Agent151: What the PM really thinks of councils

 

The recently leaked letter from the PM to the leader of Oxfordshire County Council, Cllr Ian Hudspeth, provides an interesting insight into his views about local government.

In case any of us council dunces are left in any doubt about what they may be, I have first translated the letter, entirely unnecessarily, into honest English and then commissioned some completely extraneous in-depth analysis from a team of experts. Here’s the translation:

Dear Ian,

If you local government types think you are going to get out of doing your bit to close the deficit by whinging, you are sorely mistaken.

You don’t need to close day centres for the elderly, libraries, museums, and especially children’s centres, for heaven’s sake.

Why can’t you toe the party line and put up savings that won’t rock the boat?

You say you need to make these cuts, but in fact your budget has gone up, which makes you either incompetent or treacherously disingenuous.

Time you sold off all those council buildings  sitting around doing nothing to our developer friends. While you’re at it, you can flog off the police and fire brigade buildings too.

Since you and your officers are clearly too stupid to even run something as simple as a diddy little council, I will send some clever chaps over to tell you what to do.

Yours,

David Cameron

Even after struggling with this translation for many hours, I still couldn’t quite twig what he was on about, so I asked some government experts. Here is their analysis:

1. The PM is completely out of touch with what is happening in local government.

2. So are his advisors.

3. Neither he nor his advisors has the foggiest idea how the local government funding system works.

4. Both he and his advisors consider themselves vastly superior in intellect to anyone in a council. Indeed, he considers local government types to be duffers, which explains why he thinks they don’t warrant a decent salary.

5. He and his chums are focussed on asset-stripping the public sector.

6. He is not listening to any representations from councils about the impact of austerity on their residents.

7. In any case, he is not really interested in these local issues and has bigger fish to fry, except when it’s in his own constituency.

You may be as shocked as I was at these revelations. But perhaps the PM can be forgiven. After all, he didn’t write that letter himself, did he?  It was delegated to someone he trusted, who in the end made a right hash of it. If he surrounds himself with fools, he will inevitably look foolish.

Could it be that, at a time when the PM’s attention is rightly focussed on foreign affairs, this will prove to be a useful reminder that it is the PM’s lot in life to be accountable for all things, and that he must also keep a weather eye on affairs at home.