In every area of public life we are enduring reductions in services. Emergency hospital care, maintenance of our roads, education, policing, care of the infirm and elderly – add your own service to the list – are all subject to swingeing cuts and down grading of service. You only have to read Mike Appleyard’s recent comments to learn why this is happening, if you didn’t know already. He is under fire as the Councillor responsible for providing the buses that should get our children to school. For years it has worked well and reasonably efficiently. This school year started chaotically with travel times for young people increased exponentially whilst delivering them to their schools late. Parents have rightly been making representations to Mr Appleyard about this.

His response in this paper was to thank them for their input and then spend the rest of his time telling us how much money he has had cut from his budget. Understandably. You can’t make even a half decent workaday purse out of the particular sow’s ear that central government has doled out to councils this year. Every public service is being compelled to try to provide the same service for less money. Naturally, this is impossible, so once all the obvious savings have been made in past years, the pip is now beginning to squeak more and more insistently.

If we demand the same level of service from all these public services, we have to pay for them. In order to get elected, politicians all know that they stand a better chance if they can convince us that they really, really want to cut taxes. Saying ‘What you want, citizens, costs money and if you let us have a bit more – then we can do a lot more’ won’t attract votes. Unless the politicians across the board are prepared to forego voting advantage and agree on the need to increase taxes to provide what the electors clearly want but are not minded to pay for – then we are doomed to less health care, less care for the aged, third world transport systems and a police force that has two officers on duty when a major event kicks off in one of our towns.

It is getting to be that bad and we should be demanding better and telling them we are prepared to pay for it. And perhaps seriously considering removing one level of local government provision?

Or cancelling HS2!