The Cuts in Manchester: Fighting Back

Manchester Coalition Against Cuts held a rally of organisations fighting local spending cuts at Central Hall in the Northern Quarter on 11th April. Coalition members were prominent in the attempt to stop Manchester City Council's budget meeting in March. They did not quite succeed, but that setback has not ended the campaign; quite the opposite.

Some of the Coalition Against Cuts activists who were at this rally had also been at the budget meeting and had been selling copies of the Socialist Worker outside the town hall. Is the Coalition a Socialist Workers Party front organisation? The question is asked, not for sectarian reasons, but because the SWP does have a history of dominating campaigns, or setting up its own front groups, in order to promote the Party's agenda. If this is the situation with MCAC, it will inevitably affect the progress and outcome of any local anti-cuts campaign.

However, although the rally was relatively short and consisted of a series of carefully organised speeches, MCAC seems to be providing the necessary co-ordination for a diverse set of local groups. One of the first speakers was from the campaign to save Levenshulme baths, which has succeeded in keeping the baths open. She was followed by a speaker from Newbury House, a residential project for recovering alcoholics. This only opened in July 2010 after £1.2 million was spent on refurbishing the building. Now the council wants to close it and evict the residents.

Manchester Council also proposes to close its youth service. According to Mark Krantz, who spoke for them, the youth workers were forbidden from telling the young people who use them that their youth centres are going to close, under threat of disciplinary action. Chris Sheedy of the USU at Salford College then talked about the union balloting its members for strike action over compulsory redundancies and devalued pensions. As she put it, "Staff don't consider pensions to be a gift, they are deferred wages."

MCAC distributed copies of an action diary at the end of the rally. This can also be printed off their website (look for 'diary' in the top bar.) Among other actions, they are supporting a lobby of Council Leader Richard Leese's surgery on 7th May against cuts to the youth service, and a lobby of the Council Scrutiny Committee on 26th May to save Manchester Advice Service.