I don’t give a toss about my MP’s flat, but I’m bloody livid about council tax
Next Thursday’s elections have been so overwhelmed by the scandal of Westminster expenses that candidates for the major parties have scarcely shown their faces in my part of the world. And voters, content to fulminate at the daily pageant of shamed MPs on their television screens, don’t much care whether county council and Euro candidates turn up on the doorstep or not. I have not heard a single word of discussion about, say, the balance between left and right groupings in the European parliament — an institution that could be seized by aliens and teleported to Uranus without most people in Britain even noticing. As for local government, we have sunk into apathetic acceptance of the fact that our council tax bills doubled over the past decade because council officers ceased to see themselves as public servants charged with delivering decent services at minimum cost, and were instead reinvented by Labour ministers as a kind of strategic local inspectorate, overseeing a half-baked master plan for the bureaucratic socialisation of Britain conceived by that titan of public administration, ‘Two Lavs’ Prescott.
All this was made vivid at a recent meeting of Helmsley Town Council — no member of which, I hastily interject, has claimed any expenses in living memory. A representative of Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency based in Wakefield, asked to speak: she had come to update us on the ‘Renaissance Market Towns’ programme, which was being ‘refocused’ in such a way that our chances of getting money out of it for local projects had just become slightly worse. At least I think that’s what she said, for she spoke in the special gobbledygook of regional officialdom.
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