Northamptonshire County Council is once again in La -la land

For the first time in ages Northamptonshire is becoming newsworthy, it's all over the press, the radio and the television, even BBC Look East appears to be remembered that Northamptonshire is in their region. It is of course because Northamptonshire is now the first English county that appears to be going bankrupt – the fact that all seven Tory MPs have condemned the Tory leadership on the county council and indeed the majority of the backbench County councillors have also called for the Cabinet to resign – an unprecedented moment in our local history.

Of course it's been a long time coming, I have been around in Northamptonshire local politics since 1973, indeed I was elected at the great local government reorganisation that took away county borough status from Northampton and created the two tier system that we have at the moment. It was obvious from day one that the system was a lash up. It seemed to those in central government that it was a tidy solution to problems surrounding local government, and in some places it may have worked, but not in Northamptonshire. It could never work in a county like this, Northamptonshire was always called the county of'spires and squires', that may be true in deepest rural Northamptonshire but as sure as hell it never resonated in an industrial Midland town like Northampton, or indeed some of the smaller industrial towns like Kettering and Corby.

The old rural district councils served a very different role and their history was bound up in a different range of services which they supplied reluctantly to the citizens. The absurdity of the creation of a two tier system in Northampton was so clearly illustrated in the separation of functions between a housing authority and one supplied social services. Many of the problems associated with social housing were also the problems of poverty, overcrowding, inadequate housing, and urban living.

There were arguments that suggested that policing and fire services and even to some extent education should be provided on a larger canvas but reality has always been that the needs of the urban community of Northampton town are not compatible with those of sleepy villages mostly populated by commuters to the larger cities or the living dead.

It was a top down solution that did not work but of course central government of whatever  colour can't resist reorganising local government. This seems to be a philosophy in Westminster that says you have a problem in local government – reorganise!.

Time and time again these reforms have been disastrous. And all have come from some bright-eyed wonk in a Whitehall office, someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce Cabinet government in locally, replicating what went on in Westminster, with an all-powerful executive and entire herd of backbenchers unable to play any part of observers. It might work if you have a cabinet like Mrs May, but it won't work in County Hall. Then of course we had the brilliant idea of of creating Police and Crime Commissioners,Replacing a police authority comprising of local people from all over the county with one elected person, the first time  they tried in Northamptonshire the votewas a paltry 19% and what did we get,Adam Simmonds,the first elected Muppet in history.. Then of course there is the talk always of elected mayors, once again aping the American system. But really all we are seeing is a concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.

And when you do that without any adequate scrutiny what you get, it seems to me you get chaos bad judgement and frequently what appears to be criminality. The Cabinet government in Northamptonshire is a disaster, there is no other word for it. An experiment that has failed  miserably and has allowed public services to be destroyed from the top downwards.

Probably the worst consequence of local government reform has been not simply the control in the hands  of a small group of mediocre  local politicians but the increasing power of a small group of mediocre senior managers, who, endlessly with ideas to reconstruct, to reconfigure and to reduce  local government. We have a situation where decisions are taken that affect the lives of thousands of people by a small cabal of disinterested professionals and people who like exercising power  without responsibility.

All our problemslocally are ideologically driven by people both the administrators and the so-called political leaders who care only about one thing and that is doing what central government tell them to do and only tells them to do is to cut services to live up to the credo of austerity for all except of course those in power.