THE leader of Birmingham City Council has apologised to the people of the city and insisted he had ‘no prior notice’ or knowledge of its ‘bankruptcy’ crisis.
Councillor John Cotton said he had met with Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove this week to discuss support.
He confirmed ‘all council activity’ was being reviewed but pledged to protect ‘the things that matter most’.
He added: ‘We are having to review all of our council activity, and look at where we make our spending cuts but my priority is that we continue to focus on front-line service delivery, the things that matter most to the people of this city.’
In fact, Birmingham City Council is to stop all new spending, with the exception of money protecting vulnerable people and statutory services.
Councillor Cotton, who has come under fire for being out of the country on a family holiday when the Section 114 notice was declared, said he had had ‘no prior notice’ and although he was completely unprepared for the crisis, he took ‘immediate steps to grip the situation’.
The notice means the council is only committing to fund statutory services, like refuse collection, schools and adult social care, and nothing else.
The city council’s problems are accentuated because it owes its workers £760m to settle their equal pay claim. It also faces an immediate budget shortfall of £87m this year, and has blamed the implementation of its Oracle IT system for its desperate situation. Many more councils are on the brink of shutdown.
However, while they are going under, millions of workers are having a gun put to their head by the UK’s bosses.
Tata Steel would have closed its Port Talbot plant immediately and pulled out of the UK if the government had not immediately stepped in and agreed to hand over £500m for a new furnace and to secure 5,000 out of 8,000 jobs, of which 4,000 are based at the plant. All that Tata will say is that it is losing over a million pounds a day at Port Talbot.
The £1.2bn deal announced on Friday involves switching from using blast furnaces powered by fossil fuels to electric arc furnaces which can be powered by using renewable energy.
And instead of producing virgin steel, the Port Talbot plant would produce recycled steel, with Tata investing an additional £700m.
The Secretary of State for Wales, David TC Davies, said it was ‘not going to save every job but that it is going to save jobs overall because Tata was looking to pull out of the UK, so that would have been 8,000 jobs gone, plus the supply chain’.
Not only would Port Talbot have closed but the other plants would have gone as well.
Tata Steel also has workers at plants at Shotton, Llanwern, Trostre, Corby, Hartlepool and Shapfell.
On Friday, Tata Steel managing director T.V. Narendran told BBC Wales Today that the Port Talbot plant was ‘bleeding’ up to £1.5m a day and some assets were coming to the end of their life which the business was ‘not able to support’.
The £1.2bn is the latest in a string of government interventions in industry which has seen £700m-plus given to Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover to build a new battery plant, £100m to Nissan to expand their existing one, £75m to BMW’s Mini plant and a further £300m offer to Chinese-owned British Steel, among many others.
Meanwhile, the TUC has just finished its Congress where it decided to take no serious action. The newly elected President of the TUC, the FBU’s Matt Wrack, must immediately see to it that the TUC calls a General Council meeting and that it calls and sets the date for an indefinite general strike.
The UK working class has only one way forward and that is to bring down the Tories with a general strike and set up Councils of Action so that the working class runs the country forming a Workers Government to nationalise the banks and the major industries and to bring in a planned socialist economy whose maxim will be: ‘From each according to their ability – To each according to their need.’ So now is the time to join the WRP and the Young Socialists to build up the revolutionary party that will lead the successful British socialist revolution!
