Park Cakes, based in Oldham and Bolton, is one of the largest producers of cakes for M&S, Asda and Sainsburys. Like many employers they use agency workers at busy periods such as Christmas, part of a trend among companies to hire temps instead of recruiting permanent staff. De Poel, a major recruiter of temporary agency labour, reported in last July how some employers took on 21 per cent more agency staff than in the same period last year.

Trade unions and MPs such as John McDonnell have campaigned over many years to obtain equal treatment for agency workers. The result was the Agency Workers Regulations, in force since 1 October this year, which give agency workers the same rights as permanent staff after 12 weeks of employment.

Park Cakes, in common with a number of other companies, see this legislation as a threat and are attempting to undermine it. The company has recruited 30 new permanent staff who are not on the same employment conditions as existing employees. Instead they are on zero hour contracts with no guaranteed hours and on only the minimum statutory terms, with neither overtime payments nor shift allowances. In effect Park Cakes is creating a “two tier” workforce within the factory. Although the terms and conditions of existing workers have been protected for now the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU), who represent employees at the company, see this as a direct attack on the terms and conditions of all staff.

Union members at Park Cakes have now voted to go on strike for three days from next Monday 7 November to defend their terms and conditions, viewing the actions of Park Cakes as a test case for all employers who employ agency staff while wishing to avoid the new legislation. Park Cakes is one of the largest employers in Oldham, employing 1,500 people, and until recently was viewed by locals as a workplace with decent pay and conditions.

Unfair contracts

But the response of Park Cakes in creating a two-tier workforce among its permanent staff has outraged John McDonnell and local MPs, including Michael Meacher and Andrew Heyes. John McDonnell has tabled an Early Day Motion calling on the Commons to condemn the company, labeling it “an attempt to drive down pay and conditions and undermine existing trade union agreements.” The company is not alone in trying to evade protections for temps: the Royal Mail have set up their own organisation called Angard Staffing Solutions Ltd with which to employ their 18,000 Christmas staff on the national minimum wage with no regular hours and few conditions.

The Park Cake Bakery

A representative for Park Cake Bakeries was unapologetic, saying: “The company has introduced new contracts for new employees to control costs and remain competitive following the effects of the recession and in order to safeguard existing jobs at its Bolton and Oldham sites.”

National BFAWU president Ian Hodson however challenged the company over their action and congratulated his members in standing up for their terms and conditions, saying “I want to congratulate our members at Park Cake Bolton and Oldham for standing up for themselves and their co-workers and for recognising that what the company has done is not just immoral, but wrong.

“It takes courage to stand up and they have overwhelmingly backed their Trade Union, despite the sackings, threats and pressure put on them by senior managers, who wrote to them to vote ‘no’ and called them to briefings to try and damage the reputation of their representatives by making false allegations and deliberately misrepresenting the Union position.”

Union members at Park Cake Bakeries chose next week to strike as it coincides with the launch of a new cake for Marks and Spencer. They challenge the whole conception of fair trade which Marks and Spencer supposedly espouse when they remind customers on their website: “Remember, every Fairtrade product you buy will help farmers and workers in developing countries to invest in their communities.”

Workers at Park Cake Bakeries are asking the question: is it fair to create a two tier workforce at a time of rising unemployment and declining wages? And don’t the communities of Oldham and Bolton need investment too?

Sheila Hulmes

Photograph: Phil Simpson

On 29 July, the ten councils of Greater Manchester (Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan), unofficially led by Manchester City Council (MCC), agreed to cut their carbon emissions by 48 per cent against a 1990 baseline level by 2020. Despite the scale of the commitment, the announcement attracted little media attention – revolutions and phone hacking scandals understandably sell more newspapers than council ‘strategy documents’ – and went largely unnoticed by environmentalists.

Manchester’s lead on this project follows its own much better publicised climate change strategy plan Manchester – A Certain Future (MACF), which was released at the end of 2009. Indeed, MCC’s head of environmental strategy Richard Sharland is acting director for the Greater Manchester climate change scheme that includes vague yet worthy aims such as “embedding carbon literacy into lifestyles” and “being prepared and actively adapting to a changing climate”. Another goal of the plan is the “rapid transition to a low carbon economy”, rather surprisingly when you consider the council is shirking a commitment to publish a report on the implications of a steady-state economy for its own city.

In fact, judging from the lack of progress around the Manchester climate change plan the future does not look promising for the ‘Greater Manchester Climate Change Strategy’. Almost three years on and despite a stakeholder-led target of 1,000 endorsers by the end of 2010, the Manchester climate change report has secured the support of just 201 organisations. Only two of these have come up with a delivery plan to meet the target of a 41 per cent CO₂ cut by 2020 – one of them is the council itself and the other is Northwards Housing, which manages council properties.

