Hammersmith and Fulham Council

A few more Hammersmith and Fulham goodies for you, comrades:

We hear that the New Labour guns who run Unison have finally given beleaguered workers at Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council permission to ballot for strike action.

The strike will be in protest at a major downgrading of staff terms and conditions - a slash and burn of decent working standards that the council has been threatening for about a year.

It's all surely on now.

We trust absolutely that the regional officers that Unison's London office has parachuted in to help run the leftwing Hammersmith Unison branch are up to the sober task of organising strike action.

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As it happens, Hammersmith and Fulham staff have already chucked a spanner in council leader Stephen Greenhalgh's works with a brilliant little action of their own.

Last week, they were all - technically - sacked, then re-hired on the lesser terms and conditions. They had to sign up to the lesser terms and conditions if they wanted to be rehired.

Staff didn't make this quite as easy for the council as it sounds. It seems that as they signed, hundreds of them also noted that they were signing under duress. Then, they each lodged a case form for unfair dismissal - the argument being that they were sacked, unfairly, before being forced to sign up to the new terms. 

Now, the council has a great big pile of forms to process. That's got to be a pain in the butt. HR will surely lose its rag. 

Enough for now: suffice to say that it takes an awful lot of anger and energy to organise the sort of Up Yours action we've described above.

We expect plenty more of the same.

We've said it before, comrades, and we'll say it again - people who use and provide public services have no time for the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem line that they and the public sector must be destroyed if the nation is to be saved. Take it from those of us who talk to people who use and provide public services. They don't believe they're responsible for the recession. They want the banks to pay.

More to come.

I report here, and here, and here, on the bitter fight that Hammersmith and Fulham residents and staff are having with the Hammersmith and Fulham Tory council over staff and service cuts.

Things seem finally to have reached boiling point: at their AGM last week, Hammersmith and Fulham Unison members voted unanimously to ballot for strike action to support contact centre workers who are threatened with compulsory redundancy. I have a report on the contact centre story here.

A few thoughts:

Much has been made by Tory commentators of Hammersmith and Fulham's genius for reducing council tax - but that's only one half of the picture. One can be keen on council tax cuts, but one should as keen to acknowledge the consequences of them, and that's the part that is missing from the H&F tale. We've heard plenty about tax decreases, but less about the service cuts and new charges that low council tax necessitates. We've heard almost nothing about the fury that the service cuts has caused on the ground, or thought about the real social problems that a paucity of public services might cause as the recession worsens.    

There has been fury at the cuts, all right - and that, surely, will only deepen as the recession does.

As I've written before, the council began its tenure by starting - and losing - a war with locals and staff when it tried to close Hurlingham and Chelsea school.

It attacked hostels for the homeless, closed and sold the Castle youth club, and stopped the mobile library service. It also went after housing and sheltered housing caretakers - the people most likely to foster a sense of safety and community in areas most in need. The voluntary sector also made the hit list, and charges have been introduced for recycling, meals on wheels and homecare services. Those charges mean that the much-celebrated council tax savings are not quite the savings for residents that they appear.

Now, staff have signalled that they're going to rise to the fight. It has taken them several years to get to this point - people really don't like to take strike action if they can avoid it. Does the fact they've started mean we've reached a point in the recession where anger trumps fear? 

Meant to publish this at the beginning of the year, but forget to queue it over Christmas.

It's a report from a December 2008 Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting where local spoke against council plans to move the council contact centre to Rochdale.

Thought it might be a timely reminder of the realities of Hammersmith and Fulham council's much-vaunted council tax cuts: 

We go to a mid-sized meeting room at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall, where a group of local people and council contact centre staff sit before the cocky, elitist and - in the case of councillor Lucy Ivimy, racist - Tory cabinet, to beg to keep the council's contact centre in Hammersmith, and to keep their jobs.

The locals have exactly five minutes to talk the council out of its plans to move its local contact centre to Rochdale. Those plans include making everyone who currently works in the contact centre redundant, and doubtless form a crucial part of the council's ongoing campaign to move moneyless people who use and provide public services out of Hammersmith, and rich people who don't need public services in, a la Wandsworth and Westminster, etc. 

The local people in the room aren't talking about that at the moment, though, because they're being distracted by an unexpected, if revealing, side act. The council's deputy leader - one Nicholas Botterill, who sits alongside council leader Stephen Greenhalgh - is pulling faces and laughing at the local people who've turned up to address the cabinet. It's an extraordinary display, and not a heartening one. Botterill is giggling at the the locals and their plight and screwing his little rat face up at them, presumably for the benefit of Tory sympathisers in the audience. Krissy O'Hagan - the locals' spokesperson, and contact centre union rep - is reading, nervously, a speech in favour of keeping the contact centre in Hammersmith, and public services generally, and Botterill is wrinkling his face up and laughing at her.

He makes such an ass of himself that council leader Stephen Greenhalgh is forced to tell him to shut up.

'No! No! Don't!' Greenhalgh hisses in full view of all. Greenhalgh has grasped that it's no longer the done thing to jeer publicly at low earners, but maybe the message hasn't trickled down to Botterill. Greenhalgh's cabinet has learned that mocking black people isn't on - a full year has passed since the earlier-mentioned cabinet member Lucy Ivimy revealed the H&F Tory hand on race with a remarkably bigoted commentary about Asian hygiene standards - but low earners with working class accents are still fair game.

Here's Justin - capturing utterly the contempt that those with means have for those without.

