Little London Community Day this Saturday

This Saturday, 10 June, between 12pm and 5pm, is Little London Community Day. It is a chance to celebrate the rich diversity and talents of the people who live here and begin a new effort to rebuild our much maligned community for the benefit of all. With the diastrous PFI regeneration scheme hanging over us, this year's community day will also have a deeply political feel to it.

The annual event is very much a grassroots community initiative. Organised by Community Action Little London and Servias (CALLS), a resident-led group with a full-time worker, Community Day began in April 2000 as part of the ‘Planning for Real’ process. This involved local people creating a 3-D model of the area, which we used to pinpoint problem areas and then suggest the priorities for action and the appropriate group to carry them out.

Six years on and almost everything demanded by the local community has been ignored by the local council. That's why Community Day is so important. It is about the community 'doing it for itself', bringing together local artists, musicians, poets, dancers and activists to put something on by ourselves for ourselves - which is why it is such a great day to be involved in.

This year's event has been many months in the making and features an extravaganza of home-grown talent. Musical performances on the Marquee Stage include drummers Leeds Silver Sparrow Steel Pans, the Salvation Army brass band, the Little London Community Primary School choir, the reggae beats of Unity Band, the African rhythms of Burkina Faso act Baba Kone and urban acts Cauz n Fx, DMW and C-AG. They will be joined by the poetic skills of Leeds Young Authors, the artistic wizardry of Little London Arts and the spectacular spins of anti-violence break dance crew, Breakers Unify. A prize for community heroes will be presented at the end of the day.

There will also be a variety of activities for all ages and the entire family, from crazy golf and face-painting to bingo and football flag making. Massage and fitness sessions will be on hand to counteract the waist-widening effects of the home-baked cake stalls. Plus workshops on mosaic-making, bongo-drumming, break dancing and mask making. And, just in case there is the odd football fan, the England-Paraguay match will be screened live in the Community Centre.

Save Little London Campaign will be at the heart of the Community Day. We'll have our own stall and tent - right next to our traitorous landlord, Leeds North West Homes! We've gone and raided the bank to print special T-shirts saying 'Stop PFI! Decent Homes for ALL', stickers and window posters for tenants to show how they feel. We've also produced our third newsletter, which you can download here. Right after the screening of the football, we're taking over the Little London Community Centre to show films on tenants resistance to housing privatisation.

Our aim is to talk to as many tenants and residents as possible, give them accurate information about the current stage of the PFI, listen to and respect their views and encourage more people to get involved in the campaign. Understandably people feel that there's nothing we can do anymore - the Council has made up its mind and if it hasn't listened for the past six years, it isn't going to start listening now. Our aim is to convince people that when they stand up to power, when they organise effectively, democratically and imaginatively, anything is possible.

We stopped the Transatlantic slave trade, we won the right to vote, we stopped Hitler, we won the welfare state and the right to social housing, we stopped the Poll Tax...the list is endless. In the past few years, tenants up and down the country have defeated their Councils' attempts to privatise their council homes - in Waveney, Cannock Chase, Selby, Mid Devon, Sedgefield, Ellesmere Port & Neston, Kingston, Wrexham, Aberdeen, Birmingham, Dudley, Camden, Southwark and so on. All have voted NO to privatisation!

PFI is back-door privatisation - it means that instead of the Council or ALMO running your homes, a private company does for 25-25 years. Instead of rents and council tax being re-invested in council homes, they are used to pay greedy shareholders fat profits. PFI in Little London also means the direct sale of three tower blocks of flats to a private developer. This the worst form of stock transfer - instead of being the tenant of a private landlord, tenants are simply forced to move out of their homes and into a new council housing somewhere else. In Leeds, there is a huge demand for such housing, yet the Council is cutting its housing stock by 10,000 over the next few years.