A Tory rally on the home turf of radical and cruel Conservativism

By Len Duvall AM

Over the last few days we have seen protests at Labour councils across London about cuts Labour councils are being forced to make. But tomorrow’s Tory rally, on the home turf of radical and cruel Conservativism, should remind us who is really at fault for closing services and raising prices.

No doubt there will be lots of self congratulatory back-slapping – despite the economic damage the Tory agenda is causing. And while Boris Johnson will get a few laughs, we should remember that it will be no joke later this year when thousands of local government employees will be joining dole queues across London.

While the Tory government deliberately seeks to undermine public services and local government, it is also delegating the blame. So by forcing local councillors to make their cuts for them, the government want to turn local opinion against local authorities and ensure local councillors take the blame. This is their ‘localism’.

We shouldn’t let them. I don’t know of a single Labour councillor who wants to make these cuts.

The same cannot be said of the Tories. In parliament, when the budget confirmed a scorched earth attack on public spending, they waved their order papers and cheered like public schoolboys on the playing fields.

In local government and under Boris Johnson in City Hall they pioneered the agenda of squeezing the majority and imposing cuts well before Cameron and Osborne had their hands on the levers of power.

As the Tory mayor said last year, no government department has moved “so far and so fast to make cuts” as at City Hall.

Tories want these cuts; we don’t. The blame needs to sit where it is due.

If you want to know who’s really to blame for what is happening, look no further than tomorrow’s Tory pow-wow in London. Tomorrow London Conservatives from Whitehall to City Hall and Town Halls gather to launch Boris Johnson’s re-election campaign and to hammer out their plans to cling to City Hall even as their own government does massive damage in the capital.

Tory councils in London carried out a laboratory experiment on local services affecting their residents prior to the general election, as we saw with the ‘easyCouncil’ model in Barnet, and the activities of David Cameron’s ‘favourite council’ Hammersmith and Fulham.

Now the Tory front bench and Boris Johnson will be showing their true colours by paying homage to the Tory model of local government at the London Conservative conference in Hammersmith on Saturday.

Johnson will be joined by his campaign manager Lynton Crosby – a man renowned for negative, dog-whistle tactics – to launch his campaign with Tory activists. The mayor has appeared to be at pains to distance himself from Cameron, the Tories and the worst of his party’s cuts. But his choice of this Hammersmith & Fulham Tory love-in to launch his campaign expose the lie that somehow Boris Johnson is separate from his party.

The Evening Standard described Tory Hammersmith and Fulham as ‘a high-profile test bed for the party’s policy team’ in opposition. Tory Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, Stephen Greenhalgh, was appointed head of the Cameron’s ‘Conservative Councils Innovation Unit’. While Cameron has praised the council’s record, the reality for residents is rather less pleasant.

On housing, Cllr Greenhalgh has complained “how it is hard to get rid of people” from their council homes. The Mayor’s housing adviser Richard Blakeway has met with Greenhalgh regularly since 2008 to plan housing cuts in Hammersmith and across London.

Under a Tory-led government, a Tory council and a Tory Mayor, unemployment in the borough is up 15% between from March 2010 to January 2011 and the number of people employed is down by over three thousand. 1,654 young people in Hammersmith and Fulham currently benefit from EMA which is being abolished this year by the Conservatives. Hammersmith and Fulham council estimates 1,300 residents risk losing their homes as a result of the government cuts to housing benefit. Hammersmith is the tenth worst affected local authority in the country.

Only this week, Hammersmith Tory councillors voted through a budget which closes a homeless shelter and a youth centre, slashes funding for ten out of sixteen Sure Start centres, sells off eight local buildings which house local community groups including the Irish Cultural Centre and Sands End Community Centre. The difference with Labour councils is clear – this council delights in such attacks and blazed a trail for this approach even when public spending was expanding.

As Institute of Fiscal Studies research has shown, London is being hit hard by the Tory-led government. Meanwhile Boris Johnson has been caught out meeting bankers more than the police. What a damning indictment. But not as surprising as it might be: 77% of Johnson’s election donations came from hedge funders, private equity and bankers.

The Tory-led government, Tory activists, and the bankers’ friend Conservative Boris Johnson meeting together in Hammersmith and Fulham amounts to what Kevin Maguire rightly described as the Regressive London conference.

Next year those gathering in Hammersmith on Saturday face a mid-term election here in the capital. Let’s make sure the blame for higher fees, VAT and inflation, help for bankers but cuts to EMA, reduced services and increased fares is directed where it is due.