Kicking the Provincials Into Shape

So proud are the Conservatives of their latest round of council-kicking, library-closing and child-robbing that a minor apparatchik named Greg Clark (a former member of the SDP, by all that's insignificant) has been trundled out to announce it a week before Christmas. Local authorities' funding will be reduced by 6.7% over the next four years, with most of the vandalism and cripple-kicking occurring during the first two; partly no doubt because Greg Clark has a social conscience, but mostly because Crown Prince Osborne will want to distribute a few alms before the next general election. In a triumph of Osbornomic reasoning, Clark babbled that councils' spending power will remain much the same even as it is radically reduced; if any shortfalls should somehow happen to occur, it seems they can always be made up by increasing taxes for people who cannot afford their rent, or by hiking business rates in order to encourage investment. And if anything should go wrong after that, the fault will lie not with the smirking sebacity of the Bullingdon Club, but with those Maoist extremists who attempt to buck the tide of history by repairing potholes in their roads and keeping their Sure Start centres open.