As the year peters out it's customary to look back at the comings and goings of the previous 12 months but for a change let's have a look at the future.
It's not often you can say for certain what direction social and economic policy will take but in the case of this current dreadful British Conservative government we know exactly what the next five years hold. Indeed they've already been experimenting with their plans.
By coincidence the petri dish where some of the nastier Conservative plans are suppurating is the London borough of Barnet, the constituency of our aloof, semi-detached proconsul. She is one of three Conservative MPs who represent the unfortunate borough, her part, wealthy, well-heeled Chipping Barnet.
The policies of Conservative run Barnet are the shape of things to come. They only have a wafer thin majority but they've been pushing through the most ruthless 'outsourcing' schemes in Britain. In fact they've been divesting themselves of all responsibility for running any council services and have signed a 10 year contract with the giant company Capita to do it.
What does outsourcing on the Barnet scale mean? First it means sacking thousands of staff because there won't be work for them. The union representing council workers, Unison, estimates Barnet's workforce will decline from 3,200 in 2012 to about 330. Barnet has handed away its legal services, IT, finance, HR, trading standards, environmental health, car parking, cemeteries, care for the disabled. They haven't finished. Libraries and refuse collection are next. The fancy phrase is `alternative delivery models'.
The people doing the work now are in Capita offices all over the place. For example payroll for remaining staff is done in Belfast. Parking fines are sent from Croydon. Outsourced legal services meant that no one in Barnet spotted when the councillors voted on the wrong documents. An independent inquiry by a lawyer concluded, `Nobody (at Barnet borough council) understands local government law.' Barnet employs no lawyers.
These details come from a journalist Aditya Chakrabarty, who has chronicled Barnet's destruction of local public services in the Guardian. He notes that Barnet is not alone. Sefton in Merseyside like Barnet began to outsource services to Capita in 2008. Not surprisingly the National Outsourcing Association, yes it exists, were delighted when Cameron won the general election exulting that outsourcing had doubled to £120 billion from 2010-15.
To accelerate the pace, George Osborne abolished the central government grant to local government in his November Comprehensive Spending Review. He plans to cut spending by the Department for Communities and Local Government by 79% by 2020.
So what's that got to do with here? It's up to Stormont to supplement local rates with a regional rate to help provide council services. Councillors here wouldn't follow the example of Barnet, would they? They'll have no choice. In his obsessive determination to slash public spending so that he can reduce taxes for his friends and voters, do you think Osborne is going to provide money in the north's block grant to enable councils here to provide a five star service for social care, leisure services, community centres, cemeteries etc?
Do you think our proconsul in whose constituency public services and the welfare system are being laid waste is going to argue in cabinet for more cash to enable councillors in the north to do the opposite of councillors in her own bailiwick? Of course not. This is the same person, way down in the cabinet pecking order, who blocked any movement in any aspect of the 2014 Stormont House Agreement until she had forced through welfare cuts to earn brownie points from her mean-minded colleagues.
What's happening in Barnet will come to pass here, inserted through the back door by reducing overall expenditure so that there's no alternative but to pull public services to bits. Councillors will be blamed because it will be up to them to decide which services to cut, abolish or outsource and how many redundancies to declare. In reality it will be the proconsul for the time being who is to blame but be sure of this, it makes no difference who the proconsul is. He or she will have to obey George Osborne’s ideology.
