The first meeting of the Southport Anti Cuts Coalition will be on 10th January 2011 at The Windmill pub on Seabank Road Southport at 8pm. Please e-mail if your organisation would like to send a representative : Southportanticuts@hotmail.co.uk
Feel free to turn up on the night. Individuals concerned about cuts are welcome as are representatives of any and all political parties, unions and local or national businesses. In the meantime it would be great if people could e-mail me their stories about any cuts to public services, institutions, welfare etc which have already occurred and are occurring now. If I want to publish them on the blog I will contact you first but it will be useful for setting the agenda for the first meeting.
The intention is not to interfere with any work any other organisations are doing but to help unify various groups so efforts can be organised and unified rather than separate and divisive. Just knowing what other people are doing can be helpful but currently there is no umbrella organisation which acts in this way in southport.
I'll put up details of the Agenda and attendance as and when I get them. The first suggestion is local opposition to the closing of the botanic gardens nursery - what are people doing, what has been done and what needs to be done?
Also, and perhaps more broadly, I am inviting local headteachers to come to this first meeting to speak a little about how their school will be affected by government cuts. I think the botanic gardens museum closure ties in with this since it is used by the schools as a teaching aid and demonstrates well how it is not just cuts to school budgets which affect education.
Hopefully there will be at least one doctor to speak about the nhs too.
We need to build on the petitions that have already gained lots of signatures... a protest at the council offices? How would we reach/mobilise people who have signed the petition? We need the Visiter to cover any protest we make too.
ReplyDeleteYes, we need to find the organisers of the petitions. Do you know of any? Petitions sometimes have address or email details. Do you have any contacts at the visiter - could you email anything to me?
ReplyDeleteOne of my friends on FB is going to send me a petition so hopefully it will have some details on. Is it the Southport Party? Might be worth contacting them. I don't get the Visiter but if you let me know who wrote the article about the closure in last week's paper I can contact him/her and get a dialogue going. There's not much about it that I can see on the website but I'll have another look.
ReplyDeleteIt was John siddle who wrote the article on 24th November.
ReplyDeleteHiya Kat it's Ant.
ReplyDeleteJust looked at my rota and am off on 10th Jan so will be able to come to the meeting. Can speak then about the NHS if you wish?
That'd be great ant, yeah - cheers!
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