Cooking the Books 1 – How would you like your cut?
Like local councils everywhere, the London Borough of Lambeth doesn’t have enough money to pay for adequate social amenities such as parks, playgrounds, libraries, and social centres. In fact, to balance the books over the coming years it will have to cut back on these even further:
‘Lambeth Council has to make huge savings from its budget, equal to more than a third of its annual spending, and is asking local people to give their ideas about how to save money at this time of unprecedented challenge. Over the next four years the council must find £84 million in savings, on top of £99 million in savings already agreed.’
Normally, this would be decided by the council’s cabinet, made up from members of the political party or parties with a majority of councillors (in the case of Lambeth, it’s Labour). This is an unenviable task which makes the council and councillors unpopular. Lambeth Council has come up with a way to try to avoid this, asking people living in the area which services they think should be given priority — and which, by implication, should not. The idea being that, when the cuts are made, the councillors can turn round and say that they were only doing what the public had suggested.
So, those living in Lambeth were asked to choose where the axe should fall. They had to click their way through an online survey and to choose which 3 out of 18 services they wanted to prioritise, leaving the remaining 15 as targets for cutting. Critics have likened this to giving someone sentenced to death a choice between being shot or hanged. They also question why ‘no cuts’ wasn’t an option. The answer to that question goes to the heart of matter.
‘No cuts’ is not an option because the council simply does not have the money, and the council does not have the money because the central government has not allocated it enough. Why? Because the central government is responsible for running things in the general interest of the capitalist class. Profits are what drive the economy, and governments must avoid doing anything that impedes profit-making on pain of provoking an economic downturn. Governments are financed by taxes that ultimately fall on profits and so cannot increase taxes just to improve services and amenities for the general public (they can only provide those that directly or indirectly benefit capitalist production and then at minimum cost). Governments are managing capitalism and have to abide by the economic law of capitalism that decrees that profit-making comes first.
So cuts there have to be, at both national and local level. The only question is who should decide to make them and where they should fall. The national government decides on cuts to national spending while local councils decide on cuts to local spending. Local councils blame the government. So Lambeth’s Labour Council Leader talks of ‘14 years of structural underfunding of local government’. But it’s not the fault of national government, whether Tory or Labour. Such underfunding is chronic because meeting people’s needs is not what capitalism is about.
The fact is that it doesn’t matter who decides to make the cuts; they have to be made. But it is not an extension of democracy to involve the working class in the decision. That’s just a way to get workers to act against their own interest and take responsibility for the worsening conditions capitalism imposes on them. Socialists living in Lambeth refused to take part in the charade, as did many others.