Re: LAs : Financial Meltdown - Nationwide / Support Services CUTS
Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:43 pm
Yep ... time for the LAs' own Oliver to make an appearance with his begging bowl ... after 3 days in the queue ?
Perhaps a mobile soup kitchen outside Nos. 10 & 11 to look after all the Olivers in the queue ?
When council leaders petition No 10 to end austerity, things are bad.
Labour councils have had enough. As another round of devastating cuts looms, the leader of Newcastle council has gone to the source.
With the budget barely more than a week away, the queue of desperate petitioners would stretch down Whitehall, far out of sight. If austerity is over, who’s first in line? In the battle of crises, whose need is greatest?
This morning an actual petition was handed into No 10 by one sector among those that have suffered the worst in the great state shrinkage of the last eight years – local government.
Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle city council, handed in a plea signed by all Labour local government leaders to stop the next round of cuts – a further £1.3bn due to be lopped off in April. If that axe falls again, Theresa May’s “austerity is over” conference message will be exposed as pure deceit.
Though Tory county councils have made the headlines, with Northamptonshire bankruptcy crisis and others, such as Somerset and East Sussex, teetering on the brink of going bust, it has been Labour’s northern metropolitan areas that have taken the biggest hit. Right from the start, Liverpool was cut deepest, Dorset least.
Forbes says the Labour towns and cities had to tighten a tourniquet round their spending from year one, while the county councils drifted along and have only now hit a brick wall. “We’ve already been through the pain barrier. Now it’s hitting them, and they’re not prepared, after all these years of boasting that they froze their council tax rates,” he says.
Perhaps a mobile soup kitchen outside Nos. 10 & 11 to look after all the Olivers in the queue ?