Council workers protest in Birmingham last week
Trade unions in Birmingham should be preparing serious strikes and spearheading wider campaigns after the Labour-led council voted to push through the biggest cuts in local government history. But that is not yet happening.
Birmingham, the biggest local authority in Europe, approved £300 million of cuts over the next two years on Tuesday. Council tax will rise by 10 percent in April and 10 percent the year after, adding £350 to average bills. And then on top there’s a £500 million “asset sale” as vulture firms grab council properties and land.
There’s a serious debate about how to fight back. Carl Chinn, a high-profile Birmingham social historian and author told the Birmingham Mail newspaper, “The people of this city are utterly disillusioned with the political system. After 14 years of austerity, and seeing their living standards and public services worsen, people are worn out.
“Many residents are so far removed from the political classes and local democracy and so resigned to being ‘done to’ that they don’t see the point in protest.
“Half of our children are living in abject poverty, overcrowded, in poor quality homes, and this budget will make it worse.
“But it looks like a done deal, overseen largely by unelected commissioners, mostly men in suits with no affinity with Birmingham, who don’t care about our communities.
Recalling the 100,000 strong demonstration in Birmingham to try to save the Rover Longbridge car plant in 2000, Chinn said he couldn’t imagine something on that scale again. “What working class people see is that their opinions and concerns don’t count,” he said
“Many have a complete disdain for so many politicians and the political system, and see it isn’t working for them.”
The mood of bitter contempt for what passes for “politics” is real. But Chinn’s analysis can lead to passivity and defeatism.
Yet what’s seen as apathy can move to explosive anger and action. That’s what happened over Longbridge. It can happen again.
But the unions accepting their members don’t want to fight makes it much less likely. They say they are following a mood when they have created it.
In the same article headlined, “Why aren’t thousands of Brummies taking to the streets over council cuts and tax hikes?”, the Unison union also puts forward its views.
Ravi Subramanian, West Midlands Unison regional organiser, said, “Right now the cuts and impact are words on a page.
“When libraries start closing, or your mum can’t get the home care she needs, or the support service that keeps you going is no longer available, people will realise these cuts are real, and feel angry. But then it might be too late.”
Again, this recognises the emergency, but leads nowhere. Subramanian highlighted specific protests underway against library closures and cuts to youth services, which he predicts will grow.
But, however important, it will never be enough to confront just one cut or defend one service. The unions, together, should call rallies alongside those fighting the cuts in their areas.
They should start building strikes across the council and work for united walkouts. This sort of fightback could force the government to come up with the money to halt the cuts and settle in full the equal pay claims.
The unions are a long way from that. The GMB union last week announced the names of 35 schools that will begin a formal strike vote in the next few days over the delay in dealing with equal pay. That involves fewer than one in ten of the city’s schools.
Nearly 90 percent of GMB members who voted backed strikes in a council-wide consultative ballot. But the formal ballot is confined to just a small selection of workplaces. The union said, “Further waves of formal strike ballots are expected to be announced.”
The Unite union has not put forward any concrete plan of action. After the cuts meeting, Clare Keogh, Unite’s national officer for local authorities, said, “Birmingham council’s workers must not pay the price for a crisis they didn’t create. Unite will do everything in its power, politically and industrially, to ensure they don’t.”
Unite’s membership is strongest in the bins section. The cuts package includes a possible move to fortnightly bin collections that would inevitably attack jobs. But there’s no call for strikes. Unison, the largest council union, has announced no plans for ballots. It’s time for serious resistance.
Lots of the media coverage concentrates on Birmingham’s crisis over equal pay. When the council went bankrupt last year, council leaders linked the financial collapse to a huge bill to settle equal pay claims.
The only reason that the council owes money is that for years it has paid women less than men doing comparable jobs.
The bill to settle the equal pay liability is now estimated to be more than £867 million. The size of the bill makes it easy for some to say that the cuts are because of greedy workers.
But James Brackley, lecturer in accounting at the University of Sheffield, wrote last week on The Conversation website, “The spiralling budget deficits have little to do with the equal pay issue.
“Instead, they are the result of a disastrous implementation of a new Oracle IT system, which is compounding a decade of austerity cuts that had already left services severely overstretched.”
Birmingham council cabinet papers from 27 February show that the majority of the equal pay claims probably won’t be settled until after April 2025.
Brackley concludes, “None of the £149 million of cuts to services (in the first year) relate to any deficit created by equal pay settlements.
“Originally budgeted at £40 million, the latest report by the head of financial planning to the cabinet on 27 February showed that the Oracle system has now run to an astonishing £131 million.”
Oracle’s failures have left the council in chaos, unable to prepare basic financial information. Through the 2022-23 financial year, council tax and business rates were not effectively collected.
Oracle’s co-founder and now executive chair is Larry Ellison. He has amassed a fortune of over £110 billion, according to Forbes wealth website.
Just 1 percent of his wealth would pay for all the equal pay claims and remove the need for any cuts in Birmingham.
Brackley’s analysis also confirms a Socialist Worker exclusive from last year. He says that in 2023 the council knew it was facing bankruptcy over Oracle and other issues. But “placing the blame on a headline-grabbing equal pay liability puts the problem at the door of the city’s trade unions and the elected Labour party leadership.”
As we said in October, “There are people in the government and inside the council who preferred the council to crash and burn rather than do a deal with the unions over equal pay.”
Other major firms are part of the Oracle debacle. The original implementation partner for the Oracle rollout was systems integrator Evosys, now merged with Mastek. Giant accountancy firms PwC and KPMG came in to “help rectify problems” earlier this year. They will all grab fat fees.
The eight government commissioners sent in by the Tories last October to run Birmingham council after it went bankrupt have run up a bill of nearly £300,000 for their services in just three months.
Local government minister Michael Gove dispatched the hit squad to force the city’s councillors and officers to make cuts.
Seven of them are paid £1,100 a day for their efforts, while lead commissioner Max Caller gets £1,200 a day.
Caller made a name for himself 20 years ago cutting services as chief executive in Hackney, east London.
Most of Caller’s team are drawn from other local authority corporate teams. But there are Labour Party figures to camouflage the assault.
Gove appointed two political advisers “to support the authority”. One is Lord John Hutton, a defence secretary and business secretary under the previous Labour government.
The second is John Biggs, former Labour executive mayor of the London borough of Tower Hamlets. He issued Section 188 notices to workers during the pandemic—firing and rehiring them on worse terms and conditions. He lost re-election to the post in 2022 but Gove has revived his fortunes.
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