Do as he says, not as he does

This Tory-dominated local authorities body has got together with the Audit Commission and produced a pretty doom-laden report laced with a sense of the inevitability of cuts.

The number of people working in England's 353 councils has fallen by 145,000 over the past year from 1.06 million to 932,800 and further job losses are "inevitable," the two organisations report sagely.

The gloriously named LGA chairman Sir Merrick Cockell pronounced grandly: "Unfortunately, job losses are inevitable given the scale of cuts.

"Where these are necessary, councils are working hard to minimise disruption to services through restructuring, shared services and outsourcing.

"They are also looking at how they invest in and reward people to ensure they continue to deliver the most efficient public services possible."

Sounds inevitable and logical until you look at who is delivering this death sentence on tens of thousands of jobs for reasons of economy.

Sir Merrick, it has been reported by the Daily Mail , - not a paper given to traducing Tory councillors you might think - trousers a comfy £54,000 for a three-day week from the LGA.

He also benefits from £65,000 as leader of Tory Kensington & Chelsea Council.

Which makes him one of Britain's highest paid councillors. Not much economical about that, then.

And there wasn't much economical about Sir Merrick's other wizard wheezes either.

There was the £115,000 Bentley, glorying in the number plate RBKC, which was intended for the "exclusive use of the mayor."

The Mail said that freedom of information requests had revealed that the luxury loving knight claimed to use the limo to "save taxi fares."

Now there's an economy to conjure with.

Then there's the £800,000 of the council's budget that he spent creating ceremonial roles such as a mace-bearer and two assistant mace-bearers and dressing them in ruffs and silk coats.

To spare Sir Merrick's feelings, we won't go any further into the details of his expenses as enumerated in the Mail. One wouldn't want to embarrass the poor man, after all.

But let's instead quote Local Government Minister Grant Shapps, who said: "Every bit of the public sector needs to do its bit to help pay off the budget deficit left by Labour's reckless spending spree."

We would just like to remind the minister that ruffs and silk coats hardly figured in Labour's favourite budgeting shopping lists - and nor did limousines.

That's far more of a Tory predilection, at least according to a recent case involving one Tory peer.

And the other reminder goes out more generally.

When councillors of the Tory or Lib Dem persuasion tell you that cutting your local services, your libraries, your home help services and so on are unavoidable because of the cuts made by Westminster, treat them with the contempt that they deserve.

Because it's their colleagues in the government that are making the cuts and they could just as easily adopt an entirely different policy.

But they won't, because the policy of the reigning coalition is to make working people pay for the bankers' cock-ups.

So their losses are your debts and, by God, this coalition will make sure you honour them.

Every Tory and every Lib Dem is responsible for this vicious programme of cuts, so don't let any of them off the hook either.

Remind the nauseating knight and his revolting colleagues that what goes around, comes around and one day they'll pay for their excesses. We won't.