OCCUPIED COUNTRY

I Predict a Riot

 

"So now we know. By September dozens of youth centres, libraries and swimming baths will close. The number of elderly people who qualify for subsidised care in their homes, or free transport, will be slashed. Instead, they will be given the number for a taxi.

"Bin collections will be halved. Many deprived families will have to find their own housing. A council-run advice service will be scrapped. Streets will not be cleaned between midnight and 6am. We will have to pay to park in Manchester on Sunday for the first time. Thousands of jobs will be lost.

"By September, then, the cuts will mean Manchester is a very different place. It is a pattern that will be repeated in other councils across the region in the days to come"

Manchester Evening News 8th Feb 2011

So, there we go.  The high-faluting Dispatch box pronouncments  are finally being translated into gritty reality.  The swingeing, front-loaded cut backs that for so long have been abstract, some-time-in-the-future concepts have ceased shape-shifting and become flesh.  

It's easy isn't it when you're looking at a spreadsheet?  A library here, a leisure centre there.  A few old folk aren't going to miss their transport to the day centre - y'know the day centre where they get to meet up with other human beings as opposed to sitting in their living rooms all day and evening staring at a TV.  And the driver - a familiar face they can trust?  Well, he'll be OK, you're sure he'll find something else when the private sector kicks in and creates the tsunami of jobs you predicted.  In the meantime a driver with a public license is just the sort of volunteer the 'Big Society' needs and anyway it can't cost that much in a taxi can it?  Especially not 'up North' where everything's so much cheaper.  Not that it matters anyway, the day centre'll be shut within a couple of months.

2,000 jobs.

It's a good job you can blame it all on the previous administration isn't it?  Otherwise you would just look like idealogically driven shiny faced arseholes wouldn't you?  What you need to do now is keep up the bombardment of catchphrases and snappy one-liners designed to make everything appear an abolutely no-turning-back necessity.  Now.  All at once.  And just to keep everyone on their toes how about a complete reorganisation of the NHS on the side?  The grim reality is that, as you have pointed out, the Health Service needs the shake up that only a back door privatisation can - and will - provide.  It will emerge fitter and leaner and ready for the challenges ahead. Ok so there'll be less staff but hey that would be the last Governments fault wouldn't it?

But don't stop there,  we've not had any good old fashioned Gerrymandering since Shirley Porter back in the day.  You can dress it up as 'much needed boundary reform':  it'll go down a storm in the Home Counties.  They'll be able to look forward to a Tory governement for the rest of time especially if you insist on chaining it to the referendum on AV just to muddy the waters.

As someone once said: "I warn you not to be ordinary.  I warn you not to be young.  I warn you not to fall ill.  I warn you not to get old."  And that was in anticipation of Thatcher's '83 landslide and the cuts she promised.  Cuts that were nothing like as deep and quick as  Baronet Osbourne's.

And no Plan B either.

Still, at least we're all in it together.