I wrote to Manchester City Council asking if there had been any efforts to work with the endorsers to come up with delivery plans and they replied that they support Manchester businesses through the council-run Environmental Business Pledge.

“What if the endorsers are not businesses?” I asked. They admitted, “the MACF Steering Group has chosen to focus its limited resources initially on businesses and other organisations,” which they explained were “understood to have the greatest potential for carbon savings and resource efficiency improvements.” They did however add they would be increasing their focus on residents and individuals in future through the roll-out of the “Carbon Literacy programme” currently in development.

This focus on business reveals the real aim of the Manchester (and Greater Manchester) climate change plan – attracting green investment. In 2008/9, before the global financial meltdown, the low carbon economy and environmental goods sector in Greater Manchester was worth around £4.4 billion and supported 34,000 jobs. And according to the recent Greater Manchester Climate Change Strategy report, their low carbon transition goals will encourage the investment of around £8-10 billion in projects across the region over the next five years.

Replying to a Freedom of Information request, Richard Sharland revealed that due to the cuts, five full-time staff members at the council’s Environmental Strategy team were taking voluntary severance or early retirement for the financial year of 2011/12. He nevertheless insisted that “no actions from the Council’s delivery plan have been delayed or cancelled as a result of the Government’s financial settlement.”

With such a focus on drawing capital into the region, the important work of talking to residents, informing us about global warming and preparing communities by making them more resilient to climate change is simply sidelined for better economic times – something unlikely to materialise in the near future. So until then investments and the promise of ‘jobs and economic growth’ will continue to trump other concerns.

Arwa Aburawa

A painting of the Peterloo Massacre published by the radical journalist Richard Carlile, one of the demonstration's speakers.

For Greater Manchester’s publicity arm, Marketing Manchester, there is nothing incongruous about such guests, who are celebrated for bringing “£27.4 million to the local economy”. This ignores not only the enormous, £110 million cuts forced on the city by Westminster, but also the ongoing structural inequality which means that Manchester still has the highest levels of child poverty in the UK, and some of the lowest life expectancies. Tweed-suited Tories spending a bit of cash will not only do little to alleviate these problems, but when conspiring together in conference centres they are simply plotting how to make them worse.

The very site that will host them is itself the symbolic heart of the British left. As the Tories boast to the cameras and sip champagne they will be trampling on the spot where, in 1819, 18 people were killed and 500 injured when the drunken Manchester and Salford Yeomanry charged into a crowd of 50,000 protesting against corruption and for the working class to be allowed to vote. The masses at Peterloo had come from the towns around Manchester, and organised themselves not to fight but to march behind music and banners in a festive display of protest. The Tory Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, responded to the massacre by sending a letter of congratulations to the Manchester magistrates.

Peterloo could not suppress the city’s spirit, and nor could the notorious Six Acts, forced on the country a few months later by a Tory government determined to suppress all opposition and remove any political initiative from the lower classes. The city’s Radicals kept struggling: for a free press, to support the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Glasgow Spinners, and to form unions of their own. For decades pubs across Lancashire even had as their signs full-length portraits of Henry “Orator” Hunt, the Radical whose speech at Peterloo the Yeomanry had so bloodily stopped.

The city became a hub of the Chartist movement that electrified Manchester as it did the country, a role it also performed for the strike wave of 1842, when workers disabled factories across the North West to demand reform and better working and living conditions. It was the city where Marx and Engels sought to understand capital in all its complexity and brutality, where the co-operative movement found its base, and where the Trades Union Congress was formed in 1868. It was the home of the Pankhurts, and with Salford one of the two cities in Walter Greenwood’s 1933 masterpiece  Love on the Dole.

The house in which the Women’s Social and Political Union was founded still stands, and with the People’s History Museum attests not only to the richness of the cities’ Radical history but also the pride with which Mancunians remember that history. On the other side of the Irwell in Salford is the Working Class Movement Library, founded by Ruth and Eddie Frow; his arrest and beating at the Battle of Bexley Square 80 years ago, when thousands of unemployed workers were attacked by the police for trying to deliver a petition, was depicted in the conclusion of Greenwood’s novel.

The Tories figure into that history solely as antagonists. As Chartist, socialist and co-operative movement activist George Holyoake, after whom the Co-operative’s Holyoake House in the city centre is named, wrote in his autobiography:

“Tories, by the law of their being, seek authority by which the majority of them intend the control of public affairs for their own advantage.  They supply money for corruption, intending to refund themselves by place and profit when the resources of the State come under their manipulation.”

