THE bad weather reminded us all of one of life’s eternal truths. When things seem to go wrong, the council gets the blame.

Not the police or fire service, not the government, the water company or the Environment Agency. It’s the ever-present, invariably fallible local authority.

And a good thing too. Councils must be accountable.

They have to deliver services and results and be open to public scrutiny and challenge. People expect councils to speak up for the community and ensure that other public bodies pull together to improve the local quality of life.

The day people stop having those expectations, the day they stop complaining, or occasionally praising, what the council has done, we may as well shut up shop. We will no longer have a role in our community.

This week that day came a lot closer. When Local Government Minister, Eric Pickles stood up in the House of Commons and laid out the details of his cuts, he was declaring war on local democracy as we know it.

Please don’t think this is another of the phoney wars that central and local government engage in every now and again. This is the real thing and a lot of communities, and a lot of people, are going to get hurt.

The £15m cuts that Middlesbrough faces this year, the £16m our colleagues in Stockton must deal with, the £15.5m in Redcar and Cleveland are the opening salvos in the war that will continue for the next four years.

Councils will survive. They will manage, as best they can, the new financial situation.

They will never deliberately let people down.

They will adapt and protect services.

But if the process that began this week is allowed to go unchecked they will emerge as very different organisations. They will not be able to deliver the range or the quality of services that people have come to expect. Their ability to tackle disadvantage and deprivation will have been drastically reduced.

Because sadly this is turning into a war of north versus south, affluent against impoverished.

The cuts are bad enough. Locally they were even worse than the professional pessimists who run council finance departments expected.

They also represent a massive transfer of resources from disadvantaged areas to better-off boroughs that have a large council tax take. They follow the axing of programmes like the Working Neighbourhood Fund specifically aimed at areas with severe economic problems.

We are all in this together, the Government tells us. Some of us are in deeper than others.

Perhaps you disagree with this analysis and think that this is a just war in which the enemies are waste, inefficiency and red tape.

But before you trot out the phrases about fat cats, featherbedding and gold-plated pensions, I would ask that you look honestly at the performance of your local council, the savings it has already delivered year-on-year, and the extra duties and responsibilities it has taken on.

Then I would ask you to look forward and think for a moment about what kind of democracy, what kind of society the current process will leave us with, in which local democratic institutions are shorn of the ability to deliver those services and help people in need.

You will be looking at society that is run for the benefit of those with the fattest wallets and sharpest elbows. It won’t be a pleasant sight and it will be a pretty hollow victory for the winners.