Equally To Blame
That famous national disaster, the mouth of local impoverishment secretary Eric "Slimline" Pickles, has belched forth more wisdom about the state of the nation. "Local government is a massive part of public expenditure," Pickles observed. "It has lived for years on unsustained growth, unsustainable public finance. People blame the bankers [for the country's economic woes] but I think big government is just as much to blame as the big banks." So all this time we've been mistaken, nay deluded: at least half of the Glorious Successor's quantitative easing was aimed at local government - keeping inefficient hospitals open, forcing unprofitable buses to keep moving, shoring up extravagant libraries, and all those other horrible things. Well, this puts a whole different layer of flab on the matter. This explains why, in Pickles' opinion, "there are too many chiefs, a whole layer of management that needs to go" from local government, as has already happened in the banking sector thanks to the austerity measures imposed on those establishments which are now the taxpayers' property. It does, though, rather leave the question open as to why, if local government and big banks are equally to blame, local authorities are being let off with the worst level of cuts in decades while Daveybloke's chums in the City have to suffer traumatic levels of respectful request.
2 Comments:
At 9:55 am ,
Andrew King said...
I, for one, welcome Eric Pickles’ astonishing insight. Back in 2008 we poor dupes swallowed the media cover-up hook line and sinker. We believed Robert Peston when he told us that the global crisis was triggered by people selling each other houses at ever-more ridiculously inflated prices, regardless of what the rest of the economy was doing, with over-leveraged and clueless financial institutions pumping investors’ money into the bubble until it inevitably popped, leaving taxpayers to clear up the mess.
We didn’t realise that he was telling only half of the story. Thanks to a massive media conspiracy, nobody knew about the key role that UK local councils played in bringing the global economy to its knees in their reckless orgy of occasionally emptying the bins more than once a fortnight, holding diversity workshops and providing tea and more than one packet of biscuits in team meetings.
For blowing the whistle on this unprecedented cover-up, Eric Pickles deserves some sort of wider recognition. At the very least a Tinfoil Hat Award for Conspiracy Theorist of the Decade (so far).
At 11:25 am ,
Anonymous said...
Not to mention the profligacy of local authorities that put up posters telling the public that their grants have been cut and that hold public meetngs to discuss the implications.
Guano
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