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One by one, England’s councils are going bankrupt – and nobody in Westminster wants to talk about it
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
And all around us, a familiar disaster grinds on: constant increases in demand on our most crucial public services, which the financially blitzed councils charged with providing them simply cannot meet.
The result is a story that speaks volumes about Westminster’s state of contorted denial: increasing numbers of our cities, towns and counties now face municipal bankruptcy, but no one in any position of national power and influence seems to want to talk about it.
The dire predicament of councils all over England now invites an obvious question: at what point might we collectively realise that hundreds of local crises now add up to a national catastrophe?
The proof arrived when Nottingham city council hit the skids amid talk of a grimly familiar gap between local revenues and the sheer cost of constantly trying to patch up our fraying social fabric.
After long years of endless savings, cuts now automatically entail no end of cruelties, which is why the new Labour leader of Stoke city council has been talking about “unpalatable decisions that will hurt our sense of what is right and wrong”.
This is why the neglect of councils’ predicament by both the media and Westminster politicians leaves a huge part of our national condition unreported: if you want to understand why so many voters feel exhausted and jaded, this is a significant reason.
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