Sutton’s Liberal Democrat council present their latest proposed
cuts to local services (Guardian 29 August) as if it’s nothing to do with them.
Yet they have frozen council tax rates for years and their party in government
has enthusiastically slashed local government revenue support grants. At the
same time the government continues to allow legalised tax avoidance on an
industrial scale by multinational companies and rich individuals using offshore
scams and other legal laundering operations to pay next to nothing to the
exchequer. No wonder that soon we will have hardly any public services to show for
the money we do spend. Wallington Public Hall is the last such institution
remaining in the borough: ‘family silver’ (to quote Harold Macmillan) in the
shape of Sutton Public Hall was demolished and sold to developers thirty years
ago and we have a sterile (and usually empty) office block in exchange. That
hall was paid for by public subscription and it was a betrayal of our forbears
to sell it off. Furthermore, to suggest that we should close theatres and slash
arts spending one the basis that not everyone uses them is an astonishing
argument. Is the best vision of Sutton’s future that the LibDem regime can come
up with?
