The letters were sent in September, but came to light only on Friday, when they were revealed by the Oxford Mail. The national media has been remarkably slow to pick the story up, given the insight it offers into the prime minister’s detachment from the consequences of his actions.

Cameron complains that he is “disappointed” by the council’s proposals “to make significant cuts to frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums. This is in addition to the unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children’s centres across the county.” Why, he asks, has Oxfordshire not focused instead on “making back-office savings”? Why hasn’t it sold off its surplus property? After all, there has been only “a slight fall in government grants in cash terms”. Couldn’t the county “generate savings in a more creative manner”?

Explaining the issue gently, as if to a slow learner, the council leader, Ian Hudspeth, points out that the council has already culled its back-office functions, slashing 40% of its most senior staff and 2,800 jobs in total, with the result that it now spends less on these roles than most other counties. He explains that he has already flogged all the property he can lay hands on, but would like to remind the prime minister that using the income from these sales to pay for the council’s running costs “is neither legal, nor sustainable in the long-term since they are one-off receipts”.

As for Cameron’s claim about government grants, Hudspeth comments: “I cannot accept your description of a drop in funding of £72m or 37% as a ‘slight fall’.”

Again and again, he exposes the figures the prime minister uses as wildly wrong. For example, Cameron claims that the cumulative cuts in the county since 2010 amount to £204m. But that is not the cumulative figure; it is the annual figure. Since 2010, the county has had to save £626m. It has done so while taking on new responsibilities, and while the population of elderly people and the numbers of children in the social care system have boomed. Now there is nothing left to cut except frontline services.

… It’s worth remembering that Oxfordshire, which is run by Conservatives, is among the wealthiest counties in England, with the nation’s lowest level of unemployment. In common with every aspect of austerity, the cuts have fallen hardest on those least able to weather them: local authorities in the most deprived parts of the country.

As a report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation discovered, the cuts in some areas are so extreme that local authority provision is now being reduced to little more than social care, child protection and other core services, while the budgets for libraries, museums, galleries, sports facilities, small parks and playgrounds, children’s centres, youth clubs, after-school and holiday clubs, planning and environmental quality have already been slashed to the point at which these can barely function.

In July, the Financial Times revealed that the funding for children’s centres across England has been cut by 28% in just three years: is Cameron unaware of this? As for public protection, it is all but gone. Visits to workplaces by health and safety inspectors have fallen by 91% in four years, and have been abandoned altogether by 53 local authorities. If you want to endanger your workers, don’t mind us. You begin to see how the government’s agendas mesh.

Now, as there is nothing else left to cut, the attack turns to social care, with untold consequences for children, the elderly and people who have mental health problems.

And we are only halfway through the government’s elective, unwarranted austerity programme. The spending review this month will demand even greater cuts from budgets that have already been comprehensively fleeced. How will this be possible without dismantling the basic functions of the state?

The government justifies its austerity programme on the grounds of responsibility: people must take responsibility for their own lives, rather than relying on the state; local authorities must take responsibility for their spending. But, as Cameron’s letter shows, he takes no responsibility for his own policies. Like pain, responsibility is to be applied selectively.”

George Monbiot

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/11/david-cameron-letter-cuts-oxfordshire

And, while the simplistic Left like to blame it all on ‘Tory cuts’, these citizens know it’s not all about budgets. Instead, it’s about the fashionable causes and warped priorities of a richly rewarded managerial elite versus the expectations of the people they serve.

For example, the public hear the Chief Constable of Surrey saying that her officers may no longer bother chasing car thieves or those who drive away from petrol stations without paying.

They hear the Police Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall say officers may no longer bother investigating some suicides or those who do a runner from a restaurant (in an area dependent on tourism).

They hear the Police Commissioner for Bedfordshire saying — as he did this week — that motorway speed cameras might be recalibrated to extract fines from the tiniest infractions (with no mention of ‘road safety’).

Yet they also know there are plenty of police available to swoop on pensioners who remonstrate with feral youths, or to take sneak photos of celebrities from helicopters, or to round up journalists who talk to whistleblowers and so on. And sympathy is in short supply.

If Frinton was very multi-cultural or very troublesome, there might be grants and pilot schemes and shiny new infrastructure. But it is not.
This is forgotten England: one of those unglamorous, unsexy back-waters where nothing much happens and things just slowly become more and more rubbish every day.

The local GP surgery, for instance, once a partnership of doctors who tended families from cradle to grave, reached crisis point last year after the last permanent GP departed. Patients had to queue round the block at dawn to see a ‘locum’ doctor.

‘It was dreadful,’ says Tony Comber, chairman of the surgery’s patient participation group. ‘If you did manage to get in, these locums would just keep repeating, “You’ve only got ten minutes”, even when my wife was having an epileptic fit right there.’

The surgery has been taken over, in the short-term, by a local employee-owned healthcare provider, with three doctors hired until March and locums filling any gaps. But elderly patients, often with complex problems, yearn for someone who knows their medical needs.

It will be a familiar story to millions, of course, but it simply compounds the sense of neglect in end-of-the-line places such as Frinton.

