The services provided by local councils - schools, roads, street lights, bins, libraries - are vital parts of our lives. We do not often think about who provides them or how to pay for them, except when they fail to work well or are cut back or even withdrawn. Many of these services are taken for granted. The playwright Alan Bennett, born and brought up in Leeds, was an enthusiast for the services his council provided which he felt enabled someone like him, from a poor background, to do well. He talks movingly about the importance of the ‘Leeds City Council’ crest on his school books, about the council library and art gallery, about how these services, provided by the council, made him feel part of a community. Crucially, he writes that such services did not arise from the benevolence of the rich and powerful, but that his parents’ generation earned them through the blood they spilt in the Second World War. He sees these services as his, and our birth right as citizens. ‘We are entitled to them.’ (Bennett 2005: 512-3)

The post war settlement where councils saw their role as providing services to their residents began to unravel under the shocks of the stagflation of the 1970s. Famously, on 29 October 1975, President Ford delivered a speech in which he denied that federal assistance would be provided to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: ‘FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD’. In a speech in Manchester Town Hall in 1974, British Environment Secretary Anthony Crossland told the country that the party was ‘over’: