Absolutely true that this isn’t covered enough - the cuts were massive. They’ve also only been topped up by increases to regressive council tax, so it’s yet another way the Tories are worsening inequality through tax.
But the important question at the end - what the next, presumably Labour, government will do about it - seems unanswerable. It’s not just that Labour are now allergic to saying they’ll spend money. It’s also that paying debt interest is now a significant expense due to higher interest rates and our economy is barely growing, so taking on government debt no longer makes financial sense.
The Tories have done the opposite of fixing the roof while the sun was shining - they neither reduced public sector debt nor did they reinforce our services by investing cheap money into them. Now we’re left with the consequences and I don’t see how anyone can fix it.
Our local council will probably be one of those. They spent the last decade investing in:
- A failed concert arena.
- A failed energy company.
- Another failed concert arena.
- A city poet.
Obviously the Tories forced them to do this by cutting their budget or something 🤷. Whilst simultaneously:
- Not building enough social housing.
- Not doing basic checks on existing council structures.
- Closing libraries.
- Shutting down public toilets.
- Reducing bin services.
- Having public fights with the region’s mayor (they both belong to the same party funnily enough).
- Literally banning local democracy news reporters from council meetings for asking “the wrong sort of questions”.
For sure the Tories are to blame for a lot of stuff, but there’s a huge arrogance in a lot of councils that are quite frankly shite at their jobs but in it purely for the payday. Everyone else be damned. We’ll have to pick up the pieces just like we did the bankers, and just like the bankers they’ll get away with it.
Councils were strongly encouraged to borrow money to invest, with the strong hint to them that investments that returned profit would be able to replace government shortfalls.
Some councils did it because they were backed into a corner, others were led by impossibly shit idiots.But the outcome is, a large number of those investments did not pay off, and those councils are now faced with failed investments, the bill, and still not having enough because of the cuts.
There is a growing a problem with awareness and accountability of local governance, and I think a lot of it has been caused by the decline of local journalism. Local residents now have little to no real knowledge of what is happening in local councils, at every level, because there is so few places it is reported. An uninformed electrocute can’t make informed decisions at local elections, and a such the rot begins to set in.
My own area used to have multiple local newspapers, magazines and radio stations. Now there is only one paper standing, and a couple of “zombie” outlets bought out by media megacorps that are technically still standing but outputting nothing but advertising and syndicated fluff pieces with no local connection.
The BBC are continuing to make cuts to their own local news coverage also which will only worsen the problem.
Hanlon’s razor says not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explain by stupidity.
That is getting harder and harder to do for the British government.
I feel like Hanlons razor misses the “why not both” option.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And all around us, a familiar disaster grinds on: constant increases in demand on our most crucial public services, which the financially blitzed councils charged with providing them simply cannot meet.
The result is a story that speaks volumes about Westminster’s state of contorted denial: increasing numbers of our cities, towns and counties now face municipal bankruptcy, but no one in any position of national power and influence seems to want to talk about it.
The dire predicament of councils all over England now invites an obvious question: at what point might we collectively realise that hundreds of local crises now add up to a national catastrophe?
The proof arrived when Nottingham city council hit the skids amid talk of a grimly familiar gap between local revenues and the sheer cost of constantly trying to patch up our fraying social fabric.
After long years of endless savings, cuts now automatically entail no end of cruelties, which is why the new Labour leader of Stoke city council has been talking about “unpalatable decisions that will hurt our sense of what is right and wrong”.
This is why the neglect of councils’ predicament by both the media and Westminster politicians leaves a huge part of our national condition unreported: if you want to understand why so many voters feel exhausted and jaded, this is a significant reason.
The original article contains 1,123 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
