Cuts protesters on what they’re fighting for on Saturday

Saturday 26 March will see Britain’s largest single protest since the anti-Iraq war march of 2003. Thousands upon thousands will travel to London to protest against a wide range of government cuts. Patrick Kingsley talked to six of them about what they’re fighting for Holly Sprake-Hill, 31, mother, Manchester My four-year-old daughter Willow goes to a Sure Start nursery in Longsight, down the road from where I live in Manchester. I’m protesting about how the council is selling off the childcare element of the nursery. It’s going to have a very big impact on her. We don’t yet have the specifics, but she might have to change locations. At the very least, there will be a high staff turnover, and a decrease in the continuity of care. The council has already offered voluntary redundancies to a lot of the workers, and four of the senior staff will be leaving in April. This will mean she’s not going to get the same people looking after her as she’s used to – and that’s mad. Kids like regular, continuous care with people they know and trust. The quality of her everyday childcare is going to be massively affected. For me, it’s also massive. I work about 25 miles away. So it’s very important for me to know that she’s being looked after in a place that I can trust, is getting quality childcare and good pre-school education. It would change my working life an awful lot, too. I’m a children’s healthcare worker, so I know what effect the loss of these provisions would have on both my child, and the children I work with. But this is just one small part of what’s going on in Manchester at the moment. At least 23 other children’s centres in Manchester are affected. They also want to close down leisure and youth services, there are cuts to libraries, and they tried to close our local swimming baths. It’s ridiculous, because there will soon be a massive public outcry about how there’s nowhere for kids to go. We’ve hopefully managed to save the swimming baths, and we did a lot of local protesting to sort that out. A lot of local schools use that pool. It’s been really important for the community to keep it open. I hope the march will make the government really listen to people. There’s a group of up to 50 people coming down from Levenshulme, which is quite a deprived area of Manchester. We’re quite good at motivating ourselves for protests. It has been a real coming-together of everybody. Yusuf Molade, 17, year 12 student, London I’m going on the march because the education funding reforms are unjustified. I’m worried about the debt I may find myself in after I leave university. There will be the tuition fees of £27,000, plus a maintenance loan, which could be as much as £7,000. So I’ll have £34,000 of debt by the time I’m 22. It’s crazy to say the least. In a recession, we need highly educated workers. But putting up tuition fees to £9,000 a year will achieve the opposite: it’ll ward off a lot of students from going to university. A few people I know have just dropped out of college because of the scrapping of the educational maintenance allowance (EMA), and the rise in tuition fees. They don’t feel the debt would be worth it. I can understand slightly why the government is cutting the EMA. It’s not really necessary after the first couple of months of college, because you’ve bought all your books by then. But it should have just reduced the threshold for the time being – to about £10,000 or £15,000 a year – to ensure that people below that threshold definitely get their £30 a week. The government has talked about replacing the EMA with a national scholarship scheme, where the money is given to the college, and it, in turn, decides what to do with it. But I don’t think that’s a very good idea. It’s better it comes straight from the government because it’s less complicated, and because it’s embarrassing for students to have to go to their colleges and explain their situation. I want the march to make the government recognise just how many people are against them. The government is supposed to represent the people, but we don’t feel it is doing that. It is making choices that we do not agree with at all. That said, I’ll be going with people from my college, and I don’t think we’ll get as big a turnout from there as we did for the protests over the winter. People are quite pessimistic because they feel they’ve been defeated. They think democracy’s a joke, and that the only time they can voice their opinion and hold the government to account is at the ballot box. And, obviously, people of that age don’t yet have the vote. So they’re waiting for the general election in four years’ time. Nora Pearce, 62, midwife, Kingston upon Thames I’m going to be there to defend the NHS. I’ll be with a very large group from Kingston hospital, where I work, and a couple of my grandchildren, and we’ll all be carrying two flipping heavy banners. We feel the NHS is under attack. Before the last election, Nick Clegg and David Cameron used Kingston hospital as a backdrop to say that the NHS would be safe in their hands. But now the government has said the NHS must have £20bn worth of efficiency savings, despite maintaining that no frontline staff will be cut. And at Kingston we have been told that over the next four years we will be losing nearly 500 staff – 20% of whom are nurses and doctors. Now, if that ain’t