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.

The Lewisham Train Fiasco

By Dermot Hudson

On Friday 2nd March I boarded the 17:39 train from Waterloo East to Orpington to get home. The train was operated by the South Eastern Railway, a privatised rail company owned by the Go Ahead Group, a capitalist monopoly.

The train actually arrived at 17:41. Not too bad I thought to myself, only two minutes late. Commuting on South Eastern Trains is a negative experience because they are continually late. “Signalling difficulties“, “broken down train“, “engineering works“, “weather”, you name it, there is always an excuse for the fact that they cannot do the basic thing and run the trains on time or nearly on time. I did not know what was in store for me!

It had been snowing that afternoon and there was still a bit of snow coming. There had been snow on and off for the past two or three days. It had not been the dire reports of 20cm of snow but just a few centimetres of snow, which should not have posed any problem. The DPRK and socialist countries never have these problems with snow.

The train pulled out of Waterloo East. It was crowded because there was no Sidcup train and they had told passengers for Sidcup to join the train and change at Lewisham. The train trundled into London Bridge and left London Bridge, however it got slower and slower. Eventually it came to a halt about half a mile or so from New Cross. This was at about 17:53. The train just sat there. After about 15 minutes or maybe longer the driver spoke to the passengers over the PA system. He basically said he did not know what was what and was “speaking to two signal boxes“ to find out. About another 15 or 20 minutes later the driver informed us that a train in front had stuck on a gradient on the approach to Lewisham. Later the driver said it was because it was a 12 car train. This announcement was met with derision by some passengers.

Time dragged on. We had been on the train over an hour. The driver appealed for a paramedic because someone in one of the carriages had suffered a fit (not surprising being stuck on a train). Meanwhile the heating and air conditioning went off because of no power, there were emergency lights only. Worse still, the only toilet on the train became blocked.

Meanwhile more excuses offered were offered and a great deal of conflicting information. At one point we were told that the train would be reversed back into London Bridge. It was learned that people on the first train had been evacuated and those on the second train had opened the doors and jumped off. Some people decided to take matters in their own hands and pressed the emergency door release and jumped out. This did not look a good choice however: firstly, on jumping out one risked landing on the third rail (600 volts at least); secondly, trying to walk along icy tracks in the darkness; thirdly, one would have to scramble down a snow covered bank in darkness. I also realised that I would need to walk to a bus route to get home. So myself and a number of other passengers stayed put.

The train eventually moved at 22:35, nearly five hours after it had left Waterloo East. What a disgrace! The privatised rail companies have a real ‘do not care’ attitude towards passengers. It is not simply a case of people having their evenings and weekends messed up by this kind of nonsense, but there are cases of people who have lost jobs due to train delays (which seem to be permanent and perennial on South Eastern Trains rather than the odd occurrence). In the days of British Rail (BR) generally problems like this incident did not occur because BR had their own shunting engines and locos that could move broken-down or stuck trains, but the toy-town privatised railways do not have their own locos only electric units. The BBC, taking the side of South Eastern Trains, blamed the incident on passengers escaping the train – but it was down to pure and simple incompetence by South Eastern Trains, who could not could not run a bath let alone a railway!

Bring back British Rail!

 Nationalise the railways without compensation!