Mary Locke for Bournville (and Birmingham City Council)

The picture collage is from Saturday when I went to Bournville in Birmingham to help campaign for UNISON NEC member and NHS worker, Mary Locke, who is standing to be a local Ward councillor in the May 5 elections.

Yes, Bournville is the home of the Cadbury's chocolate factory and residents told us how they can sometimes smell the chocolate beans being roasted depending on the wind direction.

Mary is the nicest, most sincere and hard working UNISON rep I have ever met. She will be in my opinion, a brilliant local Councillor.

The ward currently has 2 Tory Councillors and one Labour (who is standing down due to ill health). Only one seat is up for election this year so it will be a straight fight between Mary and her Tory opponent.

Over 20 Labour Party activists turned up to help, including UNISON Vice President, Carole Sewll and the West Midlands Regional Secretary, Ravi Subramanian.

We were carrying out a survey of residents on local issues. It went down very well and I will think of suggesting doing something similar in West Ham. There was some 750 contacts made that day.

I enjoyed chatting to local residents, who by and large, were pleased to be asked their views on local issues. They were not shy in expressing themselves either!  I like coming to Birmingham and have been to see union members here fairly often in recent years and always look forward to it.

Apart from the Chocolate factory, Bournville is famous for being a "model village" built by the original Quaker owners of Cadbury for its workforce. As someone who works in housing I was impressed by the well built family sized homes with decent gardens. There is still no pub in Bournville due to its Quaker tradition.

After the canvass, many of us went for a meal at a local restaurant, which I think is a marvellous way to end such a day. Another thing I will suggest that we adopt in West Ham.

Check out Mary's website https://marylockelabour.wordpress.com/ and contact her to volunteer to help.

Proof council cuts hit poorest areas hardest

Hat tip Ravi. "In recent days there has been a storm about the recently announced 2016/17 local government grant settlement from central government. The creation of a new £300m relief fund will mainly be used to help Tory-run councils, like David Cameron’s Oxordshire County Council, with Labour leveling the accusation that this is to buy off Tory MPs.

I will leave it to others to form a view on whether this is fair or not. But this whole storm did get me thinking about the scale of the cuts not just for this year, but over the past few years, since the Tories came to power.

So I grabbed hold of the 2011/12 figures for “council spending power” and compared them to the recently announced 2016/17 figures and worked out the percentage cut in spending power for each council. I picked 2011/12 as a base year this was the first full council financial year the Tories were able to fully influence after being elected.

I decided to look only at the 152 County Councils and Single Tier Councils (e.g. London Boroughs, Unitary Councils, Metropolitan Boroughs etc) as they make up over 93 per cent of all council spending. There are 201 district council but they make only about 7 per cent of total council spending. Hence looking only at the “Upper Tier” councils as this made the analysis more focussed.

The thing I wanted to test was the theory that the most deprived councils were worst hit. So I took a trip over to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) English indices of deprivation for 2015 website. Here I got the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) average score breakdown by council areas and then  used the rank of the average IMD score to plot percentage change in revenue spending power using versus the IMD average score rank.

Below is the very telling plot of this data. Note councils with low ranks on the IMD (those plotted to the left) are the most deprived and those with high ranks on the IMD (those plotted to the right) are the least deprived.

 This graph shows a strong and clear relationship that the councils that are serving the most deprived communities have suffered the largest cuts over the past five years. This very strong relationship is evidenced by the high R² value (or coefficient of determination) of 0.81. A value of 1 would indicate a perfect fit on the line of best fit, and a value of 0 would mean the data does not fit the line in any way. A value of 0.81 shows a strong and clear fit/relationship.

So there you have it: the numbers don’t lie. The poorest and most deprived have suffered the largest percentage council cuts. The poor have been robbed to subsidise the rich.

If you want to check the data and my calculations you can download it here."

Is this why the Tories hate trade unions?

Fascinating chart. Now, I know that not all Tories hate trade unions but none of their MPs voted against the Trade Union Bill second reading on Monday even though this is a basic democratic and human rights issue.

The chart shows that the income of the very rich (the so called "top 1%") falls as trade union membership rises and increases when trade union membership falls.

Unions are stronger when they have more members. When they have more members then their bargaining position with employers is stronger. Therefore, they can make sure that their members get better wages and a fairer share of the wealth. 

If the unions have lower numbers of members then they are not in such a strong bargaining position with employers and wages are reduced while the income of senior management and rich shareholders rocket upwards.

So encouraging trade unions rather than attacking them is not only about democracy and human rights but also about fairness and equality.

Hat tip Ravi S.

Welfare spending: truth, lies and myths

This table shows yet again that contrary to the untruthful right wing media in this country the biggest single element of welfare spending in this country by far (46%) is spent on the state pension not the unemployed or sick.

This does not mean that all welfare spending is spent wisely and that we do need to keep a careful eye on all expenditure but we need to challenge the nonsense out there about who really benefits from our welfare state.

Hat tip Chart to Ravi Subramanian, UNISON West Midlands Regional Secretary who sourced the stats from this report.