Labour council pushes through Tory budget

On 19th October last year, amid an air of comradely bonhomie and a general feeling of a common cause, Welsh trade unionists sat in a committee room in Parliament and listened to Labour Party MPs declare that they would work closely with the unions to both fight the public sector cuts and defend working people and communities.

The following day, trade unions in Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT) council were called in to an emergency meeting to be told that the Labour led council was to issue a ‘Section 188 Notice’, with a view to dismissing over 10,000 staff and re-engaging on lesser terms and conditions.

The changes were proposed in the context of an anticipated budget shortfall of £60 million over the next three years (which turned out to be £45m). Three areas were to be considered to close the gap; efficiency savings, service provision and staff terms and conditions.

The politics of snow

Whenever the weather adversely effects people the response of the authorities is generally along the lines “We don’t control the weather”. If for the purpose of this article we put aside the issue of climate change and take this statement at face value, even then we can see that this does not tell the full story.

If we take for example three major natural disasters over the last decade and in each case it was the response to these events or lack of response in reality that caused much of the destruction. Seen in the cases of the 2004 tsunami, the Haitian earthquake and particularly with Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster which hit the world's superpower, the United States were shamed by their response, exacerbated by the much better response by the Cuban regime as the same hurricane hit Cuba first.

Obviously the recent snow in Wales and the rest of Britain has not in any way been of the same magnitude, yet there are similarities. Much of the disruption and risk to peoples safety could have easily been avoided. That is, of course, if the capitalist drive for short term profit is taken out of the equation.