This is a reality becoming ever more apparent as once again under the Tories, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Because of this Manchester is not a city to which they are welcome, and on Sunday two protests seek to make this clear: a march through the city’s centre, and an assembly at Albert Square, outside the Town Hall.

As the protests and resistance against austerity and the coalition enters its second year, the left needs to maintain momentum, but it also needs to organise and remain united. It needs to be confrontational, but inclusive rather than alienating. Through the city we can march and show that the Tories need to be resisted for their assault on the working class of the country, not praised for the amount they’ll spend on food and drink. In the streets and at Albert Square, protestors will consciously turn back to the forms of demonstration that so terrified the Tories in the last two centuries: those that show that the masses are against them with a festival of colour, noise and anger.

Tom Fox

John Leech MP

The Bill, dubbed by many as “the end of the NHS as we know it”, has been denounced for effectively privatising the NHS. It passed through the Commons despite vocal opposition from the public and medical professionals and a complete lack of a mandate from either the Tories or the Liberal Democrats, neither of whom pledged to reform the NHS before the 2010 election. Indeed, David Cameron even promised there would be “no top-down reorganisations of the NHS”, an evident lie all the more excruciating since he cited the care his child received from NHS staff prior to his son’s death in 2008 as a reason why he would never touch it.

Leech is no less equivocal. Soon after his election in 2005 he found himself in hot water after focussing his election campaign on claims that the Christie, Manchester’s specialist cancer hospital, was in danger of being closed following a review, a claim he later repeated in his maiden speech to parliament. The head of Manchester’s Health Service stated that this was not the case and less than two months after his election it was revealed that the hospital was safe. A Lib Dem Councillor and one of Leech’s closest allies left the party one year later, calling the campaign “dishonest” and “scaremongering”.

At the time, Leech claimed that 60 doctors at the hospital signed a petition protesting against any planned closure. The text of the petition actually circulated did not claim that the hospital could or would be closed, even though Lib Dem election literature (not always noted for its veracity) claimed this was a possibility.

Funnily enough, 60 members of staff at the Christie are now being sacked as part of the funding cuts to the region’s medical services. On top of this 150 staff are being sent to work for a private company, HCA International, who will be opening a new private centre at the hospital. Not for nothing have the corporations swimming around the corpse of the NHS threateningly requested “a free hand with staff”, presumably because so many health workers across the country are opposed to the privatisation.

Leech’s only attempt to address the issue has been to point out that the Labour administration was hardly any better: “If the private sector involvement in the National Health Service is privatisation, it was Labour who privatised it.” Private sector involvement in the National Health Service is privatisation. Labour did privatise it. That soundbite was nowhere near as clever as Leech thought it was. As with the last government, his party’s hands are covered in blood.

Given this apparent inconsistency, could the principles that saw him rebel against his own party and their aristocratic seducers last December during the tuition fees debate actually be nonexistent, with an insincere, cynical pragmatism nesting in their place? His long history of campaigning on healthcare issues would suggest not. This May he attacked £31 million of waste in the care of people with muscle-wasting diseases who had to have emergency care rather than long-term specialist treatment, in June he had tea and strawberries with Geri Halliwell in support of a breast cancer charity, and this month he called on Health Committee Chair Councillor Eddy Newman to resign following the closure of Withington Walk-in Centre.

John Leech, Geri Halliwell and some strawberries.

But as the head of the BMA pointed out, wealthy foreign nationals with heart conditions are going to be prioritised in the new-look NHS over people unfortunate enough to possess less economically viable illnesses. The poor in cities such as Manchester, which already has in parts the lowest life expectancy in England and Wales, will suffer as access to the best quality of care becomes more readily available for the rich. Doctors have warned that the service risks a return to the 1930s, while others have openly advocated resistance to the reform’s implementation.

Leech consciously crafts himself as a campaigner for public health and defender of the region’s hospitals but thanks to him, and to Parliament, his constituents who live in Old Moat will have very different healthcare provision than those who live in Didsbury. If he thought his tuition fees rebellion could hide the nature of his character, then he was wrong. As with his namesake, he has no backbone.

Tom Fox

His sentencing has been so draconian as to attract national headlines. Last Friday he saw fit to hand a young mother of two a six month prison sentence, for handling a stolen pair of shorts. She had been at home on the night of the looting. Last Wednesday, he gave Ricky Gemmel, an 18 year old with a promising future ahead of him, a 16 week prison sentence for using “threatening or abusive language or behaviour”: being lippy with the police.

