‘It’s not easy’: Reform council strives to identify promised savings
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly9m75101lo
Posted by BestButtons
‘It’s not easy’: Reform council strives to identify promised savings
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly9m75101lo
Posted by BestButtons
20 Comments
> Now the party has run the authority for a little over four months and is embarking on the process of setting next year’s budget – and there’s a blunt assessment from the council leader.
> It’s not easy.
> In his office in the council’s Preston headquarters, Stephen Atkinson is upfront about the challenges the council faces.
> “We have ever-growing demand and limited revenue,” he said. “The government is asking local government to do ever more and not giving them the resources to do it.”
Talking is over and time to face the reality. Just like every other party, they can’t escape the facts. At least he admits that it isn’t as easy as they thought.
Funny, it was the easiest thing in the world when you were begging for our votes.
Turns out it’s easier to talk bollocks than solve problems.
Shouting from the sidelines is a lot tougher than actually running anything. The next 4 years will truly expose Reform as no better than the Tories
The reality of having an aging population and insufficient growth in both gdp and productivity to compensate is that, as a nation over the medium term, taxes will go up in perpetuity while services decline.
Faced with that horrible reality, opposition parties compete with one another to offer higher and higher entitlements that they have no idea how to pay for, while implying the bill will be paid for through some cunning ruse, be it ‘efficiency savings’, some kind of growth dividend, or a wealth tax.
It is all just displacement activity to avoid the reality of our situation, namely that we are fucked.
Yes it is, it is easy. That’s the entire platform of Racism UK: easy solutions to difficult problems.
Check with the Clacton Brownshirt in future, before making your lazy excuses, is my advice. Don’t want voters getting wind there’s a con trick being pulled.
What stopping people put their pronouns on emails and stopping working from home does not save millions . /S
Strange how every party promises to cut the obvious waste and inefficiency that they can see from outside, but when they get a look at the books that all seems to vanish. It’s as if decades of cutting spending and running everything on a shoestring has left the country with nothing left to cut that wouldn’t be politically devastating for a party, like means testing benefits for pensioners or removing the immediate entitlement to pensions from ex military personal who have served for 16 years.
Local authorities have been struggling for years to balance budgets and cut costs. While there is incompetence and inefficiencies in some councils, most do a fairly good job with the income they get especially as that income is controlled to a significant extent by central government.
LAs also face the issue that there are some services they a legally obliged to provide, so determining where they spend their income.
There is then the problem which might just be getting through to some in Reform that the majority of the issues they get excited about are central government issues. Reform councillors seem to be just now discovering they have no influence in these areas.
They are also discovering that being a councillor isn’t a cushy number, like being an MP. They actually have to do quite a lot of work, mostly don’t get paid huge sums in allowances/expenses and that if they fail to turn up to a minimum number of meeting, they lose their seat.
Why it’s almost as if simplistic populist bollocks doesn’t actually work.
It is so easy to run for council these days. There are enough cretins out there who will believe you when you lie. I swear, if I ran for office on a campaign of “no more tax, and free ice cream for all” I’d win. Then I just say “oops, sowwy” when it turns out I can’t do it. Fucks sake, this country.
So basically the actual amount of “waste” is minimal and there’s nothing left to cut. I mean we’ve been under austerity for for well over a decade, everything was already cut to the bone years ago which is why all the public services are so bad.
Surprised he’s been this open and hasn’t blamed Keir Starmer for his debt issue.
Welcome to the real world. It’s easy to shout from the sidelines, but tough to lead. Perhaps some credit to local authorities for doing what they can with so little.
End of the day, I wouldn’t be too shocked if some right wing billionaires pumped some money in for the short term, if it means gains in general election
It’s concerning that there is this mass delusion that a country as far into debt as us just needs to swap some numbers around and it’ll all magically be OK.
I fear many politicians, and those in Reform specifically, buy into this – even worse they are probably promoting it.
They’ll get into government, the reality dawns on them and they resign in droves.
I mean…why do you think Labour are struggling to solve it? Or why Conservatives committed all their time to simply kick it down the road.
“It’s not easy”….no shit.
Campaigning is the easy part.
Performing is the tricky bit.
“This thing that seemed easy after 6 pints and a closing time pontificate with my red faced mates is actually really difficult”
Wow, Reform Not-a-Party finding out politics is harder than yelling slogans…Who’d’ve guessed?
“We just assumed the councilors had been fiddling the books and skimming off the top, y’know, like we would!”
Said a perplexed Reform party member.
Ah, clueless people realising that you have to walk the walk…I wonder how many of them will still be in office in 5 years time? It’s easy to promise massive spending cuts, very hard to do without making your voters extremely angry.