Marvellous piece of writing, and exactly what I'm trying to get at when I talk about the viciousness with which wealthy Tories are pursuing the poor in Hammersmith (see story below). They will always try and squeeze those few extra dollars and services out of people who can least afford to part with either. Meanwhile, bankers walk free with our money.

Will be posting more on this soon. Have a look at the link above to Chicken Yoghurt, though - I'm hard pushed to think of anyone in the mainstream or online press who writes quite so succintly, or well.

Just heard that all 4200 employees at Hammersmith and Fulham council have been issued with redundancy notices, as the charming Tory council there pushes through new contracts and worsened terms and conditions.

My contacts tell me the unions have been told that staff must sign new contracts, or get lost.

You can expect standards in care, education, and housing services, etc, in Hammersmith to take a dive (if they continue at all) from now on.

Have a look at this if you want to know more about the terrible effects that Tories cuts are having on staff and public services at local councils. Don't EVER buy into David Cameron's fluffy Tories salespitch - these people are vicious, and interested only in destroying the health, education and care services that people who aren't fillthy rich (ie most of us) need.

Am going to do some interviewing this weekend on this, so will be back with more soon. 

Another interview for Black History Month:

(Photo: Protestor at 2007 Hammersmith voluntary sector funding cuts demonstration).

Helena Ismail is British, very nicely-spoken, clever, committed to her community, and able to take a measured view of life's many shambles - except, perhaps, local and national politics. Right now, for instance, she seems pretty close to flattening whomever next claims that David Cameron's Tories are reformed and almost human. 'They (the Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham Council) have cut our throats,' she says tightly. 'They are targeting us. I tell you this. Why are they doing that?'

Ismail has run the much-admired Shepherd's Bush Somali support group Horn of Africa for 20 years, where she and her team provide an annual average of 3000 to 4000 poor, usually desperate, people with the immigration, employment and schools advice that they needed to settle in the UK, and get jobs, etc. Horn of Africa also does a good second line in helping newcomers to the country fill in forms and to get their heads round obligations like council tax. Horn of Africa will also help if you need to know how to deal with the many zealous coppers who play a large part in your life if you're poor, young and black.

The party's more or less over, though. In April this year, Hammersmith and Fulham's ghastly Tory council took a decision to cut exactly one hundred percent of Horn of Africa's funding (some £55,000 a year), as part of a charming borough rape of black and ethnic minority voluntary groups (other Somali groups like the youth support Hope 4 All organisation got nothing, while African and African-Caribbean support group Nubian Life got less than half the funding it received in 2006. You'll find the full funding report here pdf 404kb). The cuts took effect this month.

Photo: users of Hammersmith voluntary services protest in April about funding cuts

So... your funding dries up on Monday if you're one of the Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector groups that Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council has targeted for funding cuts.

It's been six months since the council's cabinet voted to direct funding away from longstanding, left-leaning groups like the Hammersmith Community Law Centre and towards less bolshie organisations. (The Tory council claims that it's not cutting funding overall to the voluntary sector, but the Labour group begs to differ: they say funding drops significantly from October (ie Monday) and even more significantly in the 2008 to 2009 year, when projections are for an overall cut of more than 25%).

The legal action taken against the council by three people who've used voluntary sector services in Hammersmith and Fulham came to very little this week. The three aimed to argue that the council hadn't consulted properly about the cuts, or talked with the people who were going to be most affected. This seemed a likely argument - a fair few organisations heard about the proposed cuts to their funding on the grapevine, not through any formal council process.

In April, when the cabinet voted for the cuts, people like Helena Ismail from the Somali support group Horn of Africa, which lost all its funding, said they hadn't received as much as a phone call from the council about it. She found out when the Hammersmith Community Law Centre rang her and told her. The Hammersmith Community Law Centre only found out because one of its lawyers happened to see the council report that recommended the cuts.

Hangbitch was (were?) in close attendance at last night's public meeting/debate on the Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council's cuts to voluntary sector funding. Will post a report on the event shortly (update: here it is), but in the meantime, here are some photos to enjoy.

Your man on the right getting a Guinness in during the debate is Tory Councillor and Evening Standard hack Harry Phibbs.

What a cracker he was.

Isn't Phibbs the greatest name a politician ever had? Ten points for pushing on with it.

PS: could the worthy Tories who keeping emailing/spamming us with the news that abortion rates up are get lost, please? We are pro-abortion and you are not, so probably spam is going to PISS US OFF.

Many thanks.

...more interviews with Hammersmith Law Centre clients as we speak.

News in the meantime: on 18 June at 7.30pm, Polly Toynbee and others will be taking part in a debate in Hammersmith on the issue of funding in the voluntary sector. The event is being organised by the Hammersmith Law Centre, who, as readers of this site will know, are having 60% of their own funding removed from them by those charming Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

The debate will be held at the Irish Centre is on Blacks Road, Hammersmith. Twill be a public meeting, all, so get yourselves along.

You can read more about the Hammersmith and Fulham Voluntary Sector Funding Campaign here.

Having a discussion with Hammersmith and Fulham Tory councillor Paul Bristow over at his blog at the moment. We're talking about the proposed voluntary funding cuts at that council and the effect this will have on the Hammersmith Law Centre in particular. (Naughty Paul actually pinched a photo taken by one of the contributors to this site and put it on his site - see right. That was kind of how we all met each other. Ten points for taste, though - they are pretty good photos).

Anyway - trying to get Paul and council leader Stephen Greenhalgh to agree to an interview on the voluntary funding at Hammersmith and Fulham topic.