John Burgess talks a mile a minute, dresses in any colour as long as it’s black, and refers to other men as “lad” – even if they’re older than him. He’s also one of my heroes of 2015. Unlike most end-of-year gong-winners, Burgess is a name you won’t know. But if heroism is about being brave when it counts – about standing up straight even while others try to make you bend or break – he’s the real deal. And at a time when so much of the organised left is afflicted by loss of nerve, mind, or both, it is a relief to find someone who still has both.
For our purposes, Burgess’s story begins in May 2008 – at the point he was hoping to hang up his boots. After a long slog as branch secretary of Unison in Barnet, north London, he planned to return to his life as a local mental-health care worker. Then the Conservative-run council began offloading its key public services to big business – and he was thrust into the biggest battle of his life. Almost eight years later, he’s still defending jobs, campaigning against cuts, pointing out the expensive absurdities of outsourcing. Going back to care work? Nice dream.
The forces Burgess is resisting will be pushing against your door soon enough. In making his cuts, George Osborne has chosen local councils to take the biggest hit, slashing day-to-day spending by the Department for Communities and Local Government by 79% over this decade. It is both a cunning and a cowardly manoeuvre by this chancellor, inflicting the greatest damage from an apparently blameless distance.
To get an idea of the noxious politics at work, consider one of the big stories of the past few days. Conservative councillors in Essex unveil a plan to charge pensioners £26 for being picked up after a fall; newspapers pick it up; abuse is hurled by members of the public. The one man whose approval ratings go unaltered is the same one whose cuts make the whole outrage almost inevitable: George Osborne.
Thus is set the pattern for this decade. Somewhere near you, a sports hall will be closed down, a grandmother will lose her daily meals on wheels, the roads will sprout holes, and streetlights will go dark. Vast swaths of the public realm will either be abandoned or handed over to big companies to run at a profit. Each time, it will be the local council that wields the axe and faces down residents, although it’s merely following a course set for it around a table in Number 11.
When David Cameron won the May general election, the National Outsourcing Association released a statement welcoming his return. “Spending on public sector outsourcing almost doubled to £120bn under the coalition,” it observed. “We expect to see a plethora of new outsourcing deals … over the coming months now that the election is over and a secure government has been appointed.”
The difference with true-blue Barnet, Thatcher’s backyard as MP, is that it elected to start on all this early in 2008, before the banks collapsed and the cuts began. Under the guise of encouraging open-market competition, it has handed over everything from school meals to cemetery upkeep to the private sector – mostly to the multibillion giant Capita. All of which makes John Burgess the advance guard for the rest of us.
Already other Tory councillors are looking at Barnet as the model for how they should outsource their services. How he fights this, the arguments he deploys and the tactics he uses, will help set the template for all the other fights to come.
I’ve written here before about Barnet and its role as the test lab for the rest of the public sector, with its key executives skipping off to run other councils. But what’s always struck me has been the sheer attack Burgess has brought to this most vital of campaigns. The armoury of contemporary trade unionism is sadly limited: a petition, some lobbying of dignatories, a lacklustre march, a strike, some variety of defeat. That’s not been Burgess’s way.
First, he sent local councillors briefings on the problems of outsourcing – every Friday for 20 weeks. Then he began working with academics and experts to produce detailed reports picking apart the financial illogic of the contracts. When the outsourced care service, Your Choice Barnet, had to be bailed out with public money it was like seeing their predictions made flesh.
So far, so ballsy. But the other thing Burgess has done is turn what could be merely an industrial dispute into a social movement. So there have been rock concerts against the cuts, and events with Russell Brand. Short cartoon films have filled in residents on what would happen once their services disappeared into the maws of Capita. He’s collaborated with bloggers and local non-union activist groups. And he’s done all of this in the face of a weak local Labour opposition and lukewarm support from his own union. “John’s become the real opposition in the borough,” says local blogger Mrs Angry.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard or read about what trade unions and leftwingers should do across the country in this hostile climate. Columnists call for unions to engage with civil society, while Burgess gets on and organises marches to save local libraries that pull together Tories with former coal-miners from his birthplace of County Durham. Pundits demand unions work together, while he just works with PCS and Unite on local initiatives. Academics write about social-movement unionism, and he joins with local housing campaigns against social cleansing in Barnet on the grounds that “our members live here too”.
He does all this – and he’s also a carer to his mother, who has dementia. Sometimes, while planning the next action, he’s been summoned by panicky hospital staff to travel north and make sure everything’s OK. Then he comes back and just keeps on going.
If we are to save what’s left of the public sector from an acid bath of giant profiteers, user charges and historic cuts, we’ll need a lot more John Burgesses. I just hope we’ve got them.
