FIRST THINGS FIRST
SIR,—There will be wry smiles in town halls and council chambers at the Government's exhortation to economise. We are expert in looking at both sides of every sixpence and scanning each detail of its edge, but the fact remains that we are ordered to carry out certain tasks and then denied the means to do so. We cannot provide the houses that our people need; we cannot even give them water-carriage sanita- tion; but at every other level we see waste on a ridiculous scale.
Men and money cannot be spared to build houses, but they can be found to persuade people that there is an important difference between a number of nearly identical washing powders. Graduates can travel in whisky that cannot be supplied up to the demands of retailers. Civil servants, better paid than our excellent officials, can spend two or.five or ten years referring our schemes back to us before accept- ing them unchanged at a time when the cost has doubled and the money is unobtainable. The armed forces continue on their time-honoured principle of never employing one man where they .could employ four. Fabulous sums are spent on proprietary medi- cines for the lack of a little authoritative guidance (from the Medical Research Council, for instance, or the Royal College of Physicians) on a few simple 'symptomatic remedies' Men and capital are em- ployed on a grand scale in bombarding householders with unsolicited advertisements. We permit ourselves, to take two examples at random, a much larger variety of soft drinks and models of motor-cars than can be afforded by a nation on the verge of bank- ruptcy (variety is the spice of life; spice is a poor substitute for bread). 'Everybody's business,' mean- while, is nobody's business. Our people must remain unhoused, our roads fall into disrepair, our old houses become slums and our slums continue to be inhabited, while we tolerate sanitary conditions that would have made Dickens reach for the sulphuric acid.
It is small wonder that there is a heavy wastage of councillors who never stand for re-election. I look forward to the time when • councillors all over the country protest in a more aggressive manner, de- clining to resign their seats but also declining to carry out any duties until the government, of what- ever colour, allows us to put first things first. They could not imprison us all or replace us all by special commissioners.—Yours faithfully,
24 High Street, Maldon, Essex Alderman
DAVID CARGILL
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