Councils of despair

Local authorities are slashing vital services, but keeping extravagant offices and salaries – and handing blame back to David Cameron

We are, of course, all in this together. It is just that an awful lot of people feel that they are rather further in it than anyone else, and believe that while they are drowning in the deep end they can see David Cameron happily splashing about in his Gucci shorts in the shallows.

I certainly felt that way when I read through Cambridgeshire County Council’s new budget and realised that my daughter’s transport to school has been selected for the chop. Like many disabled children, she has a long daily journey to a special school which is far removed from where we live. The nearest special school — built on a cheap edge-of-village greenfield site so that the sites of the two Cambridge schools which preceded it could be sold to developers — is half an hour’s drive away. That is not such a problem if, as at present, the council’s education department runs minibuses to pick up the children. But the council is pressing parents to walk or drive their children to school instead — for some families in our area who are already at breaking point it would mean two hours driving every day.

The Prime Minister and his aides may or may not be interested in any of this, but they should certainly be interested in my initial reaction. It was, to put it bluntly: ‘Bloody David Cameron — did he not stand up in one of the general election debates, talk about his late son Ivan, and tell us he understood the pressures of bringing up a disabled child and promise extra help? So how come less than a year later we are losing our children’s home-to-school transport?’