I HAVE read with much interest the commentary and letters regarding the crisis in council funding that has been highlighted over the past couple of weeks.

I must admit I am amazed people have expressed their shock that this has happened.

We have a Labour Government, a Labour MP and a Labour council.

Labour is a party that likes to spend, spend, spend, knowing the taxpayers will have no choice but to pay, pay, pay.

They spent £644,000 on two days pleasing impressionable young people with the likely result of making many people redundant across the borough - and they then had the nerve to say their only regret was that they hadn't made the decision to make the AIR Festival free from day one.

So what reactions have we had? Council Leader Phil Mould has accepted no responsibility on behalf of the ruling Labour group.

Rather than admit their enormous ineptitude, he asks the people of Redditch to come up with some ideas for them.

I've got some great ideas, Mr Mould, and I'm afraid that number one on my list is for you and your colleagues to resign.

Our long-serving MP? While unapologetically using taxpayers' money to send political messages to her constituents (and having to go down on bended-knee to her own Secretary of State to plead for leniency for the Alexandra Hospital), she completely blanks the whole emergency and decides to ignore it.

When the Conservative-led council dared to raise the issue of looking at the cost of complimentary bus passes in order to try to balance the books, Ms Smith took every opportunity to get onto the front page with her placard-waving supporters.

Now, with service closures threatened all around, she won't even mention it in her own column.

Perhaps she was too busy defending her boss, Ruth Kelly, on Radio 4 to care about her constituents and the services they pay for.

DAVID WARD

Webheath