THE crisis facing our fire service due to reckless funding cuts by the irresponsible chancers who currently make up the British government was entirely predictable.

The Local Government Association (LGA) warns that fire and rescue services in England and Wales start the new financial year with a third less money from central government than when the coalition came to power.

And that’s not the end of it — a further 10 per cent cut in funds is expected in 2015-16, leaving authorities even less able to provide a vital service that literally saves lives.

Only last week the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) charged London Mayor Boris Johnson with having “blood on his hands” after 83-year-old Maurice Cunliffe died four days after being pulled from a fire at his flat.

Mr Johnson had shut down Woolwich fire station, the nearest to Mr Cunliffe’s home, just two months before, meaning it took firefighters two minutes longer to get there.

Two minutes might not sound like a lot. But as this tragic case illustrates it can mean the difference between life and death.

The LGA’s fire services management committee chair Kay Hammond praises fire services for avoiding damage to critical services by “moving towards a more efficient way of working.”

But as FBU general secretary Matt Wrack grimly points out: “Across the country cuts are already slowing emergency response times, impacting on critical services and endangering lives.”

And the LGA report provides details on what that “more efficient way of working” means.

“Changing shift arrangements,” which as Mr Wrack has pointed out includes high-risk gambles such as cutting cover at night.

“Cutting firefighter jobs and freezing recruitment.” It’s hard to see how that can avoid having an impact on critical services.

“Freezing pay.” Britain’s workers have been losing ground for years as pay rises languish behind inflation. The impact of the unelected coalition’s public-sector pay freeze has marked a further assault by the rich on working people’s pockets.

Firefighters, who carry out an exceptionally dangerous job requiring repeated demonstrations of a heroism few of us are ever called upon to show, have already been targeted by a government determined to make them work to the age of 68 in return for a smaller pension.

Yet more attacks on their pay and working conditions would be a shocking way to treat them. It would also be extremely dangerous.

Tories’ crazy cost-cutting combined with their deranged addiction to free-market solutions are leading Britain’s public services towards meltdown.

If skilled professionals see their workforces cut to the bone and their pay reduced to a pittance by a government which, through tripling the cost of a university education, has plunged a generation into terrifying levels of debt, recruitment will become all but impossible.

The legacy this rotten government will leave the country will be one of broken schools, broken hospitals and a broken fire service.

It will suit the Tories down to the ground. The rich will pay privately for the services they want and the rest of us can go hang.

The LGA asks for fewer restrictions on setting tax levels locally so authorities can raise money to pay for much-needed services.

It is true that local democracy is a shadow of its former self and the “radical new federalism” the Communist Party called for at the weekend is part of the answer to that.

But tinkering with councils’ powers will not save the services we all rely on.

Britain must give the Tories and their Lib Dem henchmen the boot and reject the sick neoliberal dogma they spout into the bargain.