The public face of a million voices‏

Today’s Morning Star interview with Dave Prentis in which UNISON GS Dave Prentis gives his take on the fight against Tory cuts:

Dave Prentis is determined to defeat coalition government assaults on his members and the services they deliver.

However the general secretary of public-sector union Unison is also opposed to a premature kamikaze response to the cuts agenda.

"We're not going to be drawn into an easy defeat by this government," he declares as we talk in London.

Both Prentis and his union are equally determined not to relive the 1980s, when one section of the movement after another was singled out for concerted attack by the forces of the state and was left to battle alone by other unions.

First elected general secretary in 2000, re-elected in 2005 and backed by the members a third time this year, the announcement of Prentis's latest victory coincided with the first Budget of the Tory-Liberal Democrat right-wing stitch-up.

"We didn't have a chance to celebrate the election result because we had to deal with the problem of the cutbacks in public services. So that was the good start," he recalls ruefully.

The Budget proposals set out the government's stall, but the October public spending review will lay down in greater detail the scale of its intended cutbacks.

The fact that all Civil Service departments have been told to look for spending cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent shows the size of the problem for the public sector.

"The world changed on the day of the general election," says Prentis, although he stresses that the coalition is not simply reacting to current perceived difficulties.

"You can't forget that the Tories went into the 2005 election pledged to reduce public services by 25 per cent then," he says.

"Now they're using the excuse that they have to deal with the deficit, saying that they have no choice but to reduce public service provision by 25 per cent."

Having a general outline of the direction that the coalition would go, the Unison national delegate conference agreed a detailed response on June 15.

Setting out the leadership's proposals in an emergency motion, Prentis pledged: "We will not take our members down dead-end alleys. We will not exhaust ourselves in the first few months, but we will organise."

Referring to that emergency motion, he says: "That sets out our agenda and we're not deviating from it."

Unison has embarked on a series of membership meetings across Britain, explaining what is at stake, developing the need for closer relations with other public-service unions and extending the hand of friendship to community groups.

"I really do believe, as general secretary of Unison, that we've got to go beyond trade unionism," says Prentis.

"We've got to develop our links with community groups, especially many of them fighting to preserve their services. We're using our Million Voices campaign, which is our campaign for a fairer society and for better public service provision, to reach out to community groups.

"We're saying to our regions and branches that we should be helping them, working with them in partnership and we should have a joint approach to the cutbacks in services.

"This means that we're talking about more than just protecting jobs and pay and pensions. It means that we're really about defending public services and building a fairer society."

Prentis recognises that many of his union's priorities are mirrored in the People's Charter and stresses that Unison supports the charter.

However, the unique character of the union's Million Voices campaign is that there are over a million Unison members providing public services and they are the best ambassadors for communities to understand the need to protect their services.

Prentis rejects angrily the coalition's carefully prepared sound bites to justify slashing public spending.

"We're not all in this together. It's public service workers who face losing their jobs, with all the insecurity that surrounds that. Every redundancy is a personal tragedy in somebody's home.

"It's also the poor in our society who rely on those public services. It's the vulnerable - the elderly and children whom society has always believed it should look after," he adds.

Prentis also takes issue with the often parroted claim that there is no alternative to what the service slashers are doing.

"There are very clear choices. At the moment, they start everything that they say - and they've got it down to a fine art - with 'we're having to do this because of the legacy that Labour left us.'

"It's nothing to do with the legacy that Labour left us. It's to do with the failure of the banking system and their friends in the City and they're not having to pay the price of it.

"The banks are back in profit. There's no transaction tax on banks that could go towards keeping our public services. Their bonuses are at the highest level that they've ever been, but there's no windfall tax on bonuses. Yet the poorer people in our society are expected to pay to deal with the deficit."

And he points out further fallacies of the "we're all in it together" school of falsification.

The wealth of the richest 100 people in the UK increased by 30 per cent in the past year during a recession and yet they pay minimal amounts of taxation.

Trident nuclear weapons are not part of the defence spending review, despite costing countless billions and being controlled by the US, which retains the key to fire them.

"If you can't fund care homes for the elderly, how can you afford to replace Trident?" he asks.

Labour Party member Prentis can also see that the general election defeat was, to a large extent, linked to the failings of the Labour government.

"I've got a very clear view about why Labour lost the election. People fell out of love with Labour. It isn't that they supported Tory ideals," he says.

"Everything that had happened over the years - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, privatisation policies - caused the core vote and the people who work for Labour in elections to become disheartened, disillusioned.

"You cannot win elections against that background."

While Prentis hopes that whoever is successful in the Labour Party leadership contest "will learn the lessons of history," he already has ideas of his own about the way ahead.

"I want to make sure that the next time they do get into power, with our support, it will be with very strong Labour values and Labour policies which resonate with our members."

And he wants to go back to the system whereby motions are voted on, carried or defeated, at party conference rather than having decision-making shunted off to the national policy forum.

Unison has opted to back Ed Miliband for Labour leader after arranging a hustings at its Labour Link conference, uploading the hustings to the union website, consulting Labour Link regions and convening a Labour Link lay committee meeting.

Prentis explains support for Miliband by his concentration on "real Labour values that need to be taken forward" rather than "past achievements."

"Now you can argue that Ed was part of the Labour government. Nobody can deny that, but, hopefully, he's been on the road to Damascus," says Prentis.

"If he hasn't, he's going to have problems, so let's hope he has."

Whoever takes over the helm for Labour, the immediate task facing Unison and all other public-service unions is the need to maximise unity and to develop community alliances to resist and defeat the axemen's plans.

"I would expect us to be working far more closely with GMB and Unite, with the Civil Service union PCS and also with the teacher unions," Prentis forecasts.

"That is the only chance that we have of dealing with that draconian and ideologically driven agenda."

And he reveals closer links with the Italian CGIL, German and Spanish unions in the run-up to the European TUC day of action on September 29, when Unison branches and regions will be encouraged to organise rallies outside hospitals, local authorities and other workplaces.

He emphasises that the Tories did not win a majority for the cuts agenda.

"The Liberal Democrats spoke against it and many people voted Liberal Democrat because they did not agree with the cuts that were being imposed. It's our job to get that message out."

But if the government persists with its cuts obsession Unison will move beyond persuasion.

As Prentis told his conference in June, "If this government picks a fight with us, we will be ready - we will be fierce defenders of our members and the services they deliver.

"The next four years will test us all, test our resolve, test our nerve, but we will pass the test."

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/94874