Smashing Playgrounds Again!

Leicester City Council are in the midst of a budget-cut-frenzy; all of which are totally unnecessary mind you. Vital public services are being shredded by a Labour Council that cares more about punishing the vulnerable (be they homeless or disabled) than opposing the Government.

Now they are out to destroy the lives of our city’s children, implementing a raft of brutal cuts, which were agreed upon by the Council at the beginning of the year. But tonight more than 200 protesters, most of which were children, demonstrated to the Council that enough was enough.

The enthused and empowered children showed their determination to see off the latest attacks on Leicester’s citizens, loudly chanting “Shame on Labour” and “No to Cuts!” at Councillors as they arrived at the town hall tonight for a group political meeting to discuss slashing £300,000 from the budget to run supervised schemes across Leicester.

This latest Labour-led attack on Leicester dropped on the city’s nine supervised play schemes last Thursday, with no warning or consultation. As one of the voluntary managers of Northfields Playbarn explained:

“What the Council want to do is to put all the adventure playgrounds out to tender, which means that it would be a business that would go for the tender. But we are not-for-profit, we don’t make any profit, we are not in it for money; but if a private business took over it, they would want something out of it. … It will go into private hands and then everything will go tits-up: I mean they will be charging the kids extortionate rates just to play basically. Its pathetic. The Council didn’t even consult with us; they said nothing! It was one of those things that was dropped on us, and we’re flabbergasted. They just dropped this bombshell on us. … We met with some consultant who didn’t have a clue what he was going on about. It was a businessmen who had just come out of the blue; he hadn’t got any idea about the ins-and-outs of the playgrounds.”

Leicester PlayFair made it very clear in their submission to the Council that this so-called consultant had given the playground staff a verbal presentation “full of deliberate disinformation, half truths and innuendos.”

Indeed PlayFair added, there had been “no paperwork, no consultation, no negotiation, no times to represent ourselves, and no respect shown to the thousands of children and young people registered with the playgrounds.” Instead the callous Council’s consultant ignored the history of the playgrounds and worked hard to make the ‘facts’ fit the Council’s cuts agenda!

Of course this is not the first time that the Council has attempted to undermine the provision of childcare facilities in Leicester, and it is not the first time that Leicester’s residents have been forced to defend their services. Ironically, the last time such cuts to the city’s adventure playgrounds were fought the Council was controlled by by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, with the opposition group of Labour Councillors acting as part of the protest “opposing the cuts”; while now they are inside voting for them! (For a report on this campaign see “Campaign against Leicester Council Cuts 2004”).

Campaigning group Leicestershire Against the Cuts wholeheartedly supports this latest act of resistance to a stubborn Council that has discarded the needs of their constituents. Every cut to public services is an attack on all of us, and now more than ever we need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder if we are to succeed in collectively forcing our Council to increase and not decrease public spending. It has been done in the past and it can be done again!

If Labour Party Councillors want to do something useful then they should stand up for what’s right. They should support a public campaign to tax the super-rich and oppose all cuts to public services. But if they are unwilling to do this then let them get ready to  be pushed out of office at the next election by working-class candidates willing to stand up for normal people in order to fight for a democratic socialist future.

The next protest on Town Hall Square is planned for 4pm this Thursday… see you there! And follow them on twitter here #SaveOurPlaygrounds

UPDATE: for a more detailed examination of the cuts see “Labour Bullying with Playground Cuts.”