It is anticipated that Nottingham County Council will approve significant budget cuts on Monday, which will severely impair public services around the city.
A petition with 11,000 signatures from Nottingham citizens has been brought to Downing Street, urging the government to raise funding. On Friday, members from the community delivered the petition.
The cuts include a complete elimination of public funding for cultural institutions including theatres, museums, and galleries; these cuts are consistent with councils all throughout the UK cutting their arts budgets by the same amount. Campaigners claim that it also comes after ten years of inadequate funding from the federal government, which led to the decline of public services.
The CEO of Nottingham Counselling Services, Shoana Qureshi-Khan, was among those who presented the petition on Friday. She has witnessed employees taking wage reductions in tandem with a sharp rise in volunteer work, all while attempting to support individuals grappling with mental health issues that are frequently brought on by or made worse by budget cuts in other domains. She makes the argument that additional cuts will ultimately result in higher costs since other services will have to bear the brunt of more people experiencing unavoidable crisis circumstances.
Reduced street maintenance results in more potholes, which raise the risk of accidents. Although there are theoretically savings to one department, the higher expenses to other departments are not justified in the big picture.
Many members of the group serve the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in our society through their work in the charitable sector. Communities will suffer an upsurge in crime, homelessness, drug misuse, and suicide as a result of the inevitable closures brought on by budget cuts.
The founder of the organisation Shifting Your Mindset, Mutsa Makaka, questions what the community is doing when we can’t even guarantee that everyone has a hot meal every day in a supposedly wealthy nation.
The petition was started by the recently formed Resolve Nottingham, a campaign group that believes that the best course of action is to oppose top-down government that ignores the demands of the community. They wish to collaborate with the neighbourhood to strengthen decentralised democracy and decision-making. We’re beginning to notice a trend in the UK as more and more individuals shun traditional party politics in the wake of an upcoming election that provides no meaningful answers to the very real problems that communities are confronting.
Leave a Reply