Consider the human consequences of cuts
Presumably our councillors’ overspend went on such dubious essentials as: roadside electronic propaganda boards; dysfunctional state-of-the-art car park meters; and sophisticated library laser printers many of us can ill afford to avail ourselves of.
In all cases technology firms were enriched by the public purse, and we are all free to make our own deductions as to what may or may not have transpired in secret conclave.
I am led to believe that here in one of the most affluent boroughs of one of the most affluent of nations there are a higher number of multi-millionaires than elsewhere.
Were all 250 or so of them magnanimous enough to donate, the budget would balance.
And now to proposed library cuts. In decades past office staff in general here in Britain enjoyed a predictable and humanely managed 37.5 hour working week with a leisurely morning and afternoon tea break and a paid lunch hour: not a lunch half hour and certainly not a lunch grab a sandwich at your desk.
The hourly overtime rate was time-and-ahalf for weekdays and Saturdays, with double time for those precious Sundays and Bank Holidays.
Part-time work favoured by busy mothers, students and pensioners was the only form of so-called zero hour contract we gave our blessings to.
The ever advancing worldwide and sociopathic trend slowly and insidiously degrading and hollowing out our public institutions must be called out for what it is: a kind of corporate-minded fascism and social menace of the first magnitude.
Rapaciously penetrating every nook and cranny of human endeavour as it seeks to reduce everything to the materialistic terms of profit and loss, sparing no thought for the human consequence and locked in an unholy alliance with AI and the surreptitious evangelists of financialisation, it must be resisted every step of the way.
Come on old England, stir thee from thy slumber and make again a merry land we can all learn to share and love again with a clear conscience and an unclouded brow. BEVIS BEAUVAIS The Green
Horton