JUSTIN DUNN’S ROOM 101 SPEND SPEND SPEND!
WHAT’S ANNOYING HIM THIS WEEK? Councils love to waste other people’s money
OTHER people’s money is always the easiest to spend.
Up and down the country, local councils are going bust as mad councillors sign up to what they think are eye-catching schemes in the hope the public will vote for them in return.
Where I live, the latest fad – climate change – has offered all manner of opportunities for the good town hall burghers to dream up utter nonsense.
First they stopped mowing the grass verges in the name of “rewilding”. By which they really mean “saving money”.
Then they decided to stop looking after one of our most magnificent beaches in the name of saving us from the “climate crisis”.
Yes, they have actually had the brass necks to call it that.
What they really meant by that, by the way, is “because you lot around here vote the wrong way”.
Doomed
And now they want to build a £1million-plus flood defence wall along one of our promenades to stop the projected tidal waves of the future.
The wall will only be four feet high, mind, with enough chance of stopping a tidal surge as I have of copping off with Emily Ratajkowski.
But who cares? It’s other people’s money. Might as well go for it.
Never mind that the council has been told to sell off leisure centres, golf clubs and libraries, and flog two historic town hall buildings to raise cash.
And never mind that they’ve decided they’re all hi-falutin’ business people now, snapping up a cinema (yes) and a former town centre House of Fraser department store (yes again).
This is so they can try once again to do what they have been doing for decades now, which is “regeneration” of a place that is permanently doomed to failure.
Einstein said the very definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.
Yet that’s exactly what councillors will do with other people’s money, because they can’t think of anything original themselves.
Councils are all largely skint, so what to do? Yes! Let’s spend even more! And how do they propose to do that, exactly? By banging up our council taxes. That’s on top of National Insurance going up, along with other sneaky tax rises introduced at Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s last Budget a couple of weeks ago.
And all of that comes before energy bills rocket and the predicted rise in inflation next year, which is only around the corner after all, to a whopping 5%.
To rich people and those with savings, that is good news.
But as most of us aren’t rich and don’t have savings, it’s very bad news as it means bills for just about everything will go up. Simple, say the politicians. We’ll just spend even more on shiny, stupid things and hope you don’t notice until the next lot get voted in, whoever they are. And on and on it goes. We’re bankrupt, folks. And the sooner the wonks who call themselves politicians admit it, it’ll only get worse.