Local Cuts for Local People

Eric Pickles is Satan. Or the Antichrist. Or possibly both, if that’s theologically possible. After seeing his performance on Newsnight the other night, I was only surprised that Gavin Essler didn’t start projectile vomiting, or that his head didn’t swivel through 360 degrees. It used to be only Michael Howard out of the Tory top brass that had a whiff of sulphur about him, but this is no longer the case. Roll over Beelzebub, tell Baphomet the news.

Pickles was being grilled on “localism”, which is Tory-speak for “you’re on your own, chum”, as the savage cuts to local government budgets, disproportionately targeted so the heaviest ones fall on the poorest authorities (a point made in the programme) are now starting to bite across the country.

Much of the interview, sadly, focused on “transparency”, which in the Pickles world involves publishing details of expenditure, regardless of any extra cost incurred in so doing. Even more sadly, Pickles was able to deflect the main thrusts of any attempts to call him to account, by focusing in turn on an error in the research, which led Essler to assert that the Department for Communities was only listing expenditure over £25,000 on its own web site, while expecting councils to list all items over £500. It emerged in the course of the debate that the DCLG is now also employing the £500 yardstick. [Actually, there is some interesting stuff on that web site, which repays further study, and I think I will have a closer look, and come back later to report my findings.]

Anyway, this is how localism works. You cut the rate support grant to the councils, taking care to make sure that the leafy suburbs (where the Tory voters live) “friendly” councils (such as the odious regime in Westminster) and key marginal targets are all protected, leaving the brunt to fall on the most deprived areas (coincidentally, many of them traditional Labour heartlands).

Then you meddle, selectively, as follows: when the council, faced with a decision which involves having to make drastic savings, cuts frontline services, and these cuts are unpopular, you make sure (if you are Eric Pickles) to blame the council for the cuts, as if the sudden, dramatic cut in income was nothing at all to do with you. When the council (quite rightly and sensibly) refuses to spend scarce resources on the extra cost of putting the items of their individual expenditure over £500 online, you criticise them for a lack of transparency. [So far, only Nottingham, out of all the councils, has had the cojones to do this. Shame on all the others.]

Funny stuff, transparency. Pickles seems to be remarkably opaque when it comes to admitting transparently that the transparent reason for these councils up and down the country being forced to cut to the bone and beyond, is, er, Eric Pickles. And localism, that’s a funny concept, too. It only works when the local decisions are exactly those which central government would have made and approved of. Central government in the form of, er, Eric Pickles. Any spending decisions taken at local level which don’t accord with the Tory plan for “slash and burn” are dismissed as “irresponsible”.

Of course, the Pickles plan is for the massive deficiencies his cuts will cause in councils to be picked up by the Big Society, for free, and for the massive job cuts in the public sector to be mopped up by the private sector. Neither of which is going to happen. Like all Faustian pacts, it has a sting in its tail. And possibly the horns of a dilemma.