Labour backbenchers opposed to sweeping reform of the Royal Mail could undermine one of its most cherished services, the post office minister Pat McFadden warned yesterday.
It will fall to local councils to keep cutting cherished services – whether libraries, parks, rubbish collection or help for the disabled – while also raising more revenue.
Nothing the deputy prime minister said today changes the fact that this privatisation is the first major step in the dismantling of a much cherished national service".
On this midweek afternoon, the audience was heavily skewed towards those with a stake in the state: teachers, the head of an arts project for troubled youths, an architect fretting about cancelled school building contracts, single mothers worrying about cuts to cherished social services, a dentist with questions about health service restructuring.
When Johann Lamont, Scotland's Labour leader, called for a mature debate on the funding of Scotland's cherished public services, from free personal and nursing care to free NHS prescriptions and tuition-free universities, the outcry was predictable.
The change in tax allowances are better than a poke in the eye – but barely relevant to the family about to lose a long-cherished public service or tax credit.
With many cherished BBC services the victims of cost-cutting – not least in sport, where the Grand National and Royal Ascot are among long-standing staples to be jettisoned – the Beeb's Olympic beanfeast does smack of raiding the life savings for one final blow-out before reality descends.
With admirable restraint, it remains devoted to precisely what it should be covering: parking, the closing of cherished public services, and – my Guardianista heart skips a beat at this – the news that the Coach and Horses, this paper's former regular boozer from its Farringdon Road days, is likely to be turned into luxury flats.
Our message to government, delivered in what is essentially a single voice from local government, is that we do not believe we can continue to deliver cuts on that scale without significant impacts either on cherished discretionary services or having to look at statutory ones.
And the Lib Dems Brexit spokesman Tom Brake told his party conference - which began on Saturday - that far from enhancing the NHS, the UK's exit would have a "calamitous effect on our cherished public services".
