Fisking Tory council cuts

By Tom Miller

A while back, Camden Labour Councillor Theo Blackwell gave his take on the devastation exacted upon many areas by Tory cut and run merchants in local government. I’m rather glad that people like Theo are about to shine a light on exactly what goes on.

But the Tories hardly make it easier for themselves. A couple of weeks bad, Tory journalist and Councillor Harry Phibbs added to our knowledge about Tory cuts with a wonderful Conservative Home list, which Sir Jeremy Beecham then took on here on LabourList. I completely agree with his criticisms. Many of the cuts to services and staffing laid out by Phibbs in his helpful document would affect citizens profoundly. There is as one would expect, no costing of any of the damage that the cuts might do to citizens and communities. But at least it gives us an advanced taste of the spiteful and chaotic thinking we can expect if our local authorities go Conservative this year, and is even more representative of what might happen if, heaven forbid, we get a Tory government which supports its minions in their infantile execution of slash and burn politics.

But the problems with the list aren’t just in the damage they’d do. I don’t mean to come accross as facetious, but many of the cuts listed are are replicated, or could easily be listed under the same headings. Not only are the tories as nasty as ever, they also lack the imagination to do that with any degree of thoroughness.

As Sir Jeremy said in his piece, some of them identify things which any local authority would commit to, effectively making points along the lines of ‘save money’ and ‘don’t spend it on chocolate teapots’. In this sense, the problem is that some of the proposals are too agreeable to be meaningfully called Conservative; but they do imply, ridiculously, that people such as mysef think that council budgets should be spent on conveners. Conveners for things.

Many of the proposals display a rather petty stinginess which one imagines would have little effect in terms of savings to the taxpayer. Occasionally, there is an absolutely comedic little gem, for example the abstract accusation that non-conservative councils fund racial seperatism.

Anyway, having undergone the agony of reading them, I decided to take a lighthearted look at some of the proposals, which you can read here.