While other parts of the country look forward to expensive new railways or chunks of motorway, there’s nothing new heading in this direction. No one has mentioned an ‘Eastern powerhouse’.

The street lights go out between midnight and 5am to help the county council save money. The schools are overcrowded.

At the same time, central government is planning 10,000 new homes for the district, with no obvious employment for all the new arrivals, let alone extra health workers or schools.

I meet local councillors Jeff Bray and Richard Everett — both members of the Ukip opposition on the Tory-controlled district council — who say that Whitehall is clueless about the impact it will have.
Mr Bray represents a ward where an outlying village Many people all over the country feel not merely neglected but abandoned by central government. They pay their taxes, as they have always done, but the services which they expect in return — be it health, education or policing — are now in steep decline.
And, while the simplistic Left like to blame it all on ‘Tory cuts’, these citizens know it’s not all about budgets. Instead, it’s about the fashionable causes and warped priorities of a richly rewarded managerial elite versus the expectations of the people they serve.
For example, the public hear the Chief Constable of Surrey saying that her officers may no longer bother chasing car thieves or those who drive away from petrol stations without paying.
They hear the Police Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall say officers may no longer bother investigating some suicides or those who do a runner from a restaurant (in an area dependent on tourism).
They hear the Police Commissioner for Bedfordshire saying — as he did this week — that motorway speed cameras might be recalibrated to extract fines from the tiniest infractions (with no mention of ‘road safety’).

Yet they also know there are plenty of police available to swoop on pensioners who remonstrate with feral youths, or to take sneak photos of celebrities from helicopters, or to round up journalists who talk to whistleblowers and so on. And sympathy is in short supply.
If Frinton was very multi-cultural or very troublesome, there might be grants and pilot schemes and shiny new infrastructure. But it is not.
This is forgotten England: one of those unglamorous, unsexy back-waters where nothing much happens and things just slowly become more and more rubbish every day.
The local GP surgery, for instance, once a partnership of doctors who tended families from cradle to grave, reached crisis point last year after the last permanent GP departed. Patients had to queue round the block at dawn to see a ‘locum’ doctor.
‘It was dreadful,’ says Tony Comber, chairman of the surgery’s patient participation group. ‘If you did manage to get in, these locums would just keep repeating, “You’ve only got ten minutes”, even when my wife was having an epileptic fit right there.’
The surgery has been taken over, in the short-term, by a local employee-owned healthcare provider, with three doctors hired until March and locums filling any gaps. But elderly patients, often with complex problems, yearn for someone who knows their medical needs.
It will be a familiar story to millions, of course, but it simply compounds the sense of neglect in end-of-the-line places such as Frinton.

While other parts of the country look forward to expensive new railways or chunks of motorway, there’s nothing new heading in this direction. No one has mentioned an ‘Eastern powerhouse’. The street lights go out between midnight and 5am to help the county council save money. The schools are overcrowded. At the same time, central government is planning 10,000 new homes for the district, with no obvious employment for all the new arrivals, let alone extra health workers or schools.

I meet local councillors Jeff Bray and Richard Everett — both members of the Ukip opposition on the Tory-controlled district council — who say that Whitehall is clueless about the impact it will have. Mr Bray represents a ward where an outlying village of 750 homes is on course to absorb 1,000 new ones. ‘Where is the infrastructure and who will live in these houses if there isn’t the work here?’ he asks.

To cap it all, local policing is shortly to go through the wringer.
Faced with making £63 million of savings over the next five years, Essex Police is about to cut 15 of its 25 walk-in stations and shed 190 of its 250 police community support officers (PCSOs). The nearest police base to Frinton-on-Sea, in neighbouring Walton, is to be sold.

Morale is nose-diving. While the national average for sick days has fallen to four per year, the rate among Essex Police officers has risen to 13. Among PCSOs it’s 17.5. By the standards of any organisation, it’s a scandal.
‘This is the England that the politicians take for granted,’ says local MP Douglas Carswell, who defected to Ukip from the Tories and is his party’s only MP.

‘These are people who have paid into the system all their lives. Now they find themselves let down by the sheer incompetence of the state and by a political class cocooned in another world, spouting figures handed to them by civil servants. …”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3307955/Forced-hire-police-town-old-white-politicians-care-about.htmlof 750 homes is on course to absorb 1,000 new ones. ‘Where is the infrastructure and who will live in these houses if there isn’t the work here?’ he asks.
To cap it all, local policing is shortly to go through the wringer.
Faced with making £63 million of savings over the next five years, Essex Police is about to cut 15 of its 25 walk-in stations and shed 190 of its 250 police community support officers (PCSOs). The nearest police base to Frinton-on-Sea, in neighbouring Walton, is to be sold.
Morale is nose-diving. While the national average for sick days has fallen to four per year, the rate among Essex Police officers has risen to 13. Among PCSOs it’s 17.5. By the standards of any organisation, it’s a scandal.
‘This is the England that the politicians take for granted,’ says local MP Douglas Carswell, who defected to Ukip from the Tories and is his party’s only MP.
‘These are people who have paid into the system all their lives. Now they find themselves let down by the sheer incompetence of the state and by a political class cocooned in another world, spouting figures handed to them by civil servants.’