Comment by Ntrails | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ntrails | Hacker News Reader

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> In the UK, funding for libraries [] has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity.

Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have-english-councils-fu...

Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)

> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.

We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.

edit: now in https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing...

Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D

Yeah - I used "austerity" as a slightly sloppy shorthand in my comment. My two closest local libraries were closed due to cuts made during "the credit crunch" by the coalition government (from memory!), when "austerity" was the buzzword, so I felt it'd communicate most broadly (to HN's international userbase) the phenomenon I was gesturing at.

From what I can understand, these sources are saying: "because costs are up, those past cuts have not yet really been reversed, especially not in terms of real-terms funding per-capita, or funding for 'non-essential' services".

Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!

> Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!

That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.

Yes - I think the idea of 'citizenship' feels increasingly abstract and outdated to anyone who only rarely noticeably interacts with the entity they pay taxation to, typically solely in moments of extreme crisis. 'Noticeably' here meaning I'm excluding ambient aspects of life, like walking on a government-maintained pavement.

I would argue those 'non-essential' services - those which you actively notice benefiting from - are extremely important for building institutional trust in the state. For young people entering the workforce today, who (for example) are a demographic that have a lower requirement for the services of the NHS, it must be genuinely confusing and alienating to be paying (what I believe is) a historically high tax rate.

Citizenship, as an idea, does need to demonstrably benefit both the state and the individual. Otherwise, the state is basically asking people to draw on their reserves of empathy to have a reason not to act like a dick. That will, unfortunately, have much more varied results than empathy alongside tangible incentives.

The cost of not providing those 'non-essential' services may ultimately be larger, and more difficult to calculate, I think, than are calculable today. How you provide them without the cash to do so is a question I'm not smart enough to answer. But people have now - completely anecdotally - gone a very long time with low tangible incentives toward citizenship being provided by the either the state or local authorities, and the vibe is very, very bad.

I don't think this is restricted to the UK, either. The OECD’s 2024 trust survey found only 37% of respondents across 30 countries were confident their government balances the interests of current and future generations. [1]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...

The size of the core funding cuts to councils by HMG outweigh everything else the councils are facing according to the figures.

Now, purely by memory, I recall commentary over the years that 1) David Cameron was cutting taxes on various categories of land assets to benefit large land asset holders to the detriment of the budget, 2) the battle of any tax cuts are spending programs in disguise vs no they aren't and 3) May, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer etc have not reversed any of the tax cuts put in place by Cameron.

There's no doubt a more delicate story to what has happened, but a fact check of this into Deepseek before I posted this confirmed that the throughline is credible.

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