Yet another Tory imposed catastrophe

AS a Green Party outsider to the new Somerset Council’s May 5 election dog-fight between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, I would like to put straight wrongful accusations about County Council excessive spending and non-delivery of council services, past and present.

I’m helped by my regular showing at full council meetings asking ‘public questions’, especially the annual budget meeting of February 23. I put questions about the council’s debt situation and non-delivery of services in terms of deliberate and severe year-on-year cuts from 2010’s Tory government’s national election, preceded by Tory takeover of County Council in 2009.

This period was of Tory austerity against our public services in general, but especially our treasured NHS and local councils, the latter by systematic withdrawal of the Westminster Revenue Support

Grant, which used to make up some two-thirds of annual council spending, now reduced to near zero and partly replaced by scurrilous use of grants from Westminster via Tory ‘bidding procedures’, allowing for corrupt steering of public funds into local Tory councillors’ and MPs’ pet projects.

Tory national and local propaganda is second to none in repetition of arrogant brain-washing themes of being the only party of ‘business efficiency’ able to ‘deliver vital services’, giving ‘more for less’. All this, despite annual hikes in unfair council tax (unrelated to incomes) and the Tory-created financial and staffing disaster of the recent Taunton Deane-West Somerset merger proving that

‘bigger is not better – neither economically nor democratically – plus the fact that 65% of us, in an official ballot, voted for ‘two unitaries’, not One Somerset.

Abolition of our popular district councils, trying to replace them with nebulous LCNs and one overall council, covering a vast area with only half as many councillors, looks like yet another Tory-imposed catastrophe. When Lib Dems last ruled the county, there was debt totalling £324 million financed by interest payments of £42,000 per day, but nothing for Tories to crow about when, under their present rule, debt is the same £324 million with interest at £41,460 a day.

Another question of mine not answered was: when are our arrogant Tory ‘fantastic deliverers of public services at turbo-charged, levelling-up efficiency’ going to restore all the plethora of services and staff they cut in their austerity hey-days? If not, could they please go and ‘die in the same ditch’ that buffoon Boris did in October 2019: now May 2022?

Alan Debenham Taunton, Somerset