Vital public services have to be preserved
3:36pm Wednesday 15th September 2010 in Comment
ON behalf of UNISON members working in day services at Bolton Council, I am delighted to read (The Bolton News September 8) that Jubilee Day Centre is to stay open and that nothing will happen to other services until there has been full public consultation.
The response of the people of Bolton to the cuts in adult social care, vociferously displayed at the council lobby last week, shows that people do care and value public services. The debate should now move on. Anyone that values quality public service provision should join forces in putting pressure on the Coalition government to adequately fund local authorities to deliver essential front line services.
Everyone knows there is a huge deficit but it is no bigger than after the Second World War. If the post war Government had said we have to cut the deficit as quickly as is being proposed now, we would not have had a National Health Service or a massive house building programme. The enormous post war investment led to Britain becoming a much fairer society, where access to a decent home and health care was a right and not a privilege reserved for those with money or a means tested safety net for the poor. There used to be all party consensus that public services were the practical expression of collective values. That consensus was lost in the eighties when the then Tory government, under Margaret Thatcher, started the attack on public services. First it was the utilities (gas/water/electricity) then transport, telecommunications followed by coal, oil and steel. Privatisation is the biggest shift of wealth away from working people to private capital. Very few people actually believed the ‘trickle down’ theory that we would all share the wealth of the privateers. Protecting public services does not mean that they should be preserved forever in their current form, never to re-invent themselves to meet the new demands of a more diverse and ageing population. But workers, service users and the public must be at the heart of any innovations or new initiatives.
We must end the myth that there is no alternative to the current cuts, that public services are bad, and private services good. We must all stand up and defend what we value most, the care of the elderly, the young, the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. Bernadette Gallagher Branch Secretary Bolton UNISON
