Politicians don’t speak out on parking levy

WHEN on March 13 the city council ended its second consultation on plans to tax 26,000 car drivers £550 a year to park at work, it knew the plans were deeply unpopular with the public.

And while councillors are still reflecting on how they might best ignore the mass opposition to the proposed workplace parking levy, they continue to use every opportunity to promote their regressive tax.

For example, on April 21 the council and bus companies launched their so-called Leicester Buses Partnership to make bus travel “good value”, whatever that means.

Other buzzwords thrown about included “frequent” and “reliable”, but what is clear is that in a city that already had a fleet of 413 buses the grand size of the new bus fleet in eight years’ time will be just 400.

With no hint of embarrassment, the information showing this reduction is even prominently featured on the Partnership’s new website, leicesterbuses.co.uk.

Leicester’s deputy city mayor for transport and the environment, Councillor Adam Clarke, used the recent launch event to say that the new toothless partnership with exploitative private sector profiteers “strengthens the case to generate locally the funding needed to sustain these improvements, which is why we are looking at schemes such as the workplace parking levy”.

On the other hand, most workers – including 5,000 NHS workers – who will being punished in the council’s salary-sacrifice scheme are not as excited as Coun Clarke and Sir Peter Soulsby at the prospect of paying private companies for the privilege

of seeing our city’s bus fleet reduced in size.

The same is true with the city’s trade union movement, which forms the backbone of the growing campaign to oppose the levy and to raise genuine socialist demands for addressing the growing capitalistdriven climate catastrophe that is engulfing our planet at our expense.

To date, only one local MP has come out publicly and visibly in support of the trade union-led opposition to Labour’s levy. And tragically, although some Labour councillors’ have made criticisms of the tax at internal Labour meetings and in emails to their constituents, so far, they have refused to show their disgust with the levy by helping organise the public resistance to this attack upon the working poor.

A first step in this regard might involve them and attending our next public meeting – at Secular Hall on Saturday, May 14 at 2pm – to which everyone is welcome.

Michael Barker, Campaign Against Leicester’s Workplace Parking Levy