Public Taking News Of Cuts…Surprisingly Well!

Julian Glover reports from a meeting of the think tank Reform in Cannock to gauge reaction to the proposed cuts:

There was no enthusiasm, and no outrage. Nobody shouted. Nobody interrupted the panel of local worthies. In a room of about 120 Cannock people, not one called for spending levels to be sustained, or thought this possible. Instead, there was an anaesthetised acceptance of impending pain.

I guess they won’t be sitting down in the motorway, then, Bob…

Cannock once trusted new Labour and got its reward. Spending shot up so fast that one can't help suspecting some of it will be easier to cut than critics say. Education spending in Staffordshire this year is £805m, or £4,078 per pupil – 63% up on the level of 2003 to 2004. In just three years, South Staffordshire Primary Care Trust's resources-limit has risen from £663m to £888m: up 44%.
At Friday's meeting I heard nothing suggesting people thought all this money well spent.

And there’s the rub.

If they’ve seen no benefit from this largesse (other than taxpayer-funded hectoring and nagging), why should they then object when it’s taken away?

After all, the disconnect between what the voters want and what the council want couldn’t be starker, as evidenced by this:

…how will the local council manage to save 35% over the next three years? Stephen Brown, its chief executive, warned it could be reduced to "cutting the grass and emptying the bins. That would be a tragedy".

Would it? Not for me.

That’s what I pay my council tax for, not for anti-smoking task forces and five-a-day co-ordinators!

Only half his spending is discretionary, so cuts will fall most heavily on those things the council has chosen to do: employment advice, leisure and culture, he suggested.

Those are all things that the council should never have got involved in in the first place…

There's raw meat here for Labour. But raging against cuts would have found little echo in Cannock last Friday. There was a resigned sense that the government is right about the money having run out – and I felt that a soap-box rant against spending restraint would have been met by an impatient "sure; but it's coming, so how best can we handle it?".

It seems the voters are far, far more savvy than the progressives think. They’ve had enough.

In Cannock, the loudest applause was for Sheila Brown, an impressive self-taught social entrepreneur, of the sort Cameron's team worship. She has built the Newlife Foundation for Disabled Children, based in Cannock, into a national charity. Cuts would hurt, she agreed, but society would respond. "We need to re-establish who is truly vulnerable. Benefits are too complicated. Sometimes its easier to sit on a sofa. It's not that people are lazy, just that the system is structured wrong."

Oh, heresy! Oh, calamity! Oh…

Oh:

The people I met in Cannock seemed to agree.

Heh! Welcome to the shrinking of the state…