Stand with Diane!

by Theo Russell

Diane Abbott received a rapturous welcome from around 900 people at a rally outside Hackney Town Hall in east London last week to protest against the vile attack on the MP by multi-millionaire Tory donor Frank Hester. The chant repeated again and again was "We stand with Diane!".
A speaker from the local black women's group, Sistah Space, told the crowd that Diane's parents endured the racism of the Windrush generation. “Diane was the first black woman elected to parliament and is the longest serving black MP. She's a living legend...we are under attack and we have to be vigilant!”
Criticising Labour leader Keir Starmer's suspension of Diane Abbott from the Parliamentary Labour Party, the singer and rapper Lowkey said “the Labour Party has come to power in the past with the support of black voters, and we want our money's worth!” and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose parliamentary seat is in neighbouring Islington, said “I'm proud to be here. We are here to celebrate Diane. We ain't disappearing and we ain't going nowhere!”
Diane Abbott herself said “it is the people of Hackney who selected me, who worked hard to get me elected, and who have stood by me for so many years. We need to stand up for the young generation so that they don't have to go through what our parents experienced. Thank you for your support and help. Now we need to go forward”.
Diane Abbott is immensely popular in Hackney and enjoys massive respect from the local community as their representative, but she also has a magnificent track record of anti-colonialism and opposing imperialist wars from Ireland to Africa and Palestine to Afghanistan.
While some MPs have been given police protection against threats and Rishi Sunak warns that extremists are “threatening our democracy” Tory business minister Kemi Badenoch has dismissed Hester's comment that Diane Abbott should be shot as "trivia" while the black community feel that the Labour leadership has also failed to stand up for Dianne.
While parliament debated the very subject of Hester's outright racism, the Speaker –  a Labour MP –  disgracefully failed to call Diane Abbott to speak even though she stood to be called 49 times.
After Rishi Sunak's shameful failure to return Hester's millions his popularity has sunk to new lows, but Labour also has to realise that the feelings of black British voters can't be trampled on, that they need to feel fully respected, and that includes bringing Diane Abbott back into Labour’s parliamentary party.

Libraries Cut

by New Worker correspondent

Twenty years ago Hackney library staff were fighting for the reinstatement of overtime payments. Today another libraries battle, involving the same union in the same east London borough is underway to oppose job cuts.
    The Labour council’s plans include cutting 76 jobs which will in part be replaced with 57 new roles which existing staff will have to reapply for. In detail this means there will be just 34 full-time frontline posts, down from 54, to cover seven libraries open between 55 and 64 hours a week. In some cases there could be as little as two staff on duty, even before taking into account of holidays, sick leave, training or any emergency. The cuts will allegedly save £445,000.
    The council claim that the cuts are essential to fund a £4.4 million revamp of Stoke Newington Library which is in the poshest part of an otherwise deprived borough.
    The borough’s local government branch of Unison is in formal dispute, it claims that the council has ample reserves funds (to the tune of £300 million) to fund the renovation and the job cuts will “will have a devastating impact on the service”. It has collected 2,000 signatures on a petition against the proposed job cuts. A large protest meeting was held outside Hackney Town Hall on Wednesday night prior to a meeting of the Council last week. In a consultative ballot, 72 per cent of members said they were ready to strike to prevent the cuts going ahead.
    The union accuses the council of keeping it in the dark about the job cuts when the delayed renovation plans were first announced three years ago.
    Local Unison rep Matt Paul told the Hackney Citizen that: “It will be impossible to deliver and sustain Stoke Newington library without having sufficient staff on the ground … it’s completely pointless if staff cuts are funding this”, and queried: “what’s the point of having a lovely space if it ends up eventually closing by not having the staff to run it?”
    At the same time as these staff cuts the senior management team received an additional £50,000 in salaries. The union is wary of the Mayor’s commitment to keep all libraries open, saying the planned changes could make it unsustainable to run them and result in permanent closures. For instance less staff would make temporary closures more likely in the event of staff shortages.
    Branch chair Brian Debus warned that the cuts “will inevitably mean less ability to advise members of the public and the most vulnerable who most depend on the free services that we
provide.”
    Needless to say Hackney Libraries is not the only public library service. Gerald Vernon-Jackson of the Local Government Association (LGA), which is the trade union for local authorities said that “no council wants to reduce library services, but the dramatic increase in inflation alongside increases to the National Living Wage and higher energy costs has added at least £2.4 billion in extra costs onto the budgets councils set in March this year,”
    At the same time public libraries are seeing an unprecedented rise in the number of people using their services. This is partly due to them returning to one of their Victorian purposes of providing a place for people to keep warm in without going to the pub. Others have established food banks.
    Libraries Connected, which represents public libraries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland reports that many libraries have expanded their services to help people struggling with higher prices - running food banks, giving out clothing donations and extending their opening hours and providing hot drinks.
    The BBC reports that Gainsborough Community Library in Ipswich is selling cut-price bags of fruit and vegetables for £2 and has seen sales nearly double since the summer. Suffolk County Librarian Bruce Leeke, said the cost of running 45 sites has increased a lot, “from our energy costs to our cleaning. We will have to look next year at how we run the service. We are very concerned.”
    Isobel Hunter, the CEO of Libraries Connected, warned that with budgets uncertain many libraries are contemplating cutting staff, services and book-stock with some closures on the horizon. She warns that: “the scale of the savings that libraries need to make and also the impact of inflationary costs means that these aren’t savings that can be found down the back of the sofa or trimming little bits here and there”. Unpopular increases in council tax levels will only provide a temporary relief.
    Further north at Nantwich Library in Cheshire, they have boxes of canned vegetables, fruit and cereals because it serves as an emergency food bank pick-up point.
    Joanne Shannon, of Cheshire East Council said: “I’ve worked in libraries for 38 years and we’ve not seen the numbers of people, the broad cross-section of people who will tell us they are struggling.” She added that: “Some people think of some of the areas in Cheshire as very leafy and affluent, but we do have rural poverty. We’ve got a limited number of resources to give out and they are for extreme cases, but we see so many people who are telling us they are worried. How do we start to prioritise?”
    It is good to see the Tories have abandoned namby-pamby “One Nation Toryism” and gone back to bringing us real Dickensian poverty. While it has brought out the spirit of Victorian charity what is urgently needed is the more revolutionary spirit which produced the Chartist movement and the Communist Manifesto.