Qureshi’s statements in the press convey the impression of a man seeking vengeance rather than justice. To a 13 year old boy, arrested after he admitted to police he was carrying a hammer, Qureshi said, “If you had been 15 you would be going straight through that door (to the cells) … Nothing the youth offending team could say, nothing your mum could say on your behalf could have prevented that from happening.” To a 14 year old boy charged with stealing a £1 pack of chewing gum, he said, “If you had been any older, I would not hesitate in sending you to detention.”

These two were lucky, but there is now a long and growing list of other youngsters in Manchester facing long prison sentences for what in many cases amounts only to petty theft of low value items – clothes, food and drink worth only a few pounds – which are being categorised as burglary, and some minor public order offences of a kind which happen routinely in town centre pubs at weekends.

The judiciary are, ideally speaking, trusted to act independently of popular and political pressures, impartially deciding sentences having weighed up the public interest, the harm caused by the crime and the circumstances of the individual committing it. But, as one magistrate, writing anonymously in the Guardian put it, “this week’s riots have been so shocking that normally level-headed people start to see due process of law as an encumbrance to justice. The reverse is true.”

In 2006, the Home Office’s Sentencing Advisory Panel issued advice that shoplifters – the most common criminal in the UK – should never be sent to jail unless involved in violent attacks on staff, using children to steal, or working in organized gangs. It is clear that many of those now facing hefty jail sentences were none of the above. Many were first time offenders, stealing neglible amounts from businesses which could easily take the hit.

Theft and handling stolen goods rose 9 per cent last year to just short of 122,000. Only 7.5 per cent of these cases resulted in immediate custody – 65.5 per cent resulted in fines, 13.9 per cent in community sentences. The ultimate custody rate was only 18 per cent: Only 22,000 of the 121,000 people, and these were for the most serious instances of theft.

It is also noticeable that many of the young offenders awaiting sentencing as their cases are passed up to the Crown Court, are being denied bail. This is highly unusual since not granting unconditional bail is, according to the Bail Act, only supposed to happen when there is ‘substantial’ reason to believe the defendant will commit more crimes, run away or interfere with witnesses (hence, as above, only 7.5 per cent of cases result in immediate custody). As the aforementioned anonymous magistrate has written “It can be tempting to treat a remand in custody as a first bite at punishing an offender. That is not just wrong, but also illegal.”

So why are so many people going to jail now – some even before being convicted – for stealing a bottle of vodka or a t-shirt? What makes these cases so different? Magistrates are being ‘advised’ to abandon normal sentencing procedures, with one judge stating that she had been issued a ‘directive’ to ensure that every offender went to jail. This raises major questions about the independence of the judiciary.

Qureshi shares the analysis of the Tory right, saying that the riots took place “for no reason whatsoever”, that it was “mass criminality, nothing more than that.” Even if this was the case and the riots had nothing to do with things like gaping economic inequality, the current sentencing approach will likely create more rather than less criminality.

Vicki Helyar-Cardwell of the Criminal Justice Alliance explains that although prison may be appropriate for rioters that caused serious harm, “it cannot be used as a blanket panacea. As a society we have become over-reliant on prison as a sanction, without a proper discussion of what it can and cannot achieve. Half of all prisoners go on to reoffend within a year of release, and for young offenders the rate is even higher. Imprisoning young people could turn some opportunistic looters into hardened criminals.  We need to reserve prison for serious offences, making sure effective alternatives such as restorative justice are in place that can command the confidence of victims and communities.”

Similarly, Geoff Dobson of the Prison Reform Trust has argued in relation to the riots, “Prison numbers are at a record high level and most prisons are experiencing problems associated with overcrowding. It costs £45,000 per year on average to lock someone up … it would be a mistake to see prison as the default response for all who appear before the courts.”

Statistics released by the Ministry of Justice in November 2010 show that offenders served community punishment under probation supervision are 7 per cent less likely to offend than those given short-term prison sentences of 12 months or less. In a survey of 1,435 prisoners, 68 per cent named a job as the most important factor in preventing them going back to a life of crime after leaving prison, while 60 per cent also cited having somewhere to live.

Many of those thrown into prison this week will either be losing their current jobs or having their future chances of employment wrecked. To compound this, the councils in Salford and Manchester have, predictably following the Tory lead, begun hinting at measures to evict rioters from council housing – an idea of questionable legality and sense given that local authorities are responsible for dealing with homelessness. Making people homeless makes them more rather than less likely to commit crimes, and that is why normally offenders are not stripped of their right to housing.

