Dave Bangs and Brighton Defend Council Housing's six year struggle against privatization was victorious in February's ballot, with a 77 per cent no vote against council housing sell off. This is the second DCH victory in Sussex this year, for Crawley tenants secured the withdrawal of the privatization proposal in January even before any ballot was held.
Our canvassers had to compete with a council campaign budgetted at over two million pounds, and full of the bribery of new bathrooms and kitchens. Minibuses of housing managers and other staff were out on the knocker to shoehorn tenants into a 'yes' vote.
DCH also had to contend with the opposition of a layer of tenant leaders who had been thoroughly incorporated in the Council's project. Though there are four full-time Council Tenant Participation Officers' there is no tenants federation and not even any city-wide tenant-only meetings.
UNISON's support has been crucial to our success, enabling us to produce and mail well designed broadsheets in the final year of the campaign, but the bulk of our activists were ordinary tenants, many not even active in their TA's.
This success, however, is only one of four successful antiprivatization campaigns in Brighton in the last 12 years. Selling off our countryside In 1994-5 'Keep Our Downs Public' won a sharp campaign to prevent Brighton Council selling off 10,000 acres of the beautiful Sussex Downs surrounding the town.
This was achieved in the face of the defeatism of all the big voluntary sector organizations, like the Wildlife Trust and the Ramblers Association. Our hastily formed coalition of urban wildlife and community activists fought back hard and forced the Labour leadership to acknowledge that the political cost of such a high-protile privatization was just too high.
A decade later productivist farming on the South Downs has collapsed, and eur victory is bearing some fruit, with a growing Council commitment to access, conservation and sustainable farming. This publicly-owned estate will be at the centre of the coming South Downs National Park. Revenues and Benefits campaign In early 1999 the council brought out proposals to hive off the payment of housing benefit and collection of council tax and business rates and merge them with those of three other coun cils.
The whole operation was to be run from an edge-of-city call centre. The notorious "outsourcing" firm Capita, was chosen, for whom the previous Council Leader, Steve "Lord" Bassam, had acted as a paid consultant.
UNISON started a vociferous rank and file campaign against the proposals. Capita's performance in other local authorities had been woeful and we made sure that local people knew it!
We produced a leaflet which was delivered to large areas of the town, and this included a tear-off reply slip for people to vote on the proposal. Local support was overwhelming. We picketed Council and Labour Group meetings, and built links with local claimants' organizations, thus making it much harder for the council to divide the service workers from the users.
By late summer 1999 the Council caved in and abandoned their plans.
Today many of the "whitecollar" services which have been privatised in many areas remain directly provided inhouse in Brighton - a testimony to our campaigning success. Privatised service back in-house In 2001 members of the other main Council union, GMB, won a major victory in getting the privatised refuse service back under Council control.
Brighton Council had awarded the contract to SITA, part of an Anglo-French conglomerate. SITA constantly changed routes and rotas in their attempts to make the contract pay, provoking constant short strikes and sit-ins as their demands on the workforce became more unreasonable.
Finally, in June, 13 workers were suspended for refusing to work new schedules and the rest of the workforce came out unofficially in support. All 240 were sacked by the company.
The workers then promptly occupied the main depot -before SITA could lock them out - and the cry went up, "Sack SITA".
After a few days of stand-off this is exactly what happened, when SITA walked away and the council, after some dithering, decided to bring the service back in-house. There was massive community support tor the occupation and the workers even ran an unofficial refuse service themselves.
The restored in-house service - Cityclean - is still operating, and the workforce have taken action on further occasions, when some of the old management tactics started to reappear.
The outcome of the 2001 dispute has been a strong confident workforce, with possibly the best terms and conditions of any similar service in the country.
Brighton's four antiprivatization successes have gained real strength from each other's examples. We are a long way from any alternative unified political project, but we have at least conserved a more favourable balance of forces than in many other parts of the country.