frontline staff, then what is? The hospital is saying that no services will be affected. Yeah, right. It is also saying there will be no redundancies. I half-believe that, because it could achieve staff reductions through people retiring. But it ain’t about redundancies: it’s about the service. You can’t run a hospital without the staff. At Kingston, we have 22 consultants, and 214 nurses and midwives. They’re not exactly sitting in the cupboard twiddling their thumbs. So I hope the march will make the government seriously rethink these reforms. They just don’t get the ethos of the health service. I don’t know how to say this without sounding pious, but I’ve worked for the NHS for 30 years, and I don’t work there for the pay. I work there out of public duty. People in the health service work much more than their hours. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve gone without a break – how many times I’ve worked past the end of my shift when the people I was looking after needed me to stay. The plan to sell off the blood transfusion service, which will be run by private companies for profit, is a perfect example of how the government doesn’t get what the NHS is about: people don’t give their blood for profit. If they bring in all these private companies, pity the poor sod who has got multiple health problems – the private sector won’t want you. They won’t want to do your hip operation if you’re diabetic, epileptic and elderly, because it’ll cost too much money. The other thing that’s upsetting us is our pensions. When they talk about the “gold-plated” NHS pension, I don’t know what Mickey-Mouse world they’re living in. I don’t think a £5,000 pension is particularly gold-plated. A few people in the public sector get very good pensions, but the vast majority of us don’t. Caroline Johnson, 46, care worker, Birmingham We’ve got 15 coaches coming down. There has been a huge uptake in Birmingham, particularly from people working in social care. Every service that provides what we think of as critical help for vulnerable people is suffering massive cuts. Aldridge Road day centre, where I worked, closed in Christmas 2009, and the cuts will lead to more closures of centres for adults with learning disabilities. There are two proposals: one is to put everybody with disabilities on an individual budget, from which they will have to buy their own care; the other is to cut services for people the council deems no longer eligible. There are 4,000 Birmingham service users who will be told they don’t qualify at all. It’s not true that people with critical needs won’t be affected. There’s a very complicated new way of working out whether somebody has critical or substantial needs. On the form, there’s a question: “Does your neighbour do your shopping?” And if their neighbours do, then that would count against them receiving help. What the council’s doing is heartbreaking. Mary Cooke, 72, pensioner, Peterborough A group of us from the Peterborough Pensioners Association have booked seats on a coach. We are concerned about what’s happening in the country. We’re worried about the lack of jobs for young people. We’re worried about our grandchildren, because children’s services are being underfunded. We’re worried about underfunding of adult social care. We also don’t think the plans for a flat-rate weekly pension of £140 are a good idea. Over time, it’ll reduce pensioners’ income. We want the money to be collected while people work. But what is happening to the NHS is the most dreadful thing. We’re especially worried about privatisation and the way the Tories are letting GPs control local funding. We don’t think GPs should be in charge of funding, in addition to the medical examination of patients. We don’t want GPs to be in a situation where they have to make judgments about who they put forward for treatment because they haven’t got enough money. Fancy experimenting with the NHS! How dare they. Leave it alone, and get young people into work. Alex Scott, 26, UKUncut activist, Liverpool I’m coming down with about 50 people from UKUncut Liverpool. The cuts are sure affecting me directly: there are very few chances for employment in Liverpool at the moment. Here, the main employers are the public services, and when I left university last year, I wanted to get a job as either a 999 operator, or with the council. But when the cuts were announced, they closed down all applications. So I couldn’t find a job, and I was stuck working at a Subway shop, which I left to work at a coffee bar – only to lose my job soon afterwards. My girlfriend is also affected – her disability benefits are getting cut savagely. And you can imagine that for someone with mental health problems, this is extremely stressful. As well as her boyfriend, I’m also her carer, and her disability living allowance is where my carer’s money comes from. So I’m living on the goodwill of other people at the moment because the government won’t give me my money for looking after her. And she requires 24-hour care – someone to be with her, especially when she’s going through a very bad phase of depression. Protest Cuts and closures NHS Health Pensions Economic policy Students Tuition fees Social care Public sector cuts Public sector careers Older people Patrick Kingsley guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 22, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.