This year is only eight weeks old, yet we can already write a brief history of the near future.

In Coventry, victims of sexual violence will no longer get counselling from the city’s one dedicated service, because it ran out of money when the local authority slashed its grant. Over in Birmingham, where the great Victorian preacher George Dawson once promised “everything to everybody”, the city’s orchestra, theatre and art galleries are scrambling to stay open: their municipal funding will be halved from April and disappear entirely next year. In the former mining town of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, the Citizens Advice service is closing for want of council money. Their colleagues in Woking, Surrey, are resorting to crowdfunding, just so they can help locals facing homelessness or suffocating debt. And across the country, from Cornwall to Norfolk, cash-strapped town halls are switching off street lights. Elsewhere, bus routes are cancelled, council houses are rotting in disrepair and local government officers are working out which community centres can be closed and their buildings sold to developers.

This is not some threatened dystopia; it is happening right now, right in front of your nose. I drew all the above examples from this paper or local reporting services. True, they won’t make as good a radio phone-in as the latest belch from Lee Anderson. But for most people, the vaporisation of both the services and the public realm they once took for granted will be the defining crisis of British politics in 2024.

Politics and whether the state is working comes down, for most people, most of the time, to the things they see in front of them. Nuclear submarines? Never seen one. Prisons?........

© The Guardian