20 January 2007

Tory junk mail recycles council propaganda

You may have been unlucky enough to get a leaflet recently from Hammersmith & Fulham Conservatives. Of course you might have binned it immediately because it looks like a dodgy leaflet from a bank offering a rather shabby financial product with a picture of an unappealing fat man.

But for anyone who has seen Hammersmith & Fulham Council's website and other PR material, the photo on the front of the Tories' new leaflet has a familiar look to it. That's because the Tories have used council publicity for their own political purposes. This disgraceful and illegal use of council taxpayers' funds should be investigated now.

What the leaflet fails to mention is:

* the cuts being made by the council over the next three years amount to £14 million, £26 million and £34 million in successive years between 2007-8 and 2009-10
* the cuts will hit some of the most vulnerable people locally: the elderly and disabled, children and young people who rely on council services from home helps to libraries

It also fails to mention how cutting street cleaning by almost £1 million this year will deal with litter, graffiti and flytipping.

Amazingly, the leaflet repeats the Tories' ambition to cut council tax to Wandsworth levels but fails to say how they will do it. Cutting the council tax by less than 9% by 2010 is hardly going to deliver that election pledge - while Hammersmith & Fulham residents will have seen long valued services go to the wall.

1 comment:

MING said...

http://www.lbhf.gov.uk/Directory/Council_and_Democracy/

(copy and paste the URLs)


is where you can find council documents, if you want to know.

You can call the council secretariat, or the reference libraries to negotiate the above papers.