Dave Prentis: Unions will fight George Osborne’s raid on Northern funding

There are a number of historic reasons for this, including the huge negative impact on the North of de-industrialisation during the 1980s, but what is now at the heart of the problem in this region is the massive and ongoing cuts to public spending imposed under George Osborne’s unshakeable commitment to austerity.

We were told that massive cuts to public services were an unavoidable response to the recession, which was caused by the greed and reckless gambling of the banks. But the facts show that we are not “all in it together” as the Prime Minister used to say.

The Chancellor has, so far, taken away £374m in funding from three Northern regions (Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West and the North East).

That is broadly equivalent to the amount of Government funding that has been funnelled into South East and Eastern England.

Why has spending been maintained in the South East at 2010 levels while Yorkshire and the Humber continues to be starved of essential funding?

You need only to look at the map of party political control for the answer. The Government is blatantly, even proudly, protecting its loyal voters in the South at the direct expense of deprived parts of the country in the North. So in this region we are enduring massive cuts to essential services.

The social costs of this on already hard-pressed communities are incalculable. Women fleeing domestic violence are being turned away because of a shortage of beds in some refuges. A lack of street lighting is plunging communities into darkness. Children’s centres, libraries, parks and police stations are among the services being scaled back or cut completely.

The dismantling of these vital social structures is hitting the North far harder than anywhere else and millions of people are suffering.

The cheerleaders of these ideologically driven cuts proclaimed that inflicting hardship and misery on working people was a necessary evil.

But as we have seen in Yorkshire and the Humber, massive cuts to public investment create the precise opposite of a thriving economy.

The private sector cannot operate if there is a huge fall in demand for goods and services. Every single public sector job lost drains more demand from local economies.

Small businesses such as shops, hairdressers, cafés and pubs are reliant on a properly funded public sector and fairly paid workers. Without them they have no customers and no business.

So we see a disastrous domino 
effect where public sector cuts send private sector businesses crashing to the ground.

As a result, economically blighted communities have a growing need of public services to survive the suffering – but of course, the services they could once turn to are no longer there.

Last year Unison members working for Care UK in Doncaster took more than 90 days of strike action after their employer proposed cutting their wages by up to 50 per cent. Now the Government is preparing to make taking such action more and more difficult, threatening to use legislation to stop democratic trade unions fighting for jobs and services.

The Government is trying to engineer it so that in future our members will no longer be able to expose the brutal and inhumane effects of its massive cuts and wholesale privatisation of the public sector.

At the same time they are trying to distract attention from the scandal by urging a debate on whether Yorkshire and the Humber should have an elected mayor or not. That is an irrelevance at a time when local authorities are being hollowed out because of Government cuts.

With ever-diminishing finances to pay for local services, changing the democratic structures of local authorities is just moving the deckchairs on the Titanic.

What we need is a concerted campaign for economic fairness and justice for this region and I promise that my union will be at the forefront of that.

Dave Prentis is the general secretary of Unison.