@pjm: councils have significant assets which they could use to generate revenue – without getting into large scale sales. It’s not all about cuts; there are sugnificant commercial opportunities which they could develop – if they could be bothered.
They can’t win, can they?
When British Aerospace made a load of redundancies a few years ago, Burnley Council decided to intervene to keep the high skill, highly paid engineering jobs in the constituency. They got existing local businesses involved, effectively became a bank, and came up with grants and loans etc to encourage small and medium sized businesses, mainly in the Aerospace and motorsport sectors, to relocate there. It was hugely successful.
A lot of those companies relocated from the South East. They were discussing Burnleys economic success on Five Live and some cockwomble Tory MP (from the South East, obviously) referred to Burnley (Labour) Councils enrepateurial activity as – and I swear I’m not making this up – “tantamount to Communism”, and went on ranting about how it wasn’t the place of the Public Sector to be ‘interfering with the market’ in this way.
Lets be frank. The right just hate local government, and will just demonise them whatever they do, as they endlessly parrot their tedious and inaccurate public = bad, private = wonderful mantra