This year is only eight weeks old, yet we can already write a brief history of the near future.
In Coventry, victims of sexual violence will no longer get counselling from the city’s one dedicated service, because it ran out of money when the local authority slashed its grant. Over in Birmingham, where the great Victorian preacher George Dawson once promised “everything to everybody”, the city’s orchestra, theatre and art galleries are scrambling to stay open: their municipal funding will be halved from April and disappear entirely next year. In the former mining town of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, the Citizens Advice service is closing for want of council money. Their colleagues in Woking, Surrey, are resorting to crowdfunding, just so they can help locals facing homelessness or suffocating debt. And across the country, from Cornwall to Norfolk, cash-strapped town halls are switching off street lights. Elsewhere, bus routes are cancelled, council houses are rotting in disrepair and local government officers are working out which community centres can be closed and their buildings sold to developers.
