Wednesday 22 September 2010

Suffolk county council follows Barnet into oblivion, unless... Meeting tonight!

Taking its lead from Barnet easyCouncil (we've learned in the past few days how well that's going), Suffolk county council appears to have decided it can go one better and become the noCouncil.

It plans to outsource everything. From directly employing 27,000 staff it hopes to reduce to a few hundred, drawing up contracts in a dusty annex of the county hall (the rest having been sold off as flats, naturally).

15,000 staff work in education, but all of those, ideally, would go out of Suffolk's direct employ, with the accelerated move to academies and free schools. (We know how well that particular Tory plan is going.)

Of course, this is just something written in the Guardian, just as the Guardian wrote at length about Future Shape/easyCouncil. So, just pie in the sky, then. Hopefully.

Warm invitation

Of course, if you think all of this is too awful to contemplate and you still believe that the residents of Barnet have the power to do something about it (if we don't, what have all our democratic traditions come to?), please come to the public meeting tonight (Thursday 23 September) to launch the alliance against cuts and privatisation.

Don't cut our services. Don't privatise our services. No to easyCouncil!

Thursday 23 September, 7pm, Emerald Suite, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1GN.

Speakers include film director Ken Loach and John Lister of London Health Emergency, but the main aim of the meeting is to hear from Barnet residents and workers and make plans to defeat the absurd easyCouncil plan.

More details: info@barnettuc.org.uk

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