By Giuseppe De Santis-Nationalists may remember how during the Barking & Dagenham's electoral campaign in 2010, Anti-fascist groups sent plenty of activists to distribute papers to every house, explaining how the British National Party would damage the council and make life a misery for residents.

One of the lies spread in that campaign was that the British National Party would sack hundreds of council workers.

It's interesting how only two years later, Labour councillors have sacked more workers than the British National Party would have, but they did so without cutting wasteful expenditure.

A few weeks ago the Barking and Dagenham Post reported how Barking & Dagenham council slashed staff by more than 10%: in fact it has now 969 fewer staff less than it had at the begin of 2010, a drop of 11.6% which is higher than London average of 8.4%.

In the first quarter of 2010 the council employed 8,318 in full and part-time positions, while now the number of workers is 7,349.
As expected, both unions and the Dagenham Post blame the coalition for those cuts in the workforce even if the reality is different.

Even if the cuts imposed by the coalition affected the council's finances, the truth is that plenty of money is still wasted on useless projects, executive’s salaries, and other activities that bring no benefits to residents.

Why do the council still keep spending £350,000 a year to publish council newspapers?

And how much it spent in the last financial year in legal services, external consultants, agency staff workers and interpreters and translations?
And why it doesn't reduce the salaries of the council top executives?

In this regard the council made a first step to share a council executive with Thurrock, but so far it hasn’t said how much it plans to save, and there are no signs that the salaries of other executives will be reduced.

For Labour councillors to blame the coalition is a convenient excuse to conceal their own wrongdoing and refuse to tackle wasteful expenditure, but if they think they can convince people with their lies they are wrong, as we will be out to tell the truth.

In the meantime it would be interesting to know what Anti-fascists have to say about this reduction if the workforce knows they cannot blame us for that.