Possibly because of its straddling both a national and local focus, the anti-cuts movement seems to have rather got the hang of map making. Here I’ve brought together a collection of the best maps from the anti cuts movement.
To start with, excellent website False Economy has a rather basic map of the country that sorts news stories and testimonies about local cuts by their region.
A few local groups have produced regional maps of where cuts to arts and culture are going to fall. Areas covered so far include Wales and Manchester. There may well be more.
Someone has taken data from the Public Libraries News blog and produced an excellent Google Maps mash-up that illustrates the scale and breadth of library shut downs across the country. Unhappily, each pin does not represent a single closed library, but often an entire cluster of closures in a town.
Meanwhile, the Manchester Evening News has interactive and non-interactive versions of a map which shows where the coalition’s cuts to council budgets and services will mainly fall.
Back in August the Daily Mirror mapped out the coalition’s cuts to the Building Schools For the Future programme, and sorted the cuts by area. It found that the cuts disproportionately fell in Labour constituencies.
And finally, Homeless charity Shelter has produced a map that shows the startling effect of the coalition’s brutal cuts to housing benefit on different areas of the country.
Pissed off? Thankfully, anticuts.org.uk has drawn up another great Google Maps project – that will show you your local anti-cuts group.
