UK PM David Cameron’s mum and aunt sign petition to save children’s centres from closing down

UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s mum and aunt have signed a petition against government cuts to children’s centres. Mary Cameron and Clare Currie attempt to persuade the Conservative-led Oxfordshire County Council not to shut down 44 centres in the region.

In a bid to save £8 million (AU$16.3 million), the county council is closing down children’s centres as a result of local government cut by 40 percent. This led to campaigners to ask the Tory-run council to abandon the plan.

Currie is one of the campaigners who would protest outside the County Hall next week when councillors are expected to vote on the budget. She is a staunch supporter of the children’s centres and happens to be Cameron’s aunt. She also persuaded someone else in the family to join the fight, her sister Mary, Cameron’s mother.

“The centres are absolutely essential. All the research shows they make life for children very much better. It is a false economy to cut them and absolutely wrong,” Currie told the Oxford Mail. She believed, though, that her nephew also didn’t want to shut the centres down.

Currie, 78, also apparently asked her sister to join the campaign, which Mary did while visiting Oxfordshire.

“My name is on the petition but I don’t want to discuss this any further,” Mary told the Mirror about her involvement.

Save Oxfordshire’s Children’s Centres campaign leader Jill Huish asked Cameron to intervene, saying, “It shows how deep austerity is cutting our most vulnerable when even David Cameron’s mum had enough.”

In his capacity as MP for Witney, he wrote to the local authority to express his “disappointment” at the budget cuts for museums, libraries and care centres for the elderly. However, council leader Ian Hudspeth put the blame back to the central government, saying that the cuts resulted from the reductions of funds, BBC reports.

Meanwhile, Cameron has been accused of “buying off” Tory MPs who direct most of the £300 million (AU$616 million) relief fund to Conservative councils. His home county of Oxfordshire will get £9 million (AU$18.5 million) over the next two years, according to the Mirror.