WITH the lurching into near bankruptcy and a controversial budget meeting due on March 3, the travails of Haringey Council in north London tell a sorry tale of our country’s 21st-century decline brought about by the folly of elite politicians.
 
Haringey Council, like many local authorities after a decade and a half of austerity, is teetering on the brink of financial collapse. 

The mainstream narrative on this will swing from Labour’s perspective of its dire inheritance of 15 years of Tory misrule and the consequences of years of cuts and the subsequent decay that has followed, to the right-wing media’s usual reporting of a failure of Labour local authorities to manage their household budgets.
 
There’s no denying the economic and social vandalism that austerity has visited on the UK has decimated public services, turbo charged income and wealth inequality and almost wrecked the economy.
 
However, there’s another angle to this story which will of course be ignored by the mainstream media and political analysts. 

Haringey Council provides a view, in microcosm, of the plague that has infected British economic and social policy for the past 40-plus years and two policies in particular showcase this.
 
The council for nearly a decade froze council tax. This was sold as a progressive policy protecting the poorest residents from a regressive tax as the Tory-Lib Dem coalition had stripped away national subsidies for poorer households.