Government

This is the second of our occasional 'another voice' series. Siobhan Courtney reports again from Dale Farm. The outcome was not what anyone expected: the bailiffs are not getting into Dale Farm. The atmosphere here now is very different to that of the weekend, when I was able to see what life was like inside Dale Farm. The travellers, cheering with joy and hugging each other have just won an injunction preventing Basildon Council from clearing the site pending a further hearing on Friday. Blockades, scaffolding and walls erected by the travellers and protestors stand defiant.

I was on the panel of Any Questions last night in Saltaire, the most beautiful town I’ve seen outside of the Highlands. Jonathan Dimbleby always warms everyone up with a test question, which lets the panelists make their mistakes early. The first question was this: the town of Saltaire was founded by a philanthropist, Sir Titus Salt. What can be done to make today’s rich pay their fair share? Lucky for me that it was not recorded, because I went on for ages. Sir Titus was living in an era before the welfare state, where welfare was provided voluntarily, by people in the community. Had he been alive today, the government would be confiscating 52 per cent of what he earned – thanks to George Osborne’s recently increased tax.

And what about the other sort of debt? We spend so much time harrumphing about the national debt that an important point is obscured: personal debt, the amount owed by individuals, is even higher. I wrote an article on the subject for a recent issue of The Spectator, as well as the Thunderer column (£) for last Saturday's Times. But, really, a piece in the latest Spectator (subscribers here) by Helen Wood — the former prostitute who transacted with Wayne Rooney, as well as with a "married actor" who has slapped her with a superinjunction — puts voice to the problem in blunter fashion. "My mistake," she writes, "was to get into debt": "I borrowed £800 to go on holiday, followed by £500 to pay the rent — both from loan sharks.

How much are we in for? That is the question that springs most readily to mind after Portugal's request for fiscal aid from the EU. And, sadly, the answer is difficult to work out. The figures being spread around range from £3 billion to £6 billion, with valuations in between. But, really, it depends on how much of the €80 billion package is agreed to by European finance ministers, and which lending mechanisms are used. The European Stability Fund, the EU's emergency fund and the IMF's pot of gold all have differing levels of UK involvement. If our country does end up making a significant contribution to any bailout package, then the government will certainly have some explaining to do.

When the official files are opened in 30 years time, we will see what series of decisions led the government to send a helicopter-born SAS team into eastern Libya when they could have sailed in on HMS Cumberland, disguised themselves as reporters or rung up Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Libya’s ex-justice minister who is said to head the “Transitional Government”. But it is easy to see how it happened. The perfectly sensible idea of sending a British emissary to Benghazi to make contacts must have clashed with bureaucratic protocol and the FCO’s duty of care arrangements. “What?” You can just imagine the officials exclaiming to the ministers. “You intend to send a single person to Libya. But what if he got killed? Or hurt?

The cold war in Britain’s localities is warming up. Buried in the Telegraph and the Financial Times is the news that councils are cutting local bus services, and central government is being apportioned blame. An organisation called Better Transport has launched a campaign titled Save Our Buses. It claims that straitened councils have been forced to shed £34 million from the subsidised funding of local buses; 70 percent of routes have been affected so far.   This is a prime example of local government conniving to avoid responsibility for spending contractions. With adroit calculation, councils bastardise vital services to inconvenience those they represent.

Crime maps have formally reached England and Wales. The Home Office has unveiled www.police.uk and citizens can examine incidences and trends of crime in their local area. Naturally, the website is broken at the moment. Nick Herbert, the Policing Minister, told the Today programme that the site crashed under the weight of 4 million users in an hour. The government hopes that this interest will be sustained, inaugurating a revolution in transparency and accountability. People power will trump the unelected authorities of the past. Crime maps merely record the facts of crime, but extensive trials suggested that they improve peoples’ knowledge of their neighbourhood and encourage locals to influence police strategy in troubled areas.

It seems that Cardinal Walter Kasper was right: parts of Britain are suggestive of the Third World. The Sun has been leading the tally-ho against council leaders in Exeter and Birmingham, who have allowed rubbish to lie in the streets for more than a month. And today, Local Government Minister Bob Neil joined (£) the fray, condemning councils for failing to deliver ‘one of the most basic services’. (He also mentioned executive pay, again.) Recalcitrant councils have issued a plethora of meteorological excuses, but these are mostly a distraction. Many councils managed to remove rubbish over Christmas; David Cameron commended them for their efforts.