Thank 'e kindly, sir!

How quickly times change. With Duckworth's booster seat hardly cold, and despite public denials of a financial meltdown at the Council, financial wheeze-kid Dave Burbidge called senior managers together this week to announce 2.5% cuts across all services in a last ditch effort to bridge the £8.5m gap which has appeared in the budget, despite an ongoing massive raid on balances.

Coupled with this announcement was an admission that next year's Council Tax rise will be 5% regardless, whatever the results of the "budget consultation" currently underway.

So how is it that Pugh can raise Council Tax next April by the maximum amount allowed under the Government rate capping rules, thereby inflicting on Isle of Wight residents the highest increase in the Country, and yet still deliver on his manifesto commitment? As ever, the devil is in the detail. All the manifesto said was that the increase would be "no more than the Retail Price Index", without specifying when or where. The Council has settled on the one month 5% blip in the index last September which resulted from the similarly short lived peak in oil prices, rather than using the 1% or less forecast for the coming year and beyond.

The justification for this odd but convenient choice is that state pensions next April will go up in line with the September 2008 Retail Price Index, so pensioners can have no gripe if Council Tax does the same. This might be a plausible argument if Council Tax reflected ability to pay, or even level of service received, but this has never even remotely been the case.

Many pensioners like myself, whose income is mainly fixed and whose modest life savings scupper any prospect of means tested support, will pay an extra £6 per month to have the bins emptied at their band D dwelling next year. The increase in state pension will be £15.60 per month, so Pugh and his administration will be grabbing a whopping 38% of it to pay for fat cats, consultants and financial mismanagement.

Bastards.