National Delegate Conference 21-24 June 2011

Tuesday briefing 2: We need to nail the lies and myths

Scotland’s Jane Carolan will lead off the key economy debate this afternoon by calling on us to ‘nail the lies and myths’ of the Tories and their backers that there is no alternative to cuts.

From the special seminar in Glasgow last September, UNISON Scotland and branches across the country have been putting the arguments to members to debunk the Tory and media myths. But it is hard work and still many of our own members have yet to be convinced.

And if they are not convinced, how can we expect them to take action when it is needed? So we need to keep hammering away at the UNISON Scotland key messages.

1. Public service cuts are driven by ideology not economics

2. There is nothing inevitable about public service cuts - they do not make economic sense FACT: for every £1 earned by public service worker around 70p goes back into local economy.

3. The economy depends on healthy public services - cuts risk a double dip recession

4. There is no private/public divide. The private sector depends on public sector contracts. FACT: for every one public sector job lost, at least one will be lost in private sector.

5. These measures hit the poorest far more than the rich - we are not 'all in this together' FACT: The poorest families will be hit by government cuts FIVE times worse than top earners.

6. FACT: After the second world war the deficit was at least three times (at peak 5 times) higher than it is now, yet we built the NHS and the Welfare State.

Add to these a new killer fact that Jane will speak of this afternoon. £25 billion is lost by tax avoidance every year. plus an additional £8 billion is lost through ‘tax planning’ by wealthy individuals, the so-called non doms.

Get all these arguments, a powerpoint and other tools to back them up at www.unison-scotland.org.uk/publicworks

Edinburgh: You’ve heard the debates, now here’s the reality

Conference this morning roundly condemned privatisation and all the damage that does to services, jobs and hard won conditions. It also laid out the strategies to fight back.

Nowhere is the reality of all that closer to home than in the Lib Dem/SNP plans for Edinburgh. And it is not just Edinburgh facing this fight. It has been explicit from the start of the process that the Edinburgh experiment is seen as a template for the rest of Scotland.

If Edinburgh is sold off, you may well be next. The City of Edinburgh Council is considering bids for the privatisation of large swathes of local council services. This would be the largest ever single privatisation of services in Scotland affecting up to 4,000 jobs.

The preferred bidder for two major contracts will be announced on 25 August. The privatisation is being pursued through a "competitive dialogue" - similar to competitive tendering but with slightly greater reference to service quality.

Each of the three privatisation projects is being shadowed by an inhouse option and all the service options - public and private - will be evaluated in time for a reports to full council in August and December.

However, the worry is that politicians have got themselves so out of their depth that they will be scared of going for the in-house option.

Lead negotiator Kevin Duguid outlines the UNISON position. “We continue to put the bidders and the process under the microscope and have recently put a set of questions to bidders about workforce issues which we will publish online.”

Early in the campaign the Branch pointed out that the council report recommending the privatisation was a stitch up. It used completely different types of councils to Edinburgh as comparisons. Four of the original bidders had been fined for illegal price rigging in public contracts and one of the companies was linked to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories by the Israeli state.

Some of this information had been concealed from elected members so UNISON successfully lobbied for a scrutiny system whereby senior councillors from each party get unrestricted access to shadowy truth about privatisation.

For example, fatal accident convictions were concealed , despite bidders being given the chance to ‘come clean’.

The ‘Our City’s Not For Sale’ campaign continues and has included briefings, an information pack for councillors, expert analysis of the process, leaflets, demos and street leafletting by members in the city centre.

John Stevenson, UNISON Branch President, said, "The public needs to hear about the issues. That's why we have challenged the political parties to a debate; and we are calling for a pause while proper consultation takes place".

The politicians are not consulting the public on these plans so the Branch is holding its own public consultation on 27 June at 6pm in the Augustine Church, George IV bridge Edinburgh. It has published a list of 10 questions as a starter. Questions that the Branch believes that many councillors would struggle to answer given how poorly many of them seemed to be briefed on the whole issue.

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