Compassion on the ration

The new leader of the Trade Union Congress has a good line in refreshingly colloquial rhetoric. ‘Nothing works in this country and no one in government cares,’ Paul Nowak declared in his first speech last September. ‘Everyone is on their arses.’

Unimprovably put. But please don’t write in if you’re a Conservative voter. This is a now a sentiment shared by many on the political right. That same month, the London Evening Standard (lately edited by George Osborne, the architect of austerity) grumped: ‘Welcome to Britain – where nothing works except the metaphors of decline.’

The relatively affluent are wont to moan about proliferating potholes, unemptied bins and the looming extinction of the public lavatory. I do so myself, to a degree worthy of a saloon bar bore. But the people who actually run things are insulated from the less trivial consequences of government neglect and parsimony. They educate their children privately, or cherry-pick the best state schools. They pay to avoid the NHS. And rarely do they have cause to encounter our shockingly perverse and byzantine welfare and justice systems.

This week’s Gazette carries an exposé by our own Eduardo Reyes of what happens when the tattered compact between state and citizen starts to break down completely. In Liverpool, a toxic amalgam of brutal spending cuts, tortuous bureaucracy, lack of accountability, and governance failures at both national and local level are breaking the public sector. And who is left to pick up the pieces? A rapidly dwindling band of solicitors overwhelmed by chronic social problems for which a legal remedy is the only hope.

Moreover, it’s all set to get much worse. And not just in Liverpool. Westminster has systematically starved municipal England. One in five councils is on course to go bust in the next two years.

Their recourse will not be to shut more loos or slash refuse collections. That won’t come close to saving enough money. It will be, as Eduardo relates, to place more barriers in the way of access to services that councils have a statutory duty to provide.

Just as rationing exists in the NHS by proxy – in the form of waiting lists – so it can be ramped up in local government. How? By obfuscation, buck-passing, and ‘improvised criteria’ which ensure the bar for accessing help (financial or otherwise) becomes ever harder to clear.