Yes you guessed it, Eric Pickles has again bullied his way into the headlines by making yet another attack on Labour-run councils, referring to their cuts as a "bleeding stump" strategy. The communities secretary really does believe that in spite of massive cuts imposed by his government, frontline services can be saved if Labour councils share a few more paper clips with other boroughs and cut a few more senior staff.
It never fails to amaze the ease with which the words roll off his tongue, utmost impunity. Begging the question whether the man knows what is going on around him. Perhaps a town crier is needed to convey the message. For a start, advocating the termination of people's jobs should not be the easiest thing in the world to do and secondly, roughly 50,000 jobs have already been shed by councils nationwide, many of them management roles. Maybe Pickles was comfortably tucked away under his plush bed sheets when even his partners in crime, Liberal Democrat councillors, rose up in protest against the speed at which the central government levied its draconian cuts on us all.
His super-brilliantly infallible idea of boroughs sharing resources will only unleash more harm on frontline services, services Labour has protected and improved over the years. It requires not a ritual to Einstein to realise that if a police officer is made to stretch his legs further afield to cover a wider area without extra support, local bands of merry men are bound to toast such developments. Or if the workload of administrative staff goes up then chances are frontline workers will have to pick up the backlog.
Pickles needs to stand up to his bosses instead of being too quick to present their platter of ideological cuts and then accuse Labour councils of publicising them, that stopped washing long ago.
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