Fire Service Cuts and the Need for Mandatory Reselection

Matt Wrack, leader of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), recently attacked ongoing Tory austerity which since 2010 has dismissed 9,000 fire and rescue service jobs in England, including almost 6,500 full-time firefighters.

“Fire and rescue services in England are expected to do more with less, putting public safety at risk. Firefighters have been ensuring the service delivers, but it is at breaking point”, he said in the Times newspaper on 28 December.

The response from the Home Office is that there has been a substantial fall in the number of fires over the past decade (down 46%), and fire prevention work had been a “real success”. This is a government that cannot escape from the long shadow of Grenfell, and whose ‘successful’ fire prevention work has not removed the risk of fire from tower blocks housing tens of thousands of residents, with similar cladding.

I’m sure the whole labour movement supports Matt’s statement and the efforts of his truly brave members – with one exception: the Blairite councillors who implement those Tory cuts. Regrettably the FBU’s reaffiliation to the

Labour Party has not brought an end to the Blairite implementation of Tory austerity. Another welcome FBU stance was their support for mandatory reselection at last year’s Labour Party conference, but the policy was defeated.

Now the real and welcome prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn-led government is being threatened by the election of a substantially Blairite parliamentary Labour Party.

Labour movement activists must redouble their efforts to commit their trade unions to the overdue democratisation of the Labour Party – especially Unite the Union with its executive support for mandatory reselection (2016) – to ensure a newly elected Labour government delivers ‘for the many not the few’.