A letter a day to number 10. No 1,255
Thursday 12 November 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
George Monbiot has published your letter to and the response from Ian Hudspeth, leader of Oxfordshire county council, which covers your own constituency of Witney, in which you complain about cuts to local services. In your opening remarks you state that ‘every part of the public sector needs to continue to play their bit to help pay off the deficit that the last Labour government left’. Whilst I would expect you to maintain this oft repeated deceit in public, it is hardly a good start in a communication to a leading public servant. You backed the bank bail out on the premise that they were too big to fail. It’s true that it fell to a Labour government under Gordon Brown to take the necessary action to save the banks which had very successfully crashed the global economy, but it would have been no different had it occurred on your watch. There is nothing clever about blaming the deficit on Labour, but then there is nothing clever about your entire letter. As the leader of the party which is the architect of austerity, indeed permanent austerity, it is socially illiterate and intellectually moribund to then complain that swingeing cuts that you are entirely responsible for are having a disastrous effect on services in your county.
It is to his credit that Ian Hudspeth remained respectful throughout his 6 page reply in which he patiently sets out the realities of attempting to run a county council that you have cut to the bone. You made it very clear that you expected Oxfordshire county council to dispose of surplus assets to generate capital receipts. Hudspeth responded that they had sold off 110 property assets raising in the region of £62 million, but he also pointed out that this money cannot be used to support revenue costs as that is neither legal nor sustainable in the long term as they are one-off receipts.
What this exchange very admirably demonstrates is that you have no idea what you are doing, no understanding of economic realities and absolutely no idea of the social impact of polices you are entirely responsible for enforcing. Your letter is the equivalent of someone stealing someone else’s marbles and then writing a letter of complaint to that person accusing them of, and holding them to account for, having no marbles. Not only is Oxfordshire county council continuing to ‘play their bit’, the council is clearly not playing at anything and is, indeed, being driven to its knees at incalculable cost to the public they are attempting to serve and increasingly failing.
As you frequently point out, you did gain a majority as a government, but what you demonstrate is your complete incompetence to hold office and that you are, in fact, utterly clueless of the realities of life under your brutal and ideologically imposed austerity. Britain is broken, you and your government are the cause, and you have the unbelievable chutzpah to complain about it. Did you know that the definition of chutzpah is of a man killing his parents and then pleading for the mercy of the court for being an orphan. A more appropriate word to use under the circumstances I cannot imagine.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/11/david-cameron-letter-cuts-oxfordshire
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7658518.stm
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/13/david-cameron-austerity-public-sector-cuts
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
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