Public Services
Defense of public services is driven by an engagement with UK politics. The defense of public services and spending is linked with many of the other topics on this site (especially housing & homelessness, refugees, gender & sexuality and free education).
Here's a brief introduction to public-spending-politics.
What are "Public services"?
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The NHS - hospitals, GPs and out-of-hours services, mental-health services, social care, care for the elderly, childcare services, primary and secondary schools and sixth forms, universities and colleges, public transport, libraries and sports centres, public toilets, parks, roads, social & council housing, homelessness provision and hostels, emergency services, legal aid, food banks, benefits and tax breaks (disabled, refugee, low income, family, jobseekers, elderly), council tax and rent subsidy, prisons, adult education, youth groups, waste disposal.
Austerity
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All public services are under attack from government cuts. A fight back against this is necessary on a national level, a local level, and to persuade people how vital they are.
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The Conservative government say that Britain can't afford to pay for public services because it has too much debt, so spending on public services must be cut until the debt has gone down. In fact, this argument fails even by its own metric.
Austerity is about ending the ability of the state to provide services, thereby decreasing public confidence in the public sector, and legitimising privatisation.
Who pays for public services?
The UK government allocates budgets to local councils. Each council is controlled by elected local councillors, who allocate the council money to different services. Councillors are elected for four years and are paid part-time.
Councillors can also raise the money they need to pay for services by raising taxes locally up to a limit set by government, and by investing council money in buildings and land which pay rent to pay for other services. Some things are funded directly by government, like the NHS.
Currently in Cambridge, the Conservative government hand money to the Labour-controlled City Council who control housing etc. and the Conservative-controlled County Council who control roads and street-lights etc. (You have to investigate to find services are provided by which council). South Cambridgeshire has a (Conservative) District Council instead of a city one.
Councils currently have a legal duty to provide the services they control to an acceptable standard. If they fail, they may be taken to court, and the central government can also choose to take them over and run them directly.
How Money is Cut
We can blame a local council for spending money inefficiently or with the wrong priorities, and this is what the national government would like to promote. (In 2015 Cameron wrote to his own local Tory councillor to complain about services being cut ) However, anti-austerity campaigners defend ALL public services, and highlight the extreme damage that austerity is irrevocably causing our public services.
Cambridgeshire county council before the Tories received 2/3 of its budget directly given by central government for local services to be run by the council; in 2 years time, it will receive no money in that way. The government has also forced councils to sell off their assets (like council housing) to run services, which reduces the ability of the councils to raise money and be self-sustaining.
Privatisation
Many of our most precious public services are being corrosively privatised by outsourcing and partial sale. Academisation of schools is an example of stealth privatisation, which takes control of schools out of the hands of local authorities, as is the steady increase in outsourcing services within the NHS.
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Campaigns for the protection of specific services
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