Me and my Father went shopping today

And in a repeat of an incident we had this time last year a lot of the items on my usual shopping list were strangely not in stock. For reasons I won't go into I could tell that this was a purely locally organised effort so we'll have to put it down to Croydon Council's recent ill-advised attempt to play spy games.

I can only assume that Croydon Council is picking up so much local support for their efforts because they've put about a rumour that if they are to meet their financial obligations to me they would have to either raise council tax or cut local services.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact there is a specific clause in the settlement agreement which states that payments to me may not be funded through central government grants, cuts to local services or rises in council tax. Instead the money must be shown to come from direct cuts to the real world incomes of specific, named local council employees.

That clause probably explains why those specific, named council employees are so against the deal. After all if it was only taxpayers money at risk they'd probably go out an buy a big screen TV to watch it on.