Danger Money

 By New Worker correspondent

Another dispute is brewing in Hackney, this time as part of a national campaign to secure a decent wage increase for local government workers.

After the rejection by Unite members of the 2.75 per cent wage offer for local government workers in England and Wales, local pay battles are now taking place. These individual battles are seen as pathfinders in the hope that local victories will persuade other local authorities to fall into line. This is the first skirmish, of what is called a “pathfinder” strategy.

Those involved are 32 drivers and passenger escorts on the borough’s school buses for disabled children in Hackney. The aim is to secure a one-off £500 payment and an extra day’s holiday for risking their health working through the pandemic. One of the reasons for choosing Hackney was that the Labour council had earlier reneged on an earlier local deal that would have given them a lump sum and made agency workers permanent employees.

Unite’s regional officer for London, Onay Kasab, said: “The national cost of living rise for 2020 has now been settled and this has been reluctantly conceded by our members.

“However, we feel that many of the issues in the national claim, such as the working time and annual leave elements, remain outstanding – and that there is scope for negotiations with local council employers.”

He also noted that there were serious concerns about Covid-19 measures on buses – specifically because buses with a capacity of 30 have over 20 children on them. No social distancing is possible and the ‘bubbles’ that are in force in schools are broken on buses where new ‘bubbles’ are formed.

This is part of a national campaign for a one-off £500 payment for frontline workers as compensation for the added pressures of working throughout the pandemic, a reduction in the working week to 35 hours from 36 with no loss of pay, and an extra day of holiday.

 

Traffic wardens threaten action

 By New Worker correspondent

 In the north London borough of Camden traffic wardens have voted overwhelmingly to take strike action over pay and claims they are constantly monitored by bosses having to log their location every five minutes.

  They are employed by contractor NSL (the former National Car Parks) which is hired by over 60 local authorities and ironically has Investors in People accreditation. 

 However the Civil Enforcement Officers, to give them their Sunday name, have a grim time.

A majority of them are black and suffer racist and physical abuse from irate motorists. The local branch of Unison said they are subject to “invasive” level of checks. One warder told the Camden New Journal: “If you want to go to the toilet, you have to log it. If you are going to buy water, you have to log it. If you want to sit down to rest your feet, you have to log it. If you forget, it’s a disciplinary.” The bosses say this is to protect the workers from attacks and to confirm time and place of penalties.

 Another warden was hospitalised after being attacked by a chain used to lock motor cycles. 

  Last year the council received £26 million in “surplus” from parking tickets, which is ring-fenced to be spent on transport projects. Little of this goes to the warders. They presently earn £10 an hour, short of the London Living Wage of £10.20.

  Speaking on behalf of the local Unison branch chair Liz Wheatley, said: “In today’s society it is pretty scandalous, especially in a borough like Camden that professes to have ethical employment practises and ethical procurement, that we can end up with a predominantly black, low-paid workforce forced to have to take strike action every single time they want to try and get a pay increase.”

 Earlier this year, in the neighbouring borough of Hackney 40 traffic wardens in a pay dispute with their employers APOCA Parking went of a 48 hour strike. This was over demands for a five percent pay increase. They too were only on the London Living Wage. At the time Unite official said “These workers, out in all weathers, only get the LLW uprate each year. So instead of being the minimum that employers should pay, the LLW becomes the maximum” before adding “We are arguing that each April there should be proper pay negotiations – with the aim of taking workers above the LLW”.

The fact that the minimum wage has become the maximum is exactly what the New Communist Party warned about when in the early days of the Blair government it was offered as a crumb to the unions by New Labour.