It appears that the rise of the SNP in Scotland is going to cost Labour seats at the forthcoming General Election. Scottish voters don’t want Independence from the rest of the UK, but they appear to want to be governed by a party dedicated to bringing this about and to send its members to represent them in the Westminster Parliament. Maybe some are doing this out of guilt because they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote Yes in the referendum, even though a sense of romantic nationalism made them feel that they should have done so. If former Scottish Labour voters planned to vote SNP in May out of a combination of nationalism and guilt, they now have an added motivation. A few weeks ago SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon attacked Westminster’s ‘morally unjustifiable’ Austerity policy. Her intention was to focus the spotlight on Labour for not being anti-Austerity enough, arguing that with a hung Parliament being the most likely outcome of the Election, a strong SNP presence in Westminster was the only thing that would force Labour to break up the ‘cosy consensus’ around Austerity that existed amongst the major parties. With the SNP now campaigning on an anti-Austerity ticket, one wonders what Jim Murphy, Labour’s leader in Scotland, can do to create a Unique Selling Point for the party north of the border.
But the SNP is not the only anti-Austerity party causing problems for Labour. Although the SNP is threatening 20 Labour seats in Scotland, south of the border it’s the Greens that are the headache. A surge of support for the Green Party, Natalie Bennett’s media meltdown notwithstanding, amongst disaffected former Lib Dem voters and other left leaning people, especially the young, students and first time voters, could prevent a Labour victory in 22 seats.
Why has the Labour Party got itself into this position? Ed Balls' current pronouncements on Labour Economic Policy stand in stark contrast to his 2010 Bloomberg Speech, a speech to which the economist David Blanchflower tweeted the link a few weeks ago, hailing it as one of the most sensible things anyone has said about the Great Recession. Anyone who read that speech, entitled ‘This is an alternative’, (here, still on his own website, or here if you fancy watching the man in person delivering it on YouTube) could reasonably be forgiven for expecting a more anti-Austerity policy from Labour in Opposition when Balls became Shadow Chancellor.
Many independent commentators describe the plans of political parties to implement more cuts in the next Parliament as unfeasible. My favourite description is the one used by the blogger @FlipChartRick who says that those who believe that these proposed cuts are deliverable are living in 'LaLa Land'. I am sure this will prove to be so.
The Labour Party has made much of the fact that the Coalition has made sure that the cuts to Local Government fall disproportionately on the neediest communities, such that a list of those Councils experiencing the worst cuts reads like a roll call of the most deprived places in the country. These are, of course, Labour areas. Those of us who are elected Labour politicians tasked with delivering local services would like to know, having raised this issue, what a future Labour Government plans to do to address it?
It seems that few people in national politics know very much about Local Government finance, DCLG included. Few people understand that we are responsible for delivering the second pillar of our national care service, social services. The UK is the only country in the world where this is the case. In Lewisham, in common with many other authorities, we spend half our budget on adults' and children's social services.
In a recently published report entitled Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities, http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Local-Authority-Full-Report.pdf the NAO, with mild understatement, essentially concludes that the DCLG don’t know enough about the finances of individual Local Authorities to understand their capacity for implementing further cuts. They highlight the consequent risk of what they euphemistically refer to as 'service pressures'
The House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts goes further. In their recent report of the same name, Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities 2014, http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news/report-financial-sustainability-of-local-authorities/, they say,
'Furthermore, if funding reductions were to continue following the next spending review, we question whether the Department would be in a position to provide assurance that all local authorities could maintain the full range of their statutory services.'
Lewisham Council’s Chief Executive, Barry Quirk, has an insightful take on this here, http://www.lgcplus.com/Journals/2015/01/16/y/d/s/not-even-wrong.pdf
In short, if the next government does not call a halt to the further Austerity planned for Local Government, at least in the short term, Adult and Children's Social Care Services will fall over. Pretty much everyone, it seems, working in this sector, officers and politicians alike, understand this. This will mean that elderly people will not receive the basic care they need and will not be able to provide for themselves and that children will not get the Child Protection Plans they need. I think that every Authority in the country is like a car heading towards a cliff edge. We are all desperately trying to slow down but know we can't stop. All we can hope for is that we are not the first one to go over the edge. Yet we are in the moral dilemma of wishing that one of our neighbours goes over the edge soon because this is the only way we believe that common sense will prevail and the cuts will be reversed.
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