Thousands join in cuts protest march to Downing Street

Published: 21 October, 2010
by RICHARD OSLEY, JOSIE HINTON and TOM FOOT

THE relentless cry was simple: “They say cut back, we say fight back.”

With the bugle of loud hailers ringing in their ears, thousands of public sector staff and anti-cuts protesters marched on Downing Street last night (Wednesday) to demonstrate against the slashing of government spending.

As ministers sold the cuts as a painful but necessary measure to tackle a spiralling national debt caused by the banking crisis and flabby expenditure, their names were spat out with venom in the streets around Westminster.

One placard read: “Nick Clegg – Judas”.

Right at the forefront of the protest were organisers from Camden including nurses, teachers, students, Labour party activists and union members. 

In fact, no other part of London had so many of its residents at Whitehall. 

Camden’s branch of Unison, which represents around 3,000 staff facing an uncertain future at the Town Hall, were largely behind the protest which was scheduled to coincide with the release of the Comprehensive Spending Review.

The orders from Chancellor George Osborne to make unprecedented cuts to public services were never going to make happy reading.

The Labour leadership in Camden was told that it must make 20 percent of cuts to every department. Over the next few years, the union fears 1,000 jobs will be lost among Camden’s council staff. 

Never before has the council been asked to cut so deeply into its services and council officials will now be asked to put into action plans that were drawn up for the “worst-case scenario”. More details will be released next week but councillors say play services for the young and care services for the elderly are now squarely under threat.

Meanwhile, housing benefits are to be capped, while new council tenants will be offered only short-term tenures, effectively an end to the “home for life” reassurance afforded to them up to now.

Those accepting council properties will also be asked to pay up to 80 per cent of market rents, a demand which politicians locally believe will fundamentally change the dynamics of Camden’s council housing with many in desperate need of affordable homes unable to pay. 

The familiar line from protesters yesterday was a warning that only the rich will soon be able to live in what is currently one of London’s most diverse boroughs.

In another measure – hardly foreseen by anybody at the Town Hall – a deal to create improved recycling services across seven London boroughs was torn up, leading to warnings that useful waste will simply be diverted back to landfill.

Teaching unions, still furious that long-awaited improvement money has been taken away from Camden’s schools, say they too are bracing themselves for the task of achieving the same results with less resources – something considered unrealistic by many of the marchers.

From a rally in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the march snaked down the Strand towards Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, gathering in numbers and noise as it went. 

Outside the gates of Downing Street, more protesters from across London welcomed the Camden marchers as the protest swelled to somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

From a stage in sight of David Cameron’s front door, George Binette, the branch secretary of Camden Unison, told the crowd: “Thousands, literally thousands, face the awful prospect of eviction from London or street homelessness because of changes to housing benefit and the slashing of the social housing budget at the very same time. We face the obscenity of the Eton-educated, Bullingdon Club members  who live across the road ordering cuts not seen since the 1920s and yet we live in the fifth richest country in the world. A country where 1,000 households control 350 billion pounds of wealth – more than twice the deficit.”

Labour’s finance chief Councillor Theo Blackwell also marched after seeing first sight of the deal from Mr Osborne.

He said: “This is going to be brutal on the council. It will mean we have to close a significant range of services and that’s why so many members joined the demonstration. Everybody knows we have to bear down on the deficit but this is a Tory experiment, something more than dealing with the structural deficit. There could be a calmer approach; you don’t need to cut so deeply and so quickly. The council relies so heavily on money from the government. Everybody who has worked hard to make Camden a place where services are respected and there is a network of great community projects will be saddened.”

Labour opponents to the cuts believe the pretext of debt repayments masks a deeper ideological motive. They say that attaching fixed tenures to council flats was not a measure that would make any inroads into a national deficit.

Raj Chada, a former Labour leader of the council, said: “This is not about budgets or about savings but about a Conservative revolution over how this country is run. If it was only about budgets then why would it be that young people have to choose their university not on education, but on what level of debt they want to face? Why would it be that in London people are being socially cleansed from their houses because social benefits are being capped?”

But supporters of the Coalition  refuse point blank to accept the plans are born out of anything other than efforts to scale back the debt.

Conservative leader Councillor Andrew Mennear said: “I don’t take any pleasure in this. It’s going to hurt. No one is happy but I do believe the majority recognise some steps will be taken. The hope is it works and it works quickly and we can get back to happier times. I don’t think marches are an effective way of changing government’s  mind.”

He added: “The local Labour party are out of touch with the problems affecting Britain today, which have been exacerbated by Gordon Brown and Labour over the previous 13 years. To pretend it’s OK to move forward without taking action on the problems we  inherited is Cloud Cuckooland. Gordon Brown played an awfully large part in failing to rein in the banks and increasing UK peacetime debt to astronomical levels and chickens have come home to roost.”

Liberal Democrat leader Councillor Keith Moffitt said he had concerns about the cut to the waste deal and plans for housing.

But he added: “It is a bad day for local government but it is obvious there were tough decisions to make. If Labour were in power, they would have had to have made similar decisions. The announcements matched what had already been forecast so there were no surprises. My interest is that there is not a tribal response to this and that we can work together as local councillors at lobbying in areas where we feel it is needed.”