Hes such a dick
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Yeah but he was in that show about politics once so he must know everything about politics. Stands to reason.
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He is insufferable.
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Very interesting choice of words there given who the MP for Wellingborough is!
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Arguably that’s Northants fault though. Got a lot of sympathy for councils in general, but they’ll have made a conscious choice to take the risk of keeping council tax down in the past in leiu of building up reserves to the level of their neighbours.
But yeah to address your actual point this probably will happen elsewhere. From the brief reading I’ve done on this it seems to me that this particular council fell first from a golden storm of (among other things) increased strain on social care and increased strain on children’s services, coupled with central cuts to the council’s budget, exacerbated by an inability to raise revenues from increasing council tax from 2010-2015 owing to central government policy. So yeah that seems pretty likely to happen elsewhere.
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I thought Tory councils were largely unable to raise council tax during the Cameron/Osborne years but could be wrong there.
Just realised that Andrea Leadsom is also a Northamptonshire MP. Maybe it’s something in the water up there…
The council has been Tory-run for over a decade, and it wasn’t so long ago that the national party was trumpeting the council and using it to push electoral success in the east midlands.
It’s not just about the ability to raise council tax though - Northamptonshire have been trying to offload profitable assets and interests too.
Oh I’m sure there’s multiple factors. There always is. The fact they spent a lot of money on new offices seemed to get a lot of coverage in reports…
I’d be amazed if it doesn’t happen elsewhere tbh - there’s another 2.7bn in cuts in central grants to come in the next couple of years.
Ish. No-one was allowed to increase their taxes by more than 2% or something (I can’t remember the figure), but my Tory local council (for example) chose to actually cut the amount they took in tax at the same time as being told they needed to make 50% in savings over a decade and their reserves are down. I’m not saying they should have necessarily increased by 2% a year to keep them level, but it seems counter-intuitive to me to eat into your reserves while also deliberately keeping your income lower than it could have been.
The point I was more making though was that I assume Northants made a deliberate decision to have relatively lower reserves during the Blair years (unless a perfect storm of events erroded them just as Cameron came to power).
My point was more that the council’s decisions have been driven by their own Tory leanings, and they’ve also been screwed over by the actions of their party in national government, too. You can’t separate the two, especially when they both were holding each other up as examples of exemplary practice so recently.
And yes, I think others will go the same way too.
My dad worked for his local council and had to deal with councillors on a regular basis. This was a relatively wealthy permanently Tory council in Hertfordshire. Back in 2010 the councillors felt that they could cope with the central government cuts by dipping into reserves, but they assumed that they wouldn’t face severe cuts for more than one parliament, and they’d been assured by central government that councils in the shires would be the least affected. The latter was correct (cuts to central government grants were targeted at Labour and metropolitan councils), but the former isn’t. Even they are now very, very worried.
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Yeah that was what I was wrestling with. Thanks for the clarification 
I think their reserves were pretty healthy until 2010, like most councils.
This report is from 2014 (note that the council were proudly trumpeting that they hadn’t taken the option of raising council tax by the 2% allowed):
Surrey.
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I assume this is her way of admitting she definitely doesn’t have working people’s best interests at heart.
“You can’t just say you’re committed to doing a bunch of nice things for the large majority of people! That’s cheating!” is a sentiment I think is very close to the heart of right wing thinkers.
Reminds me of when the DM published an article on some of the people protesting the rise in student fees and pointed out that some of them have nice houses, and still have the temerity to protest. Should have just written something like GOTCHA LIBS and left it at that.