Jackie Grunsell

Councillor for Crosland Moor and Netherton

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Any managers of a public service who are not planningnow on the basis that they will have substantially lessmoney to spend in two years time are living in cloudcuckoo land”These are the chilling words of Steve Bundred, Chief executive to the Audit Commission. They are used in theintroduction to the Council’s proposals to slash £250-400 million from the council budget. These are the biggest cuts Kirklees Council have made for over 40 years.Let’s be clear, the onus of these cuts will fall on us all, butparticularly on children and the elderly.

Whilst the council is working out the de-tailed proposals, the council workforce andcommunity groups are becoming moreand more anxious about the future of ourservices. The council is now holding backon publishing the details of the worst cuts(until after the elections next May!), but thecouncil is already talking about losing up to2,000 jobs. This will have a terrible impacton us all.How on earth did we get in this mess? Thegovernment has run up a record deficit,-now almost £900 billion – in order to bailout the banks to the tune of £1.4 trillion!And they expect us to pay!! To add insult toinjury, the banks are now planning massiveXmas bonuses for their managers becausethey claim the economy is starting to recov-er. It might be in their world, but the rest of us face job cuts, frozen wages, house repos-sessions and therefore massive insecurity.The response of all three main parties inKirklees has been to openly accept thesecuts without even a wimper of opposi-tion. Even the Greens have advocated cutsin pay to pay for the bankers’ crisis. JackieGrunsell has been the only councillor whohas consistently argued that we have to de-fend all jobs and services. If they can af-ford to bail out the banks, why not publicservices?The council has now recruited the consult-ants, Deloittes, at a cost of £800 a day to ad-vise them how to make these cuts. WHATA DISGRACEFUL WASTE OF MONEY.

Jackie Grunsell Fights Cuts

Jackie Grunsell will be taking a leadingpart in a new campaign, called KirkleesSave Our Services. The campaign, launchedonly at the end of November, already hasthe support of several community groups,trade unions and local socialists. Resistingthe cuts in our services and voting for coun-cillors who support good quality publicservices will be important in next year’s lo-cal election. Kirklees deserves councillorswho will stand up and fight for our services,not meekly bend the knee to central gov-ernment dictate.o No To Cuts in Serviceso No to Closures or Privatisationo We Will Not Pay for Their Crisis

Kirkless SOS

In the face of intended cuts inservices by Kirklees Council anew local anti-cuts campaignhas been formed by a numberof community based organisa-tions, trade unions and individu-als, called Kirklees Save OurServices.The campaign intends to organ-ise a public meeting for 3rd Feb-ruary and a lobby of the councilon 24th February.All are welcome to participateand join this campaign.Campaign Secretary, Ed Dovetonstated: “The cuts being lined up by the council will devastate livesand services; the council should be resisting cuts and supportingthe community, not acting as itswilling executioner.”Contact the campaign by e-mail:ed@kirklees-sos.org

Council PlansMassive Cuts

Save Our Nurseries

HE GOVERNMENT has decided to radically change the wayour Nurseries and Nursery Schools are to be funded. Pres-ently the Council receives central government funds to pay fornursery places in our schools. But the private nurseries havekicked up a fuss saying this is ‘unfair’ and they want some of ourcash. New Labour’s love affair with the private businesses hasled them into a fatal change of policy where they have are nowgoing to support private nurseries at the expense of local fundednurseries.The result is that all state funded Nurseries and primary schoolsoffering Nursery places are having their funding ‘reviewed’ i.e.cut, so that privately owned nurseries can get more of our cash!Last year, the council tried to shut Denby Dale Nursery on the basis of these proposals. A quick and effective local campaignforced the council to back off. Now they are about to announcetheir plans, based on a cut budget for all nurseries in Kirklees.In Crosland Moore this could see Thornton Lodge threatened. Jackie Grunsell has taken a very clear stand on these propos-als: The public sector should not be subsidising private nurser-ies which are clearly run for profit, where some of the moneymeant for nursery provision goes into the pockets of privateowners and is not spent on the children. We must continue tosupport nursery provision for everyone, whatever their income.If nurseries are forced to shut, it will force more parents intothe more expensive privately owned nurseries, which a lot of parents cannot afford. This is Robin Hood in reverse! Jackie has already visited Thornton Lodge Nursery and pledgedher support, but we will need a massive show of strength fromparents, children and the wider community to save our Nurser-ies – don’t let the council get away with it! Jackie says: “After thegreat campaign to save Tiddlywinks Nursery 3 years ago, I knowwe will have the public support”.• No to public funding of private nurseries• Stop all Nursery Closures• For free and comprehensive childcare for all

