This year’s UNISON Local Government Conference and the National Delegate Conference that starts directly afterwards is without a doubt the most important conference that the union has held in the years since its formation. The scale and scope of government cuts has placed UNISON members in the firing line and local government workers in particular. The national leadership have come under growing criticism of late as a result of their reluctance to add their weight to coordinated planned strike action to defend public sector pensions on the 30th June.

But it would be wrong to imagine that the lack of action at the top of the union is reflected in lack of movement in the branches and among the active layers of the union. The monster demonstration on March 26th revealed the strength of the opposition to the cuts. But the big question now is where does the movement go next? The role of the union leadership must be to support the struggles that will inevitably break out on a local level and offer a perspective as to how we are going to defeat the cuts in Local Government and the looting of the NHS.

Stewards and branch officers are coming under huge amounts of pressure from below. Members are looking for answers in the face of massive cuts which are testing many services to the limits. Some services such as Connexions, which was a flagship of the Blair government, are facing total meltdown.
Hundreds of low paid women workers face losing their jobs as a consequence of attacks on social care and school staff who have had their newly agreed negotiating machinery torn up by the Tories are seen as easy meat by School Governors trying to balance their budgets in the light of falling rolls and budget cuts.
The situation in the National Health Service is set to deteriorate further when the Government’s so called reforms are introduced. Despite all of the Tory claims that the National Health Service is safe in their hands members understand exactly what the Con Dems are planning.

Hanging over the heads of all public sector workers is the threat posed to public service pensions by the Hutton Report. From the point of view of UNISON members the battle against pensions is of massive importance. For a start it threatens virtually all UNISON member s and on the other hand, unlike the fight against the cuts, which is inevitably localised a lot of the time, it requires a national response.

UNISON’s leadership have delayed their response on the question of pensions and have even gone so far as to publish information explaining why there is a delay. Two things are immediately obvious; firstly that they wouldn’t have sent out a statement justifying their delay unless there was significant pressure from the branches to do something and secondly that they should have got their act together long before now. There is another less obvious but far more dangerous possibility; that is that the leadership of the union are manoeuvring to lay the basis for some sort of “deal” on pensions that would give some ground on the question of career average pensions (as opposed to final salary schemes) in return for the government agreeing to take the cuts over a longer period of time. This might not happen this year, but it is certainly a possibility over the life of this parliament.

The problem for the leadership of the union is that they want to come to some sort of accommodation with the government. They have little faith in the membership and they are worried that they won’t win a battle with the Tories. Unfortunately for them there is very little elbow room within which to cobble up a deal. The relatively cosy days of behind the scenes compromises with New Labour are long gone. For a start that was during the boom years. We are now in the deepest capitalist crisis in over 80 years and the Tories are in no hurry to negotiate with them. Any deal that does emerge is also likely to be too little for the members and too much for the Tories. The instability in the world economy and the perilous position of the British economy means any deal won’t be worth a light. The Tories will merely see any compromise on pensions as an excuse to stick the boot in. That was what happened under Thatcher, there’s no reason to expect any different from Clegg and Cameron.

There has been a significant shift in the mood of the members over the last couple of years. In the immediate aftermath of the economic crash many workers were quite shocked by the extent of the crisis. Then there was a certain anti Labour mood which reflected the state of the economy and the general crisis. But that mood has largely dissipated because the real enemy is plain to see, it’s the Tories and the Lib Dems. This was already evident last year when the election had just taken place and all we had to go on was the threat of cuts.

Now however the cuts are here. Thousands of UNISON members have either been made redundant or have chosen to take voluntary redundancy, but the full impact of the cuts will be felt by the people who are left behind. Services that were under strain are now barely holding their heads above the water and some are already sinking fast.

Branch officers and stewards will have heard the fine words from managers about the need to preserve front line services, and they will have seen straight through them. We know the reality of what is happening on the ground and the worst thing of all is that next year is going to be even worse. But in the same vein we know that we need action from the leadership of UNISON as well. Fine words are not enough. We want a fighting leadereship that is capable of winning the arguments and inspiring the members.

The figures for government borrowing indicate that the Con Dems are in an even worse state than New Labour was before the General Election. There will be no let up in the government’s austerity programme. There are no easy solutions. The only way that we are going to stop the cuts is by mobilising the full strength of the union, be it in Local Government the NHS or the other services and fighting with other unions to bring this government down.

The first step in that process needs to be to build on the success of the March 26th Demonstration and start planning now for strike action against the attacks on pensions on June 30th. We need to turn that protest into a 24 hour Public Sector General Strike.