In the attempt to make an example of those committing spur of the moment petty crimes, judges like Qureshi are making it more likely that the same people will be consigned to a life of criminality. Such actions have nothing to do with dealing with the long term causes of crime and nothing with keeping society safer, but everything to do with knee-jerk populism. The judges and politicians may say our society is sick, but they have no interest whatsoever in looking for a cure.

Andrew Bowman

Face off. A man gestures to police officers on market Street. Credit: Kriss Massey www.krismassey.co.uk

The town centre was a scary place on that evening. The rioters and looters were often reckless, acting with little care for the safety of themselves or others. A few were just out to hurt other people, and as it got dark hardened gangs prowled the streets to take advantage of the situation. Nobody wants this.

But those who watched in horror from afar would most likely have misjudged the atmosphere early on. There was an odd sense of humour to it. While there were no clear political targets or obvious message, this didn’t mean those involved were wild animals fighting one another for each and every trinket. They were largely groups of friends acting with universal abandon, high on a sense of control and nothing to lose.

Not all took part in the destruction and stealing, many were there for the spectacle in a place where without money they are normally so unwelcome. Nearly all shared a passionate hatred of the police, who they perceive to unfairly harass them, their friends and their families every day. Some would explain how the cuts were affecting them and limiting their aspirations, and how people were “frustrated” and “angry”. They didn’t necessarily condone what was happening, but they understood it. Others openly said they were just there to make money – a reflection of the values extolled by social elites.

Miss Selfridge on fire on Market Street

No Return to ‘Business as Usual’

Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Peter Fahy said, in a myopic and revealing statement, “Nothing in Manchester has happened to provoke this behaviour”. He and other leaders in the city making similar claims are trying to avoid the difficult questions which these events have raised. Manchester’s elite do not want to take responsibility for any part of this social crisis, and are failing to address the reality of the country’s and the city’s social and economic situation. The riots engulfing cities up and down the country were predictable and predicted, but the political establishment has willingly ignored the signs for years. Anyone who didn’t see this coming really wasn’t paying attention.

So why has this happened? What makes a young person willing to wreck a city centre, risk their physical safety and potentially gain a criminal record which would scupper their employment prospects? The sad truth is these kids don’t believe they have much of a future in our present society: their actions were of people with little to lose, the actions of those without a stake in society. Councillors may not like to admit it, but these too are “real Mancunians”.

In the aftermath councillors, both Labour and Liberal Democrat, have been talking about a return to “business as usual” – a call to keep calm and carry on, grass up your kids and get to work. But the usual business in this city is vast inequality and the exclusion of a substantial proportion of the youth from the limited political, social and economic successes seen here.

Thousands of rioters did not materialise out of thin air, but were drawn from some of the most deprived parts of the country. 27 per cent of children in Manchester grow up in severe poverty – the highest level in the country. It also has the lowest life expectancy in England, and has had an unemployment level among 16 to 24 year olds of around 30 per cent for over 20 years. As of April this year, the figure stood at 28 per cent, as opposed to the national average of 20 per cent. Two thirds of these youngsters are males. In a city with a student population of 10 per cent, 16.9 per cent of people have no qualifications.  This is the “real Manchester” for so many young people, and it is the reason why returning to business as usual is unacceptable.

Looted newsagent on Portland Street

A Systematic Silence

The only attempt by any of the political leaders in Manchester to account for the causes of what has happened is to point to the supposed weaknesses and tactical failings of the police. The best the Manchester Evening News could manage was to point the finger of blame at parents. All are keeping a systematic silence on the poverty and inequality which blights the city when it’s staring them in the face. It seems now they have been caught up in the lie for so long they are literally incapable of comprehending what went on, even as one political or economic crisis after another strips the fragile legitimacy of their position. All these facts have long been public knowledge, but the Council refuses to acknowledge it, unwilling to stain the ‘Manchester brand’.

To create this brand a grand project of social engineering has been carried out in Manchester and throughout the UK since the 1980s. In Manchester this is born out most visibly in its urban geography: the poor existing in run-down estates or moved from area to area as regeneration projects bring demolitions, gentrification and rising house prices.

The city centre is a good case in point. It has been turned into a citadel of the rich, the domain of property speculators, bankers, elite culture and consumer capitalism. Marginalised youth are often moved on by police and private security guards unless they are spending money. They are at best expected to take up menial service sector jobs – of which there are not even enough – and catch whatever crumbs fall from the top table. It is no surprise then that people should turn to crime for both money and self worth, and that they should lose respect for ‘their’ city: the reality is it is not theirs. Pat Karney’s condemnation of those “trying to destroy our city” revealed far more than he meant it to.

