Just about any Council, be it Local Authority, district, Parish or Metropolitan, usually is only as good as its leadership, strategic planning and the capabilities of its workforce to implement planned decisions. Also pivotal to success, can often be the good will and trust of its craft workers and contractors who in Local Authority “speak” is measured by negotiated meaningful talks with ‘Blue and White collar union representation’ that necessitates respect on both sides to understand each other’s constraints and motivations.

When management decisions are ‘steamrollered through’ to the detriment of a workforce – only trouble and discontent will follow and such discontent may easily be a precursor to industrial action. This is especially true when whole swathes of loyal employees are told that “posts are to be deleted, restructured or combined into multitask operations, that in effect (and all the workers know it) the management want to impose “efficiency savings”. It’s a barbaric and heartless way of saying “yes, you might have given us your service for the last two, five, ten or twenty years, but we have decided we no longer need you. When such  attitudes are dictated without ordinary individual safeguards, the individuals, and their dependants, are on a downward spiral into dependence on the state, food-banks, charities, or support from family and/or friends.

Other working class people who have not experienced such management atrocities might be forgiven for an attitude of “nothing to do with me, why should I care?” However when Council’s reach such perilous states beware, next might be Education, Libraries, Social service, Social Housing, Leisure facilities, such as swimming pools or ice skating centres, the Police as well as Local transport and rubbish removal. A number of these might well be supported, for a time, by the voluntary sector, each time such well-meaning actions from the voluntary sector, only undermines hard won concessions that Unions strived years to win.

The truth is, this Government, and many Councils have no understanding or rapport with their workforce but if this unequal divide between the “Haves and Have not’s” continues to expand, explosive anarchy will eventually thrust its labour lance through the smug security of those that care little for the benefit of their fellow citizens.

Citizens rights (that’s yours and mine) can be cancelled in a heartbeat by this Government – only enabled and exacerbated by the apathy of non-voting individuals that consider themselves to be “Working Class”!

Perhaps, voting should be made mandatory.

So  I close my political socialist  treatises.

(Mike)