Years of accumulative Conservative cutbacks will do that to a society. Where’s your empire now, Britain? Pathetic.
No doubt fiscal policies put this (and other) councils on the back foot, but it’s reductive to ignore that the thing that tipped them over the edge was bureaucratic incompetence combined with being fucked by the Oracle Corporation.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/05/birmingham_city_council_oracle/
Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, “is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it’s very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization.”
I guess no one could have predicted that a public-private partnership would be bad for the public?
I don’t know how valid this is, but I heard county and district councils use government bonds to secure more favourable loan terms. When Liz Truss upset the UK bond market the cost of borrowing rose as the value of their bond assets dropped. The county council where I live is now spending as much on servicing debt as it is on fixing roads. (Roads, although not the most important responsibility of local government, are a visible indicator of their capability.)
Bet those boomers that got all those tax cuts are taking their money to the grave.
What’s needed here is to sell off the lamp posts to a private corporation and then to rent them back from that same company!
The expectation of people to have free or subsidised light to be able to see really is some magic money tree problem caused by labor and migrants.
a failed state
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Not only does that not have anything to do with the topic at hand, but I’m also much more worried about the very real hostile take over of a nation than some people’s fucking street lights.
imagine thinking that spending billions on a proxy war does not have anything to do with the domestic decline in UK 🤡
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lmao chuds downvoting the elephant in the room