Addressing the Real Problem

The embrace of neo-liberalism has created not just inequality but also an atomised, individualistic society, where self-seeking greed and a lack of respect for others are presented as virtues. In some respects, the rioters hold a mirror to the dominant values of mainstream society.

The austerity measures currently taking place are a continuation of a long running process of redistributing wealth from poor to rich, and they will increase this inequality further. There have been warnings that this would lead to rioting, even from the likes of Nick Clegg. Most notably in Manchester the Council decided this year to practically abolish the city’s youth services as part of its programme of spending cuts – the only local authority in the UK to attempt a 100 per cent budget reduction in this area. They were warned by local campaigners that it could lead to violence.

The question now for the Council is straightforward: do they have the guts to admit this and begin in a real discussion? The situation is crying out for a serious commitment to the future of the city’s abandoned youth and for a council and populous that listens to them. There are communities around Manchester who will be desperate for some sort of engagement. There will be many who won’t, feeling the political system has simply nothing to offer them, and at present they’re not far off the mark. None of these problems will go away unless the council in Manchester and the government in Westminster address the structural inequality, deprivation and exclusion in this city and across the UK. That will be an incredibly difficult and messy job. Are any of them prepared to stick their head above the parapet? If not, expect this to be just the beginning.

Charities have been out in force about the effect austerity measures are having on the housing crisis. The results of the Fawcett Society’s research with the Institute of Fiscal Studies, revealing how the heaviest burdens will fall on predominantly female lone parent households, were overshadowed by the sheer enormity of the impact of housing benefit changes.

Shelter and Crisis have warned that the ‘safety net’ has been dismantled, with concern for the affected ‘middle classes’ making headlines, and local authorities are already feeling the increased pressure of rising homelessness. It is no secret that a housing crisis has been developing for years, and finding new ways to describe the way property prices have inflated, wages have stagnated, and how welfare spending and credit bridged the difference, is getting tricky. There are few innovative ways left to say that our council housing stocks were sold off, or to describe how the resulting shortage helped fuel a property boom on which the entire economy depended.

It is difficult to find people unaffected. Britain has a generation for whom a secure home of their own, rented or bought, is a dream to aspire to. People earning good money are lying awake at night, worrying about the inevitable end of artificially suppressed interest rates. Families up and down the country excluded from our still inflated property market, with little credit available to access it, are at the mercy of an insecure private rental market.

All in it together

Such rent and childcare costs are so high that families up the income scale are reliant on housing benefit to continue working and stay in their homes. Families who have never considered themselves “welfare dependent” are relying on tax credits to meet exorbitant mortgages. Our housing crisis has spread right across the social spectrum and if it isn’t affecting you, it affects your kids. Your friends. Whether you buy, rent, work in the public or private sector. Whether you are “squeezed middle”, that mythical working class, or the feared “excluded poor”.

Until the election, the biggest question was why politicians and the political media were ignoring it. Local authorities had warned of the rising housing benefit bill for years. Britain’s UK household debt relative to GDP more than doubled in eight years, it has exceeded our GDP since 2007, and yet our political parties do not mention it. Rising house prices are still treated as a sign of economic recovery, while charities and organisations at the coal face of debt and housing (where political sound bites don’t become true through repetition) have long issued stark warnings of the cost of a perfect storm brewing.

Then the election came, and our political parties did show they were aware of the problem. They just had no intention of tackling it.

Mortgaging the future

Both main political parties adopted the mantra that housing benefit is an affront to, in the words of the Ed Miliband-authored 2010 Labour manifesto, “ordinary hard working families”, and tackling ‘scroungers’ was touted as tackling the housing and debt crisis. Tax credits have been cut and capped, with no reference by any party to the low wages they disguised by subsidising employers.

The natural results of spending cuts on this scale is to pass the debt the state took on to rescue financial markets back again to households, so that the private debt they will rely on to cover their falling living standards may service afresh the enormous debt bubble on which our economy relies.

These measures not only ignore the enormity of the housing crisis, but make it much worse. Nevertheless, our political elite and a media drawn from the same narrow club were easily able to ensure the only debate around this issue was confined to party-political tribalism and the use of stereotypes lifted straight from The Sun to paint the crisis as the moral failings of a few of those affected.

The reality of how austerity measures are impacting on our housing crisis raises a new question. When did our political system and the media it feeds become so corrupt and separate from the country it serves that a housing crisis affecting so many people could be lost under sound bites about scroungers and “necessary cuts”, while policies that stick a grenade under it are accepted as sensible?

