John Harris (Austerity and then chicanery: how the Tories target cash-strapped councils, 23 September) correctly identifies the lack of media interest in, and reporting of, local government as a key factor in its impoverishment. It has led to this and the previous government being able to undermine locally delivered services without being called to account. After all, who cares? Such has been the patronising dismissal of those who lead our local councils that the cognoscenti really don’t know or care – until, that is, their local library is threatened with closure or there is insufficient budget to manage the roots of their favourite highway tree which must therefore come down.
The overweening centralism of government in our country is neither new nor down to one party. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to devolve powers locally, and did not establish the democratic protections needed to safeguard the services they introduced.
But the unremitting attacks we have seen since they left office have gone largely unreported. How many Guardian readers know that the coalition government’s change of funding formulae from money being provided partly on the basis of need to being largely based on population size, has been the major cause of such chaos in many, mostly northern, towns and cities? Sheffield, for example, has lost half its non-earmarked funding. Funding formulae? Hardly sexy reporting material yet the consequences have been dire. The government has thus achieved two of its objectives: to cut public services; and to do so without impacting on its electoral heartlands.
What we have really needed is good-quality, well informed, thought-through reporting: knowledge that could have been effective in making a difference.
Vicky Seddon
Sheffield
• In addition to the “jaw-dropping” library closures mentioned by John Harris, the cuts are causing the closing of museums in Lancashire: the Fleetwood Museum with the story of the trawler men and their families, and the textile mill museums at Queen Street, Burnley and at Helmshore.
All are sources of working people’s real history, our history. Learning from books is no substitute for my recent experience of being in the weaving shed at Queen Street when the engine started; with a deep rumble the power shafts turn the belts to the looms with increasing speed, rapidly creating a clattering noise rising to deafening levels. The people could not hear each other speak all the eight to 10 hours of a working day. At Helmshore Mill in the carding and spinning room, the mules rattled their way back and forth while the carding machines turned, creating cotton dust in the air. This caused “carder’s lung” or Byssinosis.
There was no health and safety, no NHS, no unemployment pay and no pensions. Workers formed trade unions but had no representation in parliament. The falsely called Great Reform Act of 1832 was useless to them because there was no Labour party.
Eric Cross
Unsworth, Lancashire
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
