOPS is a democratic organisation but I expect that it will support strikes and occupations by workers and service users as part of this struggle. I will also argue that it keeps dialogue open with the Labour Party. Division is a luxury we can’t afford.
Andy Bain
N4

• I AGREE with Glen Hurst that there should be no public service cuts (Letters, March 4). But the campaign to oppose the cuts must be as broad based as possible and include Islington’s Labour councillors and our two Labour MPs, who also want to fight these unfair and unjust cuts.  

The council cuts are a direct result of Tory-Lib Dem government grant cuts to the council, and will be exacerbated by even greater cuts locally to other public services, including the NHS. It is the government and the international capitalist system that is forcing these cuts on us.  

If the council had set a “needs-based budget” without cuts, it would have been declared illegal and left the way open for the Tory local government minister, Eric Pickles, to decide which local services to cut. This is hardly conducive to proper local democracy and needs reform.  

Attacking local Labour politicians for the cuts totally misses the point and is also counterproductive as it sows seeds of disunity when instead we should be building unity in our communities against the cuts. We clearly need to campaign for progressive alternatives to cuts, such as investment in jobs and better services as well as cracking down on bankers’ bonuses and tax avoidance.

I would urge readers to join the TUC march for the alternative at 11am on Saturday, March 26, at Victoria Embankment.
Gary Heather
Mayton Street, N7

• RÓISÍN Ní Corráin writes that the people who occupied the public gallery at Islington town hall for the council’s budget meeting on February 17 were “football crowd invaders” and “gatecrashers” (Police had to be brought in to clear cuts protesters, March 4). This is nonsense. 

Ms Corráin describes herself as an “Islington resident”. Has it not occurred to her that the people in the gallery also either live or work in the borough, and that they, like her, were exercising their democratic right to protect local services from being decimated before their very eyes? 

Ms Corráin’s justification of Islington Council’s disgraceful decision to inflict police violence and assault on local people, for the crimes of heckling and rattling tambourines, is astonishing. Furthermore, her claim that Councillor Janet Burgess was “targeted” with sexist abuse from the gallery is simply untrue; as a woman who was extremely vocal in objecting to the content of Cllr Burgess’s speech, I can say the opposition she received had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with her rhetoric that the cuts were “inevitable”, and the disastrous effect these will have on services.

There is nothing inevitable about these cuts. The council clearly had a choice; it could and should have resisted them. Instead, it has chosen to be the pallbearers of this barbaric ConDem government’s ideological attack on the social fabric of our society, and therefore deserved every piece of the non-violent protest it received on that historic night.
Jem Lindon
N7