Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy
Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy
Birmingham was once a powerhouse industrial city but now the UK's second city is a shell of its former self as rubbish lines the streets, the lights stay out and children grow up below the poverty line.
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.)
“See? We proved that democracy doesn’t work!”
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
This is the best summary I could come up with:
To claw back $600 million over the next two years, the council has approved a range of unprecedented budget cuts that will see streetlights dimmed and rubbish collected only once a fortnight.
Nick Davies, programme director of British think-tank Institute for Government, says the austerity measures brought in under former prime minister David Cameron have degraded public services across the country.
The austerity measures included a reduction in government spending on welfare, local authorities, police, courts and prisons as well as the cancellation of school building programs.
The dire state of public services in the UK, paired with a cost-of-living crisis, is expected to be a major driver for voters at the general election on July 4.
UK Labour's 'red wall' across the middle and north of England crumbled in 2019, as the Conservative party picked up marginal seats with the promise of "levelling-up" the regions.
The once-popular Conservative West Midlands mayor Andy Street was toppled in local elections last month, a blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's hopes of retaining support in middle England.
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