Ahead of yesterday's Autumn Statement, the leader of Liverpool City Council wrote to the Chancellor.

Cllr Liam Robinson's missive to Jeremy Hunt was a grim read, to put it mildly. It laid out the myriad crises currently buffeting the council. From a homelessness emergency to overspends in adult and children's social care, this is a council in a very tough spot - and it is far from the only one.

Cllr Robinson's message to the Chancellor was clear, we need urgent help or vital services will be lost. He won't have heard much from Mr Hunt yesterday to assuage his worst fears. In fact things could be about to get much worse.

Mr Hunt may well have been full of vim and vigour as he laid out his plans for cuts to National Insurance, fast tracked in order to give the Tories the biggest possible boost ahead of a looming General Election. But in town halls across the country the optimism of the Chancellor will have been met with one big question - who is paying for all this?

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In reality, the Autumn Statement unleashed a new period of brutal austerity heading into that next election. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has warned that high inflation, combined with Mr Hunt's spending plans, will cut the real value of spending in government departments by more than £19 billion pounds.

This is at a time when demand for the services provided by these departments is expected to grow. For local councils it is another disaster set to arrive at a time of already competing crises. The OBR predicts that spending for unprotected departments - such as local government - will need to fall by 2.3% in real terms under the government's current spending plans.

And with inflation set to remain stubbornly high, the cost of borrowing for local councils, once a lifeline of the austerity years, has soared, making it more and more difficult.

Local government often feels the brunt of spending cuts. and town halls up and down the country will have been watching yesterday's Commons announcements with a grim sense of de ja vu.

A total of eleven Section 114 notices declaring effective bankruptcy have been issued by local councils since 2018 compared with just two in the 18 years before that. In recent months we have seen Birmingham, the country's largest council, file a Section 114 notice, while it Nottingham's local authority is considering going the same way amid crippling pressures.

And it is not just about our cash-strapped local councils. Look around Britain today and tell me this is a country that can afford another round of swingeing public service spending cuts. Our NHS is in crisis, our schools are crumbling and our justice system is a dangerous mess.

Writing in the Mirror, Merseyside-born Paul Nowak, the General Secretary of the TUC said: "This Cabinet of millionaires is happy for our kids to be taught in portable cabins and for our loved ones to be treated on trolleys. They are happy for local council services to be driven into the ground.

"They are happy for sewage to be pumped into rivers and for trains and buses to not run on time. The world looks very different from a private jet." I couldn't have put it better.

This Autumn Statement was a cynical, deeply political manoeuvre aimed purely at clawing back a few points in the polls ahead of the next election - it will do absolutely nothing to address the broken country that has been created over the past 13 years, in fact it could make things a whole lot worse.

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