Privatisation Reduces Care for Older People

IN THE DECEMBER EDITION of Kirklees Together - that’s the glossy book-let produced by the council, which is putthrough every door with other junk mail,you will find an article titled ‘Improvingcare for older people’. It is a crude pieceof spin, meant to deceive us that Kirkleesis looking after the elderly. In reality thecouncil has closed down most of its carehomes, forcing elderly people in Kirkleesto go to private business run homes. Thishas happened alongside the closure of all but one day-care centre – one centre nowremains for the whole of Kirklees!Personal care for the elderly, throughhome-visits have also been privatisedand this has meant a reduction in thequality of care, a rise in costs and ‘third-world’ type working conditions for thecare assistants who support our elderly.The whole set-up is a scandal, aided andsupported by Liberal, Labour, Tory andGreen councillors.Care assistants work for little above theminimum wage, while the fee for visits-charged to the elderly is nearly £10 perhour, a fee which increased this year by amassive 20 per cent.Care is now run by organisations such asCarewatch Care Services, who are in business to make a profit. Their objectiveis to squeeze every extra penny they caninto their own pockets. They do this notonly by high charges, but by cramming-inmore and more elderly people to be seeneach hour. It ends up with the assistant being run off their feet and lower qualitycare, all toproduce a profit. What’s happened to thatold public service ethos, when it was thecare of the elderly that mattered?

Jackie has been campaigning to save our nurseries

Leeds Bin Men

HOW ON EARTH can anyone justify a cut in refuse work-ers’ wages by a third? Yet this is precisely what was pro-posed in Leeds by the diabolical Lib Dem/Tory council.A cut of a third would mean that refuse workers would re-ceive only around £13,000. Council Leader, Richard Brett,cruelly arguing that you don’t need a degree to collect rubbish, says that this is a good income.Unlike the £45k earning Cllr. Brett, refuse workers areforced to work in increasingly difficult conditions, with un-reasonable performance targets imposed upon them. Theyare now left with the prospect of weathering the depths of the recession on a miniscule wage.Thankfully, the workers have not taken this assault on theirpay packets laying down. Instead, Leeds has witnessed themost significant example of industrial action in Leeds sincethe great Miners Strike of 1984-5.During the course of the strike the mood of the bin menremained defiant and the public support has been over-whelming. People are wholly opposed to privatisation of the service, which is what really lies behind this dispute.As the bin strike in Leeds entered its twelfth week, anagreement was reached between the refuse collectors andthe council. The agreement ensures that the majority of the600 workers do not lose out on pay. They had faced up to£5,000 a year pay cuts. And although approximately 20 willlose out, the council have agreed to negotiate a settlement by the end of the pay protection period in February 2011.The strike exposed the greed of private contractors who dida rubbish job while fleecing the council taxpayers of over£1 million. The council has also had to drop privatisationplans and will face further costs for failing to recycle. But inKirklees we have councillors with the same type of priva-tising mentality. Both council workers and the communitywill need to be on its guard against this type of privatisationmania and the bitter cost that these measures mean to us all.

Leeds Bin Men saying thanks to people of Leeds forsupport in the strike

Youth Fight For Jobs in Huddersfield

“Even more tellingly, when one of the cabinet members inreplying to questions about the Future Jobs Fund insistedyoung people should ‘be grateful’ for a six month trainingscheme on the minimum wage with no guarantee of a per-manent job at the end of it, he got a chorus of cheers! It is blatantly obvious that most of the politicians have no inten-tion of standing up against the budget cuts and fighting forthe defence of jobs and services.”STUDENTS AND YOUNG WORKERS from Huddersfieldtook part in a Youth Fight for Jobs (YFJ) demonstration on 21October, protesting against planned cuts in Kirklees councilservices.At the time the specifics of the cuts have not yet been an-nounced, and will probably stay concealed for as long as thecouncil can manage for fear of a public backlash. The cutswill probably include at least a freeze on recruitment, if not job cuts, and the closure or privatisation of various services,including those aimed at and involving young people.The protest began outside Huddersfield University studentunion and our march through town ended outside the councilchamber, where the council were discussing up to £400million in budget cuts. We were told that we were annoyingsome of the councillors due to our noise, the announcementof which caused a further surge in chanting and drumming.Local councillor and Socialist Party member Jackie Grunsellreported from inside: “To the shame of all the other coun-cillors, I was the only one to get up and speak against thedevastating cuts planned. I explained the need to invest morein a recession to create decent jobs and start building councilhousing again, and warned of the generation of young peoplewho will be lost to unemployment.