Michele Hanson: A New Public Services: Let the Developers and the Super-wealthy Experience a Bit of Austerity for a Change

The approaching new Age of Austerity is a terrifying prospect, because some of us thought we were in one already. Things have been pretty austere for the old, the weedy, the homeless, the poor and the mentally ill for some time now. "Don't go barmy in Camden," my friend Rosemary warned me, because she knew someone who had, and there wasn't much help on offer.

Any more cuts in mental health and people will be going mad on the pavements. And it's so easy to go mad nowadays. Everyone I talk to is seething: the milkman, taxi drivers, shop-owners, teachers, because they just don't believe that there's no money and that cuts in public services have to be made. They can all see that there are oceans of money swilling about, but the wrong people have it. If I want to get anyone raging, I only have to mention a few key words: consultants, management, developers, bankers, bonuses, tax-havens, pensions and jargon. That's the fat layer of wastage that needs cutting.

Rosemary I and had a little weep over our local paper's report on Camden's library plans. Some librarians will be replaced by self-issuing machines (cost about £1.5m, expected savings £850,000), and the chap in charge will be called a Growing Your Library People Work stream Manager. Hordes of creatures are paid handsomely to think up this drek. No Austerity for them. Meanwhile, the poor and unaccommodated are roaming the streets.

Rosemary found a shivering, half-starved woman on the corner near her house and took her home for dinner, bath and rest, because there aren't many "public services" for someone like that. My very elderly mother was all right, she lived with me, we weren't hard up, but we couldn't help but notice how grim things are for the elderly poor, who don't have a bossy middle-class daughter to watch out for them.

I saw one on Secret Millionaire – stuck, three floors up, indoors, alone with her cat and sacks of stinky, saved-up cat-shit, because no one could take them downstairs for her. How much would that cost? One mini-fraction of a consultant's daily rate.

But no one in charge of the country's money seems to listen to what the public says and needs. We want more teachers and smaller classes; we get flashy, huge, overambitious school buildings. My local borough consults like mad, they even call groups of us in for meetings, and then, like every other borough, they only seem to take notice of whoever agrees with what they planned to do anyway. And even if local government listens to us, Whitehall doesn't. They can, and usually do, overrule local planning decisions, if a developer appeals often enough. Round here we've fought for a superb nursing home (Athlone House) on the edge of the Hampstead Heath, a cobbled 18th-century street, swimming pool, community center, allotments, small shops, street markets, adult education. We usually lose. The developer wins. Only money matters.

Now we have a chance to turn things around and let the developers and the rest of the super-wealthy experience a bit of Austerity for a change. Slap them with a big fat surtax. Let the watershed be for them, not for public spending. Then we would have a government that stops sucking up to the rich and trampling on the poor, and a fairer world. Just a hopeless little dream of mine.