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Daniel Alexander

But as with many elements of the cuts and the drive towards austerity the working class and the poorest are not all in this together with the rich. It is simply misleading to say that “we are all living longer”, since poverty and the ravages of long-term unemployment and low-paid work have meant that alarming gaps have arisen in the average life expectancy in different regions.

Taken as a national average, Alexander is telling the truth – life expectancy from birth, based on 2008/09 figures, is 77.7 years for men and 81.9 years for women, and so a person retiring at 66 would still have a good run. However, closer inspection shows that this is not true for the poorest parts of the UK, in particular Manchester.

According to figures released by the Office of National Statistics earlier this month men in the city have only a 54 per cent chance of living to the age of 75, with women only having a 69 per cent chance – both being the worst in England and Wales. Neighbouring Salford is close to the bottom, with men having a 54.5 per cent chance to reach the age and women 68.4 per cent.

In Manchester this translates to a life expectancy of 73.4 for men and 78.9 for women, while in Salford it is 74.6 and 79 respectively. Manchester is consistently the worst in England and Wales. In terms of UK results, only Glasgow is worse.

This has a lot to do with poverty. Despite the “regeneration” of Manchester destitution and child poverty is still endemic, with the city the “child poverty capital of Britain”. East Dorset, a retirement hub for the affluent, is a high performer, with men expected to live to 81.3 years and women until they are 85. In Kensington and Chelsea, the best performing Local Authority in the country, women can expect to live to an amazing 87 years, with men not far behind at 83.7. Five years ago, a report found men from the most deprived areas are 2.8 times more likely to die between the ages of 15 and 64, and women 2.1 times.

This means that, in reality, Mancunians will spend more years in work but certainly not more in retirement. Instead, the move of the retirement age to 66 means that men will lose 11.8 per cent of their years of retirement, while in Kensington and Chelsea they will only lose only 5.3 per cent. Mancunian women will lose 7 per cent of their retirement, while women from Kensington and Chelsea will lose only 4.5 per cent.

Thus public sector workers and those drawing a state pension will have a year taken from them, justified by the incredibly high life expectancy of the country’s richest dragging the average up. The richest are also the least likely to require a state pension, or any of the other aspects of the welfare state currently under threat. Alexander’s statement, and similar sentiments echoed by the right-wing media, are deliberately disingenuous.

Tom Fox

Late last year, a senior official of Manchester City Council promised a report on the implications of a steady-state economy for Greater Manchester. Six months on, that report is in a steady-state itself; a state of non-existence. And despite hailing it as an important step towards the kind of new thinking Manchester needs for the 21st century, Manchester’s climate change activists appear to have fundamentally fumbled the ball.

On Wednesday November 17 2010 the “Economy, Employment and Skills Oversight and Scrutiny Committee” of Manchester City Council held one of its regular meetings. Towards the close of proceedings Richard Sharland, the council’s Head of Environmental Strategy, offered to produce a report on the implications of a steady-state economy for Greater Manchester. A steady-state economy is an economy which is stable (rather than constantly growing) and takes into consideration ecological limits and concerns. Sharland was at pains to warn the committee that this report would not take place “in the next two weeks”. While one Labour councillor was heard to mutter that two years would be fine with him, there was an agreement by the representatives of Manchester’s people that the report was necessary and to be welcomed.

Two separate accounts of the meeting by Manchester Mule and Manchester Climate Fortnightly, both published later that day – and unchallenged by the council for accuracy – mentioned the verbal commitment to a report on the implications of a steady-state for Greater Manchester. Curiously, however, the official minutes of the meeting were far more lukewarm, merely mentioning a “summary of the research on a steady state economy.” The Oversight and Scrutiny Committee has met on a further six occasions since November, and there has been no mention of the steady state economy report or even the ‘summary report’ mentioned in the minutes.

When we contacted Richard Sharland he was unavailable for comment. However, there was a meeting on May 25 with members of the Oversight and Scrutiny Committee to schedule items for the coming months which did include a commitment to “look at the research about ‘steady state’ economics and how this links with green jobs”. Even so, the committee failed to schedule the item, adding that the loss of certain staff members due to redundancies had halted the progress of the report.

In its original coverage, Manchester Mule quoted Dave Cullen from Manchester Climate Action, as saying, “It is encouraging to see parts of the council agreeing to look at one of the root cause of climate change – the absurdity of chasing infinite economic growth on a planet of finite resources. But the council has a history of making promises, missing deadlines and letting issues slip. We need to make sure this fundamental issue gets properly examined.” We tried to contact both Friends of the Earth and Manchester Climate Action, but neither was able to provide us with a comment about the six months of inaction.

