Labour Hits Rock Bottom: Falling Ratings, Highest Tax Increases and Cuts to Essential Services

4.00.00pm GMT Sun 4th Mar 2007

Lambeth's Council Tax increase is the highest in London thanks to Labour

Not only did Lambeth Labour lose an Audit Commission star last week and send the Borough plunging to the bottom of the league table of all 32 London Boroughs, but Labour's reputation and history as guardians of the weak and dispossessed was also finally shattered for ever.

Despite an unprecedented march and rally on Lambeth Town Hall by over 450 pensioners, disabled people, their representatives and carers, and numerous voluntary organisations, Labour politicians voted through a tidal wave of vicious care service cuts and previously unimaginable rises in care charges and eligibility criteria.

That they did this without demur, and seemingly without conscience, was bad enough but Labour Leader Cllr Steve Reed steadfastly refused to meet with protesters packed into the Assembly Hall, local papers have rightly criticised the Mayor Cllr Liz Atkinson for insensitively trying to curtail the moving speech to Council of a woman about living with learning difficulties, while Labour's finance spokesperson seemed to think that blaming everyone else would cleverly divert people's attention from the decision they alone were making.

In the event all this did was to infuriate people who ordinarily might rank as natural Labour party supporters to storm the ramparts of the Labour citadel and an ugly and dangerous stand-off took place on the Town Hall staircase as security staff physically manhandled aged and infirm protesters and barred their way from entering the Council Chamber.

Labour councillors and youthful Town Hall spin-doctors cowered, trembling, in a corner as this militant example of people-power was clearly not in their manual of How to Run Lambeth.

And well they might. Lambeth Town Hall, lampooned in the Press as being flushed down the plughole, has seen some dark days in the annals of Labour party rule but this was probably the moment when even they hit rock bottom.

Labour had, apparently, drawn-up their miserly budget based on a focus-group that had put services for the elderly, sick, the disabled and their carers, and the whole of the voluntary sector at the bottom of a list of priorities. This bogus 'scientific analysis' alone apparently gave Labour politicians the moral justification to clobber the weakest sections of our community with all the ethics of the Masters of the Victorian workhouse.

As the local press tore into Labour's now clearly exposed bankrupt ideology the air was also rent with disgusted Labour party members tearing-up their membership cards and vowing never to vote for them again.

For many, even if the Cabinet later wriggle out of implementing the full impact of these appalling proposals, the very fact that they were even proposed at all shows that all Labour's pious principles as a party have been finally consigned to the scrapheap.