Uniting Leicester! Community and Unions

Unite Community showed their versatility tonight by making what might otherwise be a staid annual general meeting into an lively discussion focusing on the issues that the branch should take up in the coming months. Set up about two years ago, the local Leicester branch has more than doubled their membership in the past six months, from 40 to 84. This, no doubt, has much to do with the active role their members have played in supporting all manner of community campaigns.

As an opener to the meeting, the thirty or so attendees worked together in pairs to thresh out potential campaign focal points. This was very much in the vein of the TUSC People’s Budget Conference held at the weekend, where local rebel Councillors Wayne Naylor and Barbara Potter helped draw together peoples ideas into what will become a peoples manifesto. So tonight it was good to see Wayne again lending his time to contribute towards supporting the unions activism.

Specific ideas for campaigns raised up for debate included: concern with benefit sanctions; ongoing cuts to drug and alcohol abuse centres; the need for green spaces in the city; local council cuts (like SureStart, youth services, and libraries); welfare cuts; attacks on disability services; devising ways to work to improve community action and cohesion; the poor state of the city’s public transport network; and the proposed closure of 400 NHS hospital beds locally which will come about as a result of the government’s so-called “Better Care Together Plan.”

Other interesting issues that were discussed included: the need for a decent living wage; supporting the local Trades Council’s ongoing efforts towards setting up an unemployed workers centre; and taking the Arriva-run ambulance services back under public control.