So who killed Manchester’s chance of a steady-state economy which seeks to balance our economic aspirations with ecological limits? Well, this case is a bit like Agatha Christie’s Murder On the Orient Express – everyone was (at least a little) guilty. The report hasn’t (yet) been written. The Liberal Democrats failed to ensure the minutes of the meeting reflected reality, or ever asked about the report again. Labour remained and remains obsessed with the short-term, misunderstanding the nature of the challenges our species faces. And Manchester’s citizen journalists and eco-warriors? Well, they talk a good game, but when it mattered, they failed to find the time, motivation or organisation to follow up on an issue they themselves had identified as vital.

If you think the council should keep to its promise to look at the implications of a steady state economy for Greater Manchester, and do it sooner rather than later, why not contact the chair of Economy, Employment and Skills Oversight and Scrutiny Committee Joanne Green. Her council email is cllr.j.green@manchester.gov.uk or her phone number at the Town Hall is 0161 234 3235. You might also like to ask the local environmental groups like Manchester Climate Action and Friends of the Earth whether they are putting their weight behind this issue.

David Cameron and DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith

As a practitioner of welfare benefits law I am privileged to spend my working day helping out those less fortunate than myself. Old and young, sick and well, from the uneducated to the highly educated, all of my clients are in some way dependant on welfare benefits and free legal advice. Unfortunately come the year 2013, should the government’s proposals to slash legal aid be passed, many of these people will be left to defend their rights without expert help.

The government’s proposals have been described, by the Law Society, as “a devastating attack on access to justice”. While such a statement may seem somewhat hyperbolic, the reality is that it is an entirely reasonable one to make. The government is working under the assumption that the average person can defend themselves in court against a private company or public body; this is not the case. There is a clear danger that a large section of society will not be able to right wrongs against them because they cannot afford to pay the legal fees. The government argues that to fill this gap in access to justice voluntary and charitable bodies will step in; research suggests that these organisations simply do not have the capacity to do so.

It is all the more unfortunate that the proposal to remove welfare benefits advice from the scope of Legal Aid should come at a time when it is suspected by some economists that government cuts are going to leave increasing numbers of people unemployed.

The changes being made to the system of welfare benefits are cause for serious concern among  many of those familiar with them. There is a growing consensus that at least some unintended consequences of the Welfare Reform Bill will run contrary to the stated aims of the government and that the most vulnerable in our society will suffer as a consequence.

Manchester Advice

As an example many sick and disabled people are now required to pass medical assessments in order to access sickness benefits. It is the belief of many welfare rights advocates that these medicals are not fit for their purpose as part of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) decision-making process. It is contended by the Ministry of Justice Select Committee that ongoing problems in DWP decision-making will lead to an increase in the number of people appealing adverse decisions from 370,000 in 2010/11 to 436,00 in 2011/12. These figures seem to indicate that now is the time to put more money into legal aid for welfare benefits. Without freely available expert advice it is hard to see how the sick and vulnerable are expected to defend themselves against complex legal arguments in front of a tribunal and there is a serious risk that injustices will result.

Another cause for concern is the recent news that a whistleblower at the DWP had alleged that targets are issued to incentivise Jobcentre staff to remove people from benefits. In his interview the whistleblower highlights the fact that it is “not the hardcore benefit cheats who are affected by this but the vulnerable”. More alarmingly the government issued a statement that rejected these claims as “claptrap and conspiracy” only to later admit, after others spoke up, that such a system of targets is actually in place.

It is also worth considering that the welfare benefits system is our insurance against the vagaries of life and that we are all a p45 or illness away from being part of it. It is crucial that vulnerable people’s access to justice is given as high a priority as possible. For those who are still not convinced of the necessity of providing legal aid for welfare benefits advice, research carried out by Citizens Advice Bureau has indicated that for every £1 spent on Legal Help in welfare benefits the state saves a potential £8.80, due to the avoidance of adverse consequences. This clearly indicates that the proposed cuts to Legal Aid are not only morally but also financially questionable.

It is our duty, as good citizens, to protect Legal Aid, not just for welfare benefits but across the whole spectrum of the law. As Alexander Hamilton said “The first duty of society is justice”.

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You can help save legal aid and protect our welfare benefits system by writing to your M.P through http://www.writetothem.com/ and joining the campaign at http://soundoffforjustice.org/.

If you require advice on your entitlement to benefits contact Ryan Bradshaw on 01942 77 42 45.