MANY of your readers will be anxiously watching river levels in hope. But hope is the most that residents can expect for the foreseeable future.

The biggest victims of six years of budgetary cuts are precisely those who have the legal obligations to protect, support and promote our common welfare.

Local public service providers are silent, unable to oppose the cuts.

What school head, care home provider, doctor, police chief, general, librarian, prison officer or firewoman could state publicly that the public were at growing risk of service collapse?

Local government is going under and nobody, except the leader of North Yorkshire County Council, Cllr Carl Les, seems willing to own up and to protest.

Flooding, and the background depletion in funding for flood defences, is only the latest in a growing liturgy of oncoming calamities to public services that local government is unable to halt.

With cuts of 40 per cent in the last Parliament and with a further 36 per cent scheduled, local government is obliged to allocate cuts to the bones of even the sparse flood alleviation measures. We know what is needed in our areas. But without public money from public taxation most of these solutions are ignored.

Flooding is a public problem that can only be solved by public action.

Those unavoidably shared things we all need to survive and prosper (called “public goods” by economists), such as clean air, water, a safe country, safe environments, houses, streets and roads, national health and education, support in crisis, need effective central planning and provision, supported financially by general taxation.

A&E crisis, potholes, bullied care patients, ambulance delays, diminished or closed libraries, failed or not installed flood defences, are just the tip of the iceberg of public service cuts. Homelessness is a crisis returning to our streets.

My solution is novel, inspired by Cllr Les. Those who run our public services in North Yorkshire are Conservative Party members or voters.

Six years into office, they bear the responsibility to protect us. If you think things have gone too far or far enough, why not contact your parish, district and county councillors, and MPs? Ask them how they intend to protect us from a further planned reduction of the tax base and with on-going funding cuts?

Ask what will be left of our county worth having after the deficit is paid off and a “war chest” is stocked for some vague future crisis?

But wait – they know already! Cllr Les declared another £25m “crisis”

in council services (D&S Times, Dec 25) so he knows the truth.

Local government is being allowed to, and is planned to, go under. Join Cllr Les and protest now!

Dr John Gibbins, Sowerby, Thirsk