Local government in Britain is in crisis. On the one hand, it is the first to suffer as the British economy is driven on to the rocks by inept neo-liberal politicians of both main parties. On the other, the central State dumps increasing burdens on it without calculating the costs and leading to absurdities like a Labour administration in Birmingham bankrupting its own city.
Fiddling around with process such as elected mayors makes no fundamental difference if there is a failure to ensure that the costs of service to the people can be covered by the funds required and if local people cannot set priorities. Local councillors are now mere cyphers, a political Potemkin village. We support elected mayors but they must be given the tools of the job and get better quality support from executives and elected officials and access to funding.
The decentralisation of power to our towns and cities, the ability of men and women from working households to participate in local government and lose no income or family life by it, adequate authority over executive officers and a return to the ethos of municipal socialism represent the Workers Party of Britain’s policy for local government.
Specific proposals include putting senior council executives on five year rolling performance-related contracts, a fixed 6:1 pay level ratio between the lowest and highest paid staff member, whistleblower hotlines to report bullying, corruption and mismanagement to a level above middle management and increased control of the terms of local taxation including the implementation of tourist taxes for re-investment in city and town centres.
We also advocate increased selective regional delivery of services with neighbouring authorities to reduce administrative costs in favour of front-line services especially in education, transport and economic development.
Making Managers Accountable
To have policies for worker empowerment implies a policy for dealing with administrators and managers. The Workers Party of Britain is not opposed to management but only to management that answers to a special interest that is not the interests of the people. The running of the country requires good managers who act in the interests of the workers and the country and not those of profit-takers or their political lackeys.
Managers have nothing to fear from the Workers Party of Britain since we will be liberating them to manage without looking over their shoulder at the internal thought police or the accountants meeting shareholder targets. One of our aims is to help workers become managers through education and training while stopping those who ‘make it’ from pulling the ladder up behind them.
There are four departments in our sights – finance, marketing, public affairs and human resources. The engineers, innovators and producers remain the valuable core of any society. Finance has its duty to shareholders but this must never be at the expense of the community or workers. Marketing must be restrained from using half-truths and false narratives to sell what people neither want nor need. Public affairs are often the excuse for political manipulation and the lobbying of government and it must be restrained.
It is the human resources function that, under ‘bad’ managers, can be most dangerous to the common good as it seeks to de-politicise and atomise workers, actively discourage collective trades unionism and impose identity politics, lifestyle imperatives and anxiety on workers. The Workers Party of Britain will put in place legislation to offer free speech and lifestyle protections for workers and stop corporate interference in private lives.
We will end the old war between workers and managers and replace it with a socialist commitment to management in the interests of the working class with accountability to the working class both through legislation or regulation and the trades union movement. We see ourselves as liberators of managers, civil servants and local government executives who can work for the common good with a clear conscience and not be creatures of anonymous shareholders or political opportunists and face the difficulty of having to make bad moral choices or lose their livelihood.
Julie Lowe 