However, all is not well. BADACA meets monthly but the meetings are getting smaller and smaller with the same crowd of predominently old men. It is a pity that so few go to meetings because the discussion is usually good - practical, informative and about what to do. I am 64. There is something wrong when someone as old as me has a prominent position in a campaigning organisation. BADACA has a Steering Committee supposedly made up of delegates from its 30-odd affiliated trade union branches and community groups but the delegates do not come so it is the same group as attends the Open Meetings and (more or less) the Organising Committee, which was supposed to organise things but has become an executive of men available during the day. Very few of BADACA's core activists genuinely represent a viable trade uinion or community organisation to whom they are answerable.

Then there are the trots. A weapon used against BADACA is that it is a "trot front" dominated by members of the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party. To a certain extent it is, but in their defense it is not their fault. They have not deliberately manouvered their way into control and, as they cancel each other out, they do not really have control. They have filled a vacuum because, at the end of the day, they are the ones prepared to do the work.

It cannot go on. There is no end to austerity; the cuts are getting worse; even if Mayor Ferguson wanted to, there is little he can do to protect Bristol from the Government's onslaught. Aside from the bedroom tax, the most pressing issue is the sell-off of the NHS. How many Bristolians know that if they call for an ambulance it will be provided by National Car Parks (possibly with a ticket machine inside it)? Weston-super-Mare Hospital is being flogged off and its A&E closed; billions are being drained from the service to private business, all backed up by a media campaign to destroy public confidence. It is no good waiting for the next Labour Government; there may not be one in 2015 and if there is, little will change. We must revive the anti-cuts campaign in Bristol which started so well three years ago with big meetings and demos of 2000 or more.

The question is, how? There are hundreds, nay thousands of Bristolians aganist the cuts. The problem is that hardly anyone will do anything. Over 300 people came to the People's Assembly a few weeks ago but few of them turned up to the bedroom tax demo a few days later. The People's Assembly may inspire more people into activity but what it will actually do in Bristol is not clear and neither is its relationship with BADACA.

To succeed, BADACA needs to go back to its representative base a large part of which is local trade union branches and workplaces. You may scoff at the unions but in the Bristol area we have a network of tens of thousands. The NUT can distribute material on the NHS to its 5000 local members and other unions can distribute stuff on what is happening to schools. The emphasis has to be on winning the arguments: cuts are not inevitable; we don't have to "make sacrifices"; public is good and private bad; it is the fault of greedy bankers, not immigrants and "scroungers". At the moment, we are losing. I believe that BADACA has to be much looser - a genuinely representative federation of different organisations and campaigns supporting each other. Imagine the effect if we could mobilise a 100 or more people to be in Broadmead every Saturday for two months, in local shopping centres, outside hospitals and health centres with imaginative and accessible material and stunts to explain the consequences of what is happening to the NHS.

BADACA has to give itself a kick up the backside and get back its old spirit but so does the Bristol left. Just because you are a "Friend" of an anti-cuts Facebook page or follow the right blogs doesn't mean you are actually doing anything. We need a discussion on where we are going and all contributions are welcome.