19 April 2011
Scotland’s trade unions have challenged council leaders to stand shoulder to shoulder with them in mounting concerted direct action against spending cuts.
Scottish Trades Union Congress general secretary Grahame Smith said: ‘Many [councils] have told me that they don’t want to make cuts; they don’t want to sack workers. And I know that many councillors believe in the public sector and in public service.
‘But until now they have failed to stand with us and make the case against the cuts. That is just not good enough. We don’t want to be fighting local government. We want to be fighting alongside local government like we were in the 1980s and 1990s.’
His remarks came yesterday, the first day of the STUC congress in Ayr, which held an unprecedented open session with civic, faith, equality and other campaign groups opposed to cuts.
Delegates also backed a general council statement accusing councils of focusing on consultation events rather than ‘on running effective campaigns and empowering those they represent to challenge attacks on jobs and services’.
It urges local authorities to prepare parallel ‘needs budgets’ during the 2011/12 budgeting round, specifying the sums required to meet ‘true’ local needs, around which community campaigns could unite.
Meanwhile, municipal resentment over election promises to continue the council tax freeze into the next Parliament has deepened, with a warning from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities that councils could be left unable to meet undertakings given to avoid compulsory redundancies.
Rory Mair, the convention’s chief executive, followed up Cosla president Pat Watters’s commentsto Public Finance last week by warning the political parties that council leaders were angered by their refusal to respect the prerogative of Scotland’s 32 local authorities, rather than of Holyrood, to determine council tax rates.
The promises also drew fire from funding expert Professor Richard Kerley of Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, who said the £70m annual top-up paid by the Scottish government to councils in lieu of council tax increases was fast eroding in value. The SNP's pledge to continue the freeze for the full five-year parliamentary term could end up costing more than £600m, he predicted.
The Scottish Greens have included defence of services in their three ‘red lines’ for any post-election coalition talks. Alongside pledges to resist both student tuition fees and new nuclear or coal power stations, they say their MSPs would refuse any role in a government that made cuts to services that worsened inequality.
The Scottish Greens' manifesto, launched today, proposes raising more than £200m extra a year by using for the first time the tax-varying power of the Scottish Parliament. The Greens want to add 0.5p in the pound to the basic rate of income tax in Scotland.
