Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy
Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy
Birmingham was once a powerhouse industrial city but now the UK's second city is a shell of its former self as rubbish lines the streets, the lights stay out and children grow up below the poverty line.
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Years of accumulative Conservative cutbacks will do that to a society. Where's your empire now, Britain? Pathetic.
No doubt fiscal policies put this (and other) councils on the back foot, but it’s reductive to ignore that the thing that tipped them over the edge was bureaucratic incompetence combined with being fucked by the Oracle Corporation.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/05/birmingham_city_council_oracle/
Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization."
I guess no one could have predicted that a public-private partnership would be bad for the public?
I don't know how valid this is, but I heard county and district councils use government bonds to secure more favourable loan terms. When Liz Truss upset the UK bond market the cost of borrowing rose as the value of their bond assets dropped. The county council where I live is now spending as much on servicing debt as it is on fixing roads. (Roads, although not the most important responsibility of local government, are a visible indicator of their capability.)
Bet those boomers that got all those tax cuts are taking their money to the grave.