After Thursdays election\u00a0Lancashire County Council now comprises: Con 51, Lab 16, Lib Dem 10, Independant 3, Green 2, BNP 1, Idle Toad 1.\u00a0 35 seats changed hands.<\/p>\n
The Conservatives said they’d not increase Council Tax next year. \u00a0In the last few years council tax seems to have gone up far more than inflation and it is a popular cause of dissatisfaction. On the other hand council departments will say that new regulations and the need for more services during the recession are putting strain on the budgets.<\/p>\n
Maybe those voters were mainly protesting about Labour and don’t really want reduced taxes and the Conservative victory wasn’t as emphatic as it looks.\u00a0 Although I’d think the pendulum is swinging back to tax cutting and service cut-backs. Particularly now that we know we’re all in hock for 20 years and maybe we can’t afford our services.<\/p>\n
It’s\u00a0a difficult one as it must seem to government workers that they are like the banks and are protected. Governments can always print more money so pay up and spend your way out of recession.<\/p>\n
Somewhere along the way repayment of spending has to start and maybe 2010 is the time.\u00a0\u00a0No matter how much you dislike the banks for what they’ve done it is an unfortunate truth that banks are more important than many government services. Do you want your wages or that mortgage for your first house\u00a0or do you want\u00a0new council offices and library books?\u00a0 Then again we don’t want young or old people to be vulnerable and\u00a0 I use the library quite a lot.<\/p>\n
I foresee complaining\u00a0council workers and political manoeuvring to create public protest.\u00a0 So lets hope the new councillors keep their promise without\u00a0too much pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After Thursdays election\u00a0Lancashire County Council now comprises: Con 51, Lab 16, Lib Dem 10, Independant 3, Green 2, BNP 1, Idle Toad 1.\u00a0 35 seats changed hands. The Conservatives said they’d not increase Council Tax next year. \u00a0In the last few years council tax seems to have gone up far more than inflation and it … Continue reading “Lancashire, The Red Rose county goes blue”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paPtnz-5r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339,"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions\/339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madeinpreston.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}