Leicester’s assistant mayor for education and housing Cllr Elly Cutkelvin is a politician with an appetite for power. She is presently “campaigning” to be selected as the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Loughborough. But despite posing in her online electoral video waving a megaphone and boasting of her commitment to grassroots campaigning, the reverse is true. As in reality she inspires ordinary people to launch campaigns against her.
Her promo video shows her as a child in the warm embrace of her father, Leicester City Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby – a heritage which is highlighted when she says “I was born into an active Labour Party household”. And while she doesn’t mention her father’s name, she boasts that “After a career in hospitality management… I became a caseworker for an MP”. This is noteworthy because that MP was her father.
In fact, Cutkelvin became a councillor in 2011, which is the year that Sir Peter resigned from parliament to become Leicester’s City Mayor – an anti-democratic political position that needs to be abolished.
With no hint of irony Cutkelvin states: “I came into politics through grassroots community activism, empowering people to have a voice in their communities,” and she then goes on to boast of “transforming local special educational needs services”.
But we should remember that last year, as part of an ongoing review into cutting funding for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) services, Cutkelvin oversaw the cutting of funding from two SEND schools (Millgate and Keyham Lodge) against a huge tide of opposition from parents and children who participated in an official consultation and were then ignored.
During one council meeting that reviewed these cuts, Cutkelvin first cynically agreed with her critics that “families and the children should be at the centre of this consultation” before adding that the consultation is a “bit of a red herring”. She continued: “You should trust the experts on this, a parent will always say ‘my child needs more, my child deserves more,’ ‘my child needs more than that child over there’.”
If that wasn’t enough, Cutkelvin is now overseeing another controversial SEND consultation which aims to cut £450,000 from Ash Field Academy’s residential unit. Hence a trade union led campaign is opposing her, bringing parents, students and staff together in a genuine grassroots campaign to fight more SEND funding for all, while opposing the Labour Party’s plans to continue imposing Tory cuts in our city.
But thankfully, Cutkelvin doesn’t always get her way, and just last month we saw a successful grassroots campaign achieved a significant success against her careerism. In this case, campaigners from Enough is Enough (which includes myself) defeated Cutkelvin’s housing department’s attempts to impose a 70 per cent increase in energy bills for 2,500 council tenants on the city’s district heating system.
So, if you are not involved already, then please do get involved with the ongoing campaign to save Ash Field resi department from Cultkelvin’s careerist axe.
SIGN THE PETITION TO HELP SAVE ASH FIELD RESI FROM ELLY’S CAREERISM HERE: https://action.unison.org.uk/page/90942/petition/1?locale=en-GB
Thoughts of a Leicester Socialist 