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Starmer candidates will have to ‘look over their left shoulder’ in May 5th council elections

The left-wing Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is fielding over 250 candidates in May’s local council elections in a move, it hopes, that will make the candidates of Sir Keir Starmer’s revived Tony Blair-style New Labour party ‘at least have to look over their left shoulder’ as they consider carrying out Tory-lite austerity policies in the council chamber.

Launching the TUSC local election campaign, the TUSC national chairperson Dave Nellist, a former Labour backbench colleague of Jeremy Corbyn from 1983-1992 and the third place finisher in the recent Birmingham Erdington by-election, said:

“Faced with the biggest drop in living standards in sixty years it’s more than time for a fightback -starting in the town hall”.

“Local authorities are responsible for over one fifth of all public spending. The 125 Labour-led councils alone control budgets of at least £82 billion. On top of that they have usable reserves of just under £20 billion and borrowing capacities that could boost their spending power”.

“That’s why it’s completely wrong of the BBC, in their preview of this year’s local elections, to say that the cost of living is ‘not something councils have real control over’. There really is no excuse, for Labour councils in particular, not to act now to mitigate the cost of living crisis”.

“They could, for example, introduce tomorrow free school meals and breakfast clubs for every pupil, including during school holidays, which would immediately help family budgets. They could reinstate childcare provision in SureStart early years centres – and re-open the hundreds of centres closed since 2010 – to reverse rising childcare costs”.

“Local authorities could freeze council home rents and at the same time, through their powers to compulsorily register landlords, combat rising rents – and energy-guzzling poor home insulation – in the private sector”.

“Rishi Sunak’s miserly increase to the Household Support Fund in the Spring Statement was pitifully inadequate but there’s nothing stopping councils from topping it up themselves to meet real local needs. The list goes on. Councils are not powerless – if there were councillors prepared to fight”.

Reviving Tony Blair-style New Labour

“But it is clear that Sir Keir Starmer’s Tony Blair-style New Labour is not prepared to take on the vested interests of the capitalist establishment as they seek to pass on the costs of the Covid crisis and now the war in Ukraine onto the working and middle classes”.

“When the Tories say they ‘can’t interfere in commercial decisions’ as the energy corporations rip us off or P&O brutally sacks 800 workers, where is the call from the Labour frontbench for nationalisation as the lever to take back control from the CEOs and wealthy shareholders?”

“But locally too, Starmer’s Labour councillors provide feeble ‘opposition’. That’s when they aren’t enthusiastically implementing Tory policies – such as in Coventry where the Labour council has spent around £3 million so far to try and defeat its Unite-organised bin drivers rather than the £300,000 it would cost to settle the dispute”.

Candidates in over sixty councils

“The scale of the TUSC challenge in May’s local elections is modest compared to what could have been achieved – and what will hopefully be achieved in the future – with the potential for thousands of anti-austerity trade unionists standing if the unions were to organise a national drive for candidates”.

“But nonetheless it is still an impressive list of trade unionists – headed by the senior assistant general secretary of the RMT transport workers’ union and national executive members from UNISON, the National Education Union and NAPO; of former Labour councillors and council candidates now standing for TUSC; and of individual members of the component organisations of our coalition. All of them pledged to vote against cuts, closures, privatisation and other austerity politics in the town hall”.

“At the very least, in 69 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales, the local representatives of Starmer’s Labour will know that they will have to look over their left shoulder as they consider carrying out Tory-lite policies in the council chamber”.


Information

1. TUSC was co-founded in 2010 by the late Bob Crow, the RMT transport workers’ union leader, as a federal coalition. Along with the RMT, a constituent organisation of TUSC, its All-Britain steering committee involves leading trade unionists from nine other unions; together with the Socialist Party, the Resist party founded by the former Labour MP Chris Williamson, and a TUSC individual members section open to independent socialists with their own representation in the coalition.

2. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60840043. For more information on the financial firepower that councils have see the TUSC briefing report, How Much Reserves Have They Got?, at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/456.pdf. Also available is a guide to how councils’ reserves and borrowing powers could be used to produce an arguably legally-compliant needs budgets, Preparing a No Cuts People’s Budget, at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/450.pdf

3. TUSC stood sufficient candidates in the 2015 general election to qualify for a UK-wide party election broadcast, which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcEMrCTVRdg. It recalibrated its electoral activity however following Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, not contesting either the 2017 or 2019 general elections. But with Keir Starmer as Labour’s leader, TUSC has resumed standing candidates in all election contests. The full list of candidates in May’s elections, and the seats they are contesting, is available at https://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/470.pdf

4. The minimum policy pledges signed up to by every TUSC candidate, the TUSC core policy platform for the May 2022 local elections, can be seen at https://www.tusc.org.uk/17627/22-02-2022/tuscs-core-policy-platform-for-the-may-2022-local-elections

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