The potentially doomed finances of both Somerset County and Taunton Deane Borough Councils, taking with them yet more heavy cuts in staff and locally provided services, is an easily predictable end result when you have a Tory government ideologically hell-bent on cutting public services to the bone and privatising everything it can lay its hands on.

It was predictably as sure as night follows day when government callously makes the extreme right-wing decision to simply remove centrally-funded revenue support grant, comprising some two-thirds of total budgets, over the ten-year period from 2010 to 2020.

The seeds of this further post-Brexit Tory chaos, sewn in past years of unnecessary Council Tax freezes and recent overspending to restore Ofsted-rated ‘inadequate’ children’s social services, or to follow the nonsensical takeover of a financially-failing West Somerset Council, now have truly come home to roost.

Can we take all this severe underfunding and mismanagement on the chin and still come up smiling?

Well, we have local elections next May, and a possible Brexit-led general election or ‘People’s Vote’ to follow these, where obviously our votes could be decisive in showing our disgust against what’s gone on.

More housing crisis misery, and its social ills of homelessness and debt-ridden struggles to pay rents or mortgages, also looks like receiving little relief from this Tory government’s latest Social Housing Green Paper.

Everyone knows that the solution lies in restoring yesteryear’s massive programme of council house building by removing present Tory shackles on councils’ borrowing.

However, getting the privatising Tory government on board – similarly for getting Right-to-Buy stopped or curtailed – is nigh impossible, making the Green Paper somewhat dead on housing solutions when not a single penny of new funding is proposed for local councils to build new council homes.

Alan Debenham, Clifford Avenue, Taunton.