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Launched today! Check out the new crowdsourced campaign site, which aims to bring together everyone concerned about the cuts. You can find out about cuts, personal stories and campaign actions in your area, and add in your own information. There's also a great video narrated by Sam West, about why we're facing the cuts, and the case for an alternative.
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The TUC are backing this January event for online progressives. Grassroots activists from across progressive organisations and causes will be coming together in London on 8 Jan for a day of training, debate and networking. Come learn from what's worked in 2010, and help plan what's going to work in 2011.
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Richard Exell
The National Council for Voluntary Organisations has announced a “restructuring” that will lead to a net loss of about 30 jobs. Many of the jobs to be lost will be at Capacitybuilders, the agency that provides advice and support for charities, whose closure was announced last month by the Cabinet Office. The organisation is also losing a substantial proportion of its funding from the Office for Civil Society’s Strategic Partners Programme. NCVO Chief Executive Stuart Etherington blamed the redundancies on “reductions in public funding.”
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Richard Exell
In the UK, False Economy is up and running, offering an intelligent and organised contribution to the grass-roots campaign against the cuts. In the USA, there’s a brilliant new website, Our Fiscal Security that, like False Economy, takes apart the arguments that are used to justify spending cuts. Their first major initiative is Investing in America’s Economy, a report that provides a detailed and realistic answer to the inevitable chorus of “so, what’s your alternative?”
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Richard Exell
Today’s figures for consumer confidence and show that families are becoming more worried about the future. This month, the GfK NOP Consumer Confidence Index decreased by two points to minus 21. While people’s judgement of their personal financial situation over the past year was the same as last month, the other elements of the index were all worse. The question on how people judge their personal situation over the next 12 months produced a fall of five points, more than any other element of the overall index.
It’s interesting to look at the questions about how people judge the last 12 months and the next and see how they have changed:
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Nigel Stanley
The new cuts campaign website has gone live today. The TUC is a strong supporter, and we have been working with a group of local campaigners and on-line activists for the last few months, to make it a reality.
I’ve got the first blog post on the site setting out in more detail what the site is all about.
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Owen Tudor
The Cancun Conference of the Parties (the UN climate change talks underway in Mexico this week) is unlikely to be the last word on combating the threat of climate change. But one key issue where people hope progress will be made is on finance. It will cost at least $100bn a year to help developing countries cope with and adapt to the challenges of climate change.
Robin Hood Tax campaigners have at least part of the answer, as the World Wildlife Fund show in their latest briefing: a Financial Transactions Tax set at between 0.5% and 0.005%, depending on the transaction being taxed, could raise about four times that amount – so only a quarter would pay the climate change bill for the world, leaving the rest for fighting poverty at home and meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
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"Community Care" reports that anti-poverty organisations are critical of government plans to hand over responsibility for Social Fund Community Care Grants to local authorities. Making social workers responsible for the severe rationing that has always been an element of the Social Fund is bound to harm their relationship with their clients, they warn.
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"Local Government Chronicle" reports Simon Hughes MP saying that local authority chief executives and treasurers believe that the cost of council redundancies is more likely to be £1.5 – £3 bn than the £200 m set aside in a government “capitalisation fund” for council restructuring.
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The Spending Review allocated an 'extra' £2 billion for social care. London Councils calculate the share of the central government grant to local authorities that is meant for adult care, has been cut by £3 billion.
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Richard Exell
I have a post up at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook, published by the Office for Budget Responsibility. The OBR is predicting a more depressed economic recovery than we had from any of the recessions of the past 40 years. The new figures suggest that public sector employment is going to fall by less than they predicted in June – mainly because benefit claimants are taking a much worse hit than anyone thought likely back then. As Brendan says, this is a ‘recovery’ that will still look anaemic by the time of the next general election.
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Tim Page
HM Treasury and BIS have published their “growth review” this afternoon. As mentioned in my post earlier today, we had been expecting a Growth White Paper until as recently as last week, when the Financial Times reported that civil servants did not think they had enough substance on economic growth for a White Paper. That is a serious charge: we have a government that has pursued deficit reduction with such vigour, but does not have a substantive narrative on economic growth. Simply assuming economic growth will happen without government support in these most difficult of economic times would be a major risk. Furthermore, the first 20 pages of today’s review describes actions already taken by the government, in areas such as stability, dynamism in markets, access to finance, planning, better regulation, innovation, competition, infrastructure, procurement, tax and skills.
This leaves only two pages, literally, to discuss the growth review. To go from an expectation of a full-blown White Paper to a two page discussion is underwhelming in anybody’s language.
But those two pages have important implications.
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Brendan Barber
No doubt the Chancellor will try to spin today’s OBR “Economic and fiscal outlook” report as a vindication of his approach. But a closer look at the figures reveals that even by the time of the next election, the OBR expects well over a million people still to be claiming unemployment benefit.
In short, by 2015 the UK economy will still not be back to where it was before the recession hit in 2008. No politician should seize on these figures as some sort of good news story, least of all one that has just abandoned plans to publish a jobs and growth strategy for the country.