IT’S PAYBACK TIME..

VOTERS hammering the Tories in Thursday’s English council elections will be payback, as the Conservatives are hammering local authorities.

Town halls bear the brunt of deformed austerity when £16billion cuts since 2010 sees central government steal 60p of every £1 provided for community services.

The figures compiled by Labour’s persuasive Andrew Gwynne, right, are eye-watering when every swiped Tory penny is money grabbed from your schools, streets, parks, social services, public transport, council housing, job creation, libraries, bin collections and countless other initiatives to improve life for the majority of us.

Experts calculate the Tories could lose up to 1,000 council seats this week in the English elections outside London with Libs likely to be the biggest gainers in rural areas, Labour doing well if it wins 300.

So don’t get mad, get even. These elections are bigger than Brexit. In a rebuke to ministers, top

» cops with the College of Policing warn that prison doesn’t work for young knife offenders, while indiscriminate stop-andsearch creates long-term problems. With a separate Derby University study finding that crime was fuelled when Thatcher destroyed industrial communities in the 1980s, the answers are economic and social. Austerity Tories are incapable of being tough on the real causes of crime when their dangerous cuts are inflicting deep wounds. P&O now suing the Government after a

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£33million Eurotunnel payout leaves Chris “Failing” Grayling’s sunk £13.8million shipless ferry contract an increasingly expensive disaster. No wonder a Tory MP whispered to me that every time the Transport Secretary flop leaves home, a Surrey village must be missing an idiot.