Council Plans to Remove Litter Bins Really are Garbage.

Politics, particularly local politics, is seldom about marches, placards and grand speeches made from the podium to an adoring crowd. Instead it is about little things that for all they are resolutely prosaic; are also hugely important.

There is no better example of this than the issue of Stoke-on-Trent City Council deciding to get rid of a third of its 3000 litter bins.

This is part of the emergency budget the council pushed through on the Thursday of last week that sees 42 jobs being axed. In this instance it sees £710,000 being cut from its Streetcare and Greenspace services.

Councillor Dan Jellyman, the cabinet member with responsibility for regeneration told the Sentinel the problem was there are ‘lots of bins which are close together’.

He cited as examples the Longton transport interchange, which is used by only one bus an hour after First Potteries pulled their services out, yet has eight litter bins and bins being located outside schools that have been closed.

He added that the review of litter bin locations, the council’s favoured euphemism for removing a service, was about ‘saving the time of officers who have to empty these bins, as we will have a reduced workforce’. The remaining staff would then be freed up to do other jobs such as ‘litter picking and tackling fly-tipping’.

Yes, you did read that last line right because it was written how Councillor Jellyman said it, getting rid of litter bins will free up council staff to pick up the litter people would have put in the bins that aren’t there anymore. If someone who employs that kind of logic ever comes to ‘save’ your village it might be a good idea to start worrying about just how they’ll do so.

It must be endlessly frustrating for the council to send staff out to empty litter bins that aren’t used because there is little or no footfall in the areas where they are placed. The solution to this problem though is relocation; not removal.

A city that starts taking away litter bins from public places, sadly I fear removing a third this time will be only the start, is inviting problems. They may be doing so, mostly, inadvertently, but they are doing so all the same.

Litter blowing free in the streets is the first sign of a city in decline, followed soon afterwards by graffiti and fly-tipping. How on earth does this square with the narrative about Stoke being a ‘city on the up’ trumpeted by council leader Abi Brown at every opportunity?

To any objective understanding it simply doesn’t and never can do so. The message, again maybe partially inadvertently, sent is that Stoke-on-Trent it a city that doesn’t care about itself. Given that we are in a constant battle with our own inferiority complex and the lazy preconceptions of metropolitan outsiders that can only ever be disastrous.

You don’t need to be an expert in the dark arts of urban regeneration to know that if potential investors see litter blowing down the pavements of streets that are gridlocked with traffic, they will like as not go elsewhere.

This simple truth seems though to be entirely lost on a council leadership that has been blinded by its adventures in property development to its more mundane responsibilities. All those shiny new hotels and apartment blocks in Hanley are at risk of looking like isolated specks of light in the wider darkness of urban blight.

Not for the first time for the want of the horseshoe of having the common sense to see that they should be moving not scrapping bins the council are risking losing the battle to build a more prosperous future for this city.

Here Comes Bod

Not so far back in the long-ago railway catering was the stuff of comedy, the merest mention of wilted ham rolls on a BR buffet could wrong a laugh from even the toughest audience.

Even after the last dining car had been shunted into the sidings rail travel seldom involved a voyage of culinary discovery. The larger stations offered a parade of fast food chains, the smallest a kiosk flogging family size bars of chocolate at the sort of prices you charge when you have access to a captive audience.

How things have changed. Now even provincial stations are home to burger joints that can use the word gourmet in their name with irony coming into play.

They are increasingly home to their own 'tap' too, marking a renaissance for the old platform bars that used to be the haunt of stag parties and seedy salesmen. A prime example of such a venue is this excellent little watering hole that opened at Stoke Station a year or so ago.

The bar is part of s new chain opened by local brewery Titanic and is designed to appeal to a more metropolitan clientele than their real ale orientated pubs. The décor had the shabby chic look you'd expect but done well enough for it not to look like it's come out of a box.

The important thing, the beer, is up to their usual high standard and there is a small, but we'll curated menu of spirits. Remarkably for a place that bye to its purpose to cater for an almost exclusively passing trade the bar had a friendlier atmosphere than I have found in many, so called, community pubs.

Quite why Titanic have chosen to name this new brand after an obscure character from seventies children's television eludes me. It is something I shall ponder over on frequent return visits.

Bod
Stoke-on-Trent Railway Station
Station Road
Stoke-on-Trent
ST4 2AA
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TUC calls for Working Class Power Revival

The Trades Union Congress (TUC), the body bringing together all the UK's trades unions has issued a call for the political power of the working classes to be rebuilt.

The TUC was founded more than a century ago to 'advance the general interests of the working classes', a mission it still adheres to today.

These are difficult times for the union movement in the UK, figures published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in 2017 show that membership has risen slightly with 6.2 million workers being union members, a huge fall from a peak of 13million in 1979.

Union membership is ageing too with members over the age of first outnumbering younger members. Once a bastion of blue-collar solidarity there are now more union members in professional jobs (37.9%) than those described as 'routine ' (20.8%).

This fall in membership among members of what were in simpler times called the 'working class’ comes at a time when more UK workers are defining themselves by class. Research published in 2015 showed 60% of UK workers defining as working class, including 47% engaged in job roles classed as being managerial.

For the lowest paid workers, those in most need of unionization these are difficult times. Data produced by the Social Metrics Commission in 2017 show that 22% of the UK population were living on relative low incomes, meaning their income is below the national average. Increasingly people in this situation are in full time work, giving a hollow ring to government claims that it can end inequality just by getting more people into work.

Work itself is becoming harder for those in 'routine ' occupations, mostly in the retail and service sectors. These jobs are frequently done by women and members of the BME community, hours are usually long and unsociable with little compensation in terms of pay.

To the existing discrimination around race and gender the TUC argue that discrimination on the grounds of class should also be considered and is calling on the government to act.

Among the recommendations made in the report the TUC wants new powers for workers to negotiate better pay and conditions through collective bargaining. They also call for the rebuilding of public services that have been decimated by a decade of austerity.

The most interesting and potentially challenging recommendation is that employers should be required to publish data on class related pay gaps. This would be paired with the introduction of legislation to tackle class discrimination.

There is no disputing the fact that since 2010 the coalition and then Conservative led governments have got more people into work; the evidence for their claim to have made work pay is much harder to find. In fact, their policies have contributed to the return of a growing cohort of the 'working poor ' for the first time in decades.

Calling for action to address the inequalities that are causing so much harm to the most vulnerable members of society is something that accords with the traditional role of the TUC. As is attempting to revive political activity in workplaces and marginalized communities.

Aspirations and achievements, however noble, are quite different things; the latter must climb the steep hill of real-life conditions and for reviving working class political power the omens are not propitious.

Working life is more frantic and fragmented than it was even a decade ago, people in short term insecure jobs don't put down roots long enough to learn the names of their co-workers, never mind develop a collective political consciousness. Unions, despite their best efforts to claim otherwise cast a much smaller shadow than they did in 1979, with many members seeing them more as an insurance policy than a political organization.

The biggest barrier though to rebuilding working class political consciousness is the all-pervasive grip of our consumer society. Even those who have the least capacity to do so are enlisted into a wild hunt after the brass ring of affluence.

The TUC deserve credit for trying to turn the tide of apathy and for seeking to place class discrimination alongside the other forms we have rightly learnt to abhor. They can't do so alone though; they need to operate within a political system that looks outwards to a society in which participants want to do good; not inwards to their own personal rivalries.