Throw Me To The Wolves, Daddio!

One of my favourite scenes in movie history is from the 1958 film The Vikings where King Ragnarr Loðbrók stares into a pit full of starving wolves before leaping in to his certain death, torn to pieces by ravenous insatiable creatures that lurk in the pits of hell just waiting for the next innocent lunch to come their way.

Well, social medias a bit like that.

You can’t of course reason with starving wolves. They just want to eat you. And maybe give marks out of 10 later.

But of course, nothings really as it seems. The real king Ragnar wasn’t thrown into a pit of wolves at all. It was a pit of snakes. And some of the film, set in 9th century England, was actually filmed in Croatia. Where they had better Fjords with warmer water.

Finding out what really happened and telling people the facts doesn’t always go down well. Particularly if it goes against what their own fixed mindset tells them. So listen wolves, I’ll be down in a minute, but first here’s what happened at the County Council budget set meeting this week. Actually, a pit full of sleeping wolves might be a good tactic….

Theres 110 county councillors. That’s far too many. But there were nearly 300 before Unitary when there were districts as well. And it was up to these from all over Somerset to take a decision on what we’d all be paying in Council tax from April.

Grrrrr!

Now this should be a straightforward and simple task. The party with the most councillors runs the council (in this case that’s the Liberal Democrats with 61) and its pretty much up to them what happens. The main opposition (that’s the Conservatives with 33) usually say what they’d do instead (although this time they didn’t bother) and the other parties (Labour 5 Green 5 Independents 3 No Political Group 2 and ReformUK 1) tend to wave their hands a bit and go ‘oi, we’re here too you know!’.

This year. And the last year. It’s been a bit tricky. The Unitary council was only set up 2 years ago and each year they’ve only just managed to balance the books. And that’s what they have to do. Balance the books. Otherwise, the budget is illegal. And if this looks like happening then the Finance officer issues a 114 notice which means the Government has to intervene by sending in Commissioners. Who are they? Well, they’re overpaid bureaucrats, overpaid to take the firm and harsh measures that the councillors will have tried to avoid. Cuts, selling things and sacking people.

Why is the new Somerset Unitary in this position only two years after setting up? There are 4 reasons. And they’re all the Tories fault. Luckily.

Howl!!!

When the Conservatives came to power in 2010 (with the help of the LibDems coalition of the ‘was this such a good idea on reflection’) they introduced a programme of austerity which meant massive cutbacks to local government funding. That meant local councils had to either make cuts locally or seek other ways of funding themselves. In many cases – including ALL the Somerset districts, this involved buying properties to get the rents from to generate an income. Things like TKMaxx in Worcester, a multi storey car park in Bournemouth and of course the Elbit weapons systems company in Bristol.

Second the Conservatives who ran Somerset up until 2023 took this a step further and, because they like to be seen as the party of low taxation, they also froze their council tax. Hoorah! Said the already wealthy Oh no, there go the services we rely on said the poor and needy. So, for the sake of those few years of tax breaks the County’s reserves was depleted and not replenished.

Third there was a time bomb ticking away in the basement. Councils have to cover the bills for their social care and this is something that has increased year by year and often without knowing what the bill is actually going to be. This still has to be paid for out of local council taxes. Under the budget-heading ‘how long is a piece of string’.

Fourthly – and with the last one in mind, the Tories, knowing they didn’t have the reserves or the funding streams and guessing that their own government wasn’t likely to help them, came up with a major cost cutting exercise. Scrapping the well-run districts and replacing them with one big council. Unitary Somerset. Most of us didn’t want it. Including most of the Tories in the districts to be fair. But we got it. And they reckoned it would save £18m.

Roar!!

But only 2 years later the 110 Somerset councillors were sitting staring at a multi-million-pound black hole, asking the Government for extra emergency funding, seeking a special ‘Capitalisation direction’ so that they could sell off all those investments they’d bought, putting the council tax UP by 2.5% higher than the limit and sacking 555 of their workers.

That was the budget the Lib Dems were proposing. They said we had to vote for it otherwise if we didn’t it meant we were voting for the Commissioners being sent in. The Tories condemned them, criticised the cuts, bemoaned the lack of reserves, wept for the sacked workers. And quietly accepted the blame. “Well, yes we did do all that yes, but we managed to set balanced budgets while we were doing it”

They voted against. The Lib Dems voted for. Labour voted against. The Independents voted against. The Greens had a free vote and voted all over the place. The new ReformUK councillor said ‘I’m not going to tell you how I’m going to vote’ and then when asked ‘how are you going to vote?’ said ‘against’.