ErnstRemarx wrote:rebeccariots2 wrote:seeingclearly wrote:DPAC supported action on this:
Free lifts to school for disabled children facing axe by Coventry Council.
http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/c ... ign=buffer" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
This means 4-16 year olds. Essentially it is disabled transport, but makes it sound like these children are getting a freeby that other people don't get. These kids won't get to school at all without this kind of assistance. I don't know whether this is a widespread practice in councils or an isolated example, but I do know these children have as much right to access education as any other children.
I think there have been other councils making similar cuts - seem to remember a story relatively recently about it. Awful stuff happening now. Feels like the impact of government cuts to local authorities and other central programmes is really starting to have a very visible impact now ... with much more in the pipeline.
I'm sure Ernst will be along later to tell us what it is like trying to deal with the cuts to local authorities from a councillor perspective ... in his usual frank and robust way. I hope so anyway. I wouldn't like to be in that position now.
Editing to take out the 'doing' - which was doing nothing.
I'll tell you now. It's a massive pile of shit that we've been dumped in by central government. Make no mistake, when councils cut services, it's because of the effects of central government cuts, no more, no less. We're even worse off in Bury because we're the smallest metropolitan borough in the country and simply don't rack up the points (indices of deprivation) that neighbouring authorities do. For example, if we were the size of Rochdale (next door) we would actually have been given another £20m, as opposed to losing £54m. The Barnet formula fucks us over big time, and central government is completely uninterested, as we're not Tory and in the south.
We're seeing closures of all sorts of provision, and good people having to take redundancy at the council and it's heartbreaking. Faith school free travel for kids outside the immediate catchment area went 2 years back. I was in the overview and scrutiny meeting that tackled that, and I've rarely been as disgusted as I was that evening, with parents who've made a choice to send their kids to a faith school complaining bitterly that disabled kids still had free transport. If I'd been as christian, I would have been utterly ashamed to hear that. As a humanist, it made for a grim evening.
We're facing having to re-appraise and rejig practically every single service we do, and I find it utterly baffling that there are residents in the borough raising FB pages and conducting campaigns to get the council to restore services - very public ones - when it's simply a financial impossibility. These people claim they're the 'voice of reason' or suchlike, but in fact they're fantasists. Those services aren't coming back in the way they knew them; not now, not ever, unless a rich benefactor would like to replace that £54,000,000 that the Tories have swiped.
They can complain as much as they want, and probably vote us out down the road, but that will make fuck all difference to Bury's central government settlement. It will still be shite and if it's a Tory council by then, they can make the unedifying choices about shutting social need provision. I imagine those useless tossers will simply put Bury out to tender (or on Ebay), get a one year hit for a council tax cut and then preside over a catastrophic disintegration of services as they get ripped off by the private sector, who'll do them no favours.
Until then, we continue to fight the fight. I'm part of a budget group on the council that seeks to examine, streamline, enhance and otherwise scrutinise ideas for service change, and also ideas on how we can expand our ability to generate money. It's challenging to say the least, but I/we have already made a difference this year, and expect to next. The frightening bit is that you're at the coal face, discussing the issues regarding people's livelihoods and millions of pounds - but I'd rather it were me than some fucking Tory or FibDem numpty.
That's no different to what I thought, but nevertheless I do believe the great British public is better than this, that they do care, and prove they do over and again that services for children like this are important, and that part of that culture is to support such children, it part of our sense of decency and fair play.
i also know about the other tendency, Ernst, that you describe so well, and am aware this isn't just a tory tendency. I watched a valued and much loved day centre close about 2002 and its client group of of disabled adults relocated to a draughty bleak and unfit for purpose Victorian primary school building. God knows what it had been used for in the interim, the already high windows had been painted halfway up with dark green paint, and there were no adult loos in that half of the building, the rest was inexplicably padlocked, and inaccessible. The relatively better part of the building, it contained the school hall, which might have been more suitable, and the teachers loos. Somebody made those decisions. The old centre, purpose built in the sixties was demolished and sold as parking to a neighbouring trucking company.
I'd find it hard to sit in on this kind of decision making, even worse to in some way be a party to it. More power to you for being there and not only being rational and decent, but also being a witness to it.
For the life of me I cannot understand the immense waste we accept while watching services decline and our true values get eroded. That's the bit that gets me, it did when I was working, when things were immensely better than they are now, and it does now when there's no real latitude for waste, but it piles up around us. I hope Ed has a plan for that, it's what I read into his redistribution messages. If he hasn't, or is unable to, then I'm worried, because it's not just money that's being cut, it's people's potential and their hopes for the future.
But thanks for your honesty on the subject, I've come to really value your posts for exactly that.
