Birmingham Council in economic crisis
Birmingham City Council is in a deep economic crisis and is seeking to heap this onto the backs of workers whilst cutting services provided for public health, including those which keep our streets clean and free of disease.
Birmingham City Council was once the single biggest local authority in Europe, but a workforce of 20,000 has been slashed in half and the plans which are being implemented by Labour Councillors seek to reduce this number to 7,000 by 2018. They blame it on the Tories but they ALL play the same game, its called capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
And the Birmingham anti-cuts movement does very little about it. Headed by Labourites and Trots they’re too busy infiltrating Momentum or sitting on various committees of one form or another. They particularly love talking to one another at the Trades Council. And the Communist Party of Britain doesn’t have time to organise public opinion or workers against the cuts, they have a grand election campaign to run for Mayor of the West Midlands. Despite its small size, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in Birmingham is the only political organisation which can be seen three or four times a week in various parts of the town undertaking political work amongst the working class. If you want to get involved email birmingham@cpgb-ml.org
Bin men under attack – again
Refuse workers are vital to society; they do a job most people don’t want to do. Just because they work with rubbish they shouldn’t be treated like rubbish. In meetings held in March with Council refuse workers it was announced that Bin men are expected to take a £3,000 per annum pay cut and work an increase from four to five working days a week. Crews on wagons are to be reduced, as is the ratio of leading hands which risks putting the public at risk from fatal collisions on busy streets. This news has not gone down well with all the yards in Birmingham, and the more class conscious workers will be calling on workers to strike at the mass meeting in April.
Bin men and others who turn out on strike will need to come out determined to win. The bin men must be urged to find creative ways to ensure lorries do not leave depots, that tyres are bereft of air, that wagons have ignitions but no keys, that entrances and exits are barricades and scabs run a gauntlet from the Agency office to the depot. The public can help! Any wagon that makes it out must be prevented from completing its work and pressure must be piled upon the Council from the rate payers, who can take their rubbish and heap it upon the steps of the Council House for Labour Party leader Clancy and his gang to clean up, better still take the rubbish to the neighbourhood offices of the local Labour Party.
The movement against cuts
Too many people in this country are waiting for all the cuts to magically come to an end and a return to things as they were but capitalism is in systemic crisis no recovery is possible.
Whether it’s in relation to the privatisation of the NHS, an end to foreign wars of aggression or the seven year long freeze on public sector pay it’s time for British workers to draw a few simple conclusions from all too apparent observations:
Labour or Tory – it’s the same old story
Capitalism means crisis, racism and war
Its class against class – fight for socialism!
However, in an unsurprising turn, it was robbed of its core message by the UN, when it was officially decreed that 8 March would be a day for capitalist governments to not only remove the focus on working women, but also to demonise non-western nations in the name of ‘progressivism’.
