WHAT has happened in Manchester this week could well form the blueprint for what will happen in Liverpool shortly.

Manchester City Council has announced £110m- worth of spending cuts over the coming year that will see everything from the closure of public libraries, swimming baths and toilets to a 20% cut in adult social care services.

Drivers will have to pay for street parking on Sundays and bins will be collected less frequently. Around 2,500 council jobs will disappear.

In Liverpool, we know we have to cut £90m a year and 1,500 council jobs and 500 voluntary sector jobs are to go. You can be sure that, when Liverpool comes to publish its detailed plans, they will look very similar to Manchester’s.

It is in the context of these cuts that council leader Joe Anderson has withdrawn this city from David Cameron’s Big Society initiative, calling it a “big con”. Cllr Anderson doesn’t see how the Big Society can be made to work while the jobs of so many public servants and charity workers are being dispensed with.

Cllr Anderson has judged this issue correctly. The Prime Minister’s Big Society idea was dreamed up after he realised the extent of social damage the cuts would cause. The Big Society idea is no more than conscience salving spin.

What Mr Cameron has failed to understand is that cities like Liverpool have been running social care and other services along Big Society lines for many years already.

Hundreds of millions of council cash is already spent on sub-contracting social services to well- run private and voluntary sector organisations. Any cuts, therefore, are bound to hurt, not help, these organisations.

It might be possible for the private and voluntary sectors to offer efficiency savings to councils by streamlining their operations across several boroughs, a bit like how some councils are currently sharing in-house staff and managers across local authority boundaries. If this were to happen, though, overall service levels would shrink and we would have to call it the Consolidated Society – or the Smaller Society.

VARIOUS petitions protesting against sharply rising petrol prices are in the throes of being compiled and submitted to government.

According to its website, over 65,000 people have signed the Fair Fuel Campaign’s petition, which, as well as representing motoring groups such as the RAC, also includes petrol retailers.

They argue that the forthcoming 5p fuel duty increase should be scrapped.

David Cameron has already agreed to think about introducing a mechanism to stabilise petrol prices, though some of his more recent comments have been interpreted as playing down this prospect.

Fuel duty and VAT currently accounts for about 80p of the £1.29 price of a litre of petrol. Any cut in fuel taxes would, initially, make a big difference to forecourt prices.

I suspect, though, that any relief would be short- lived. Oil prices have been rising rapidly in recent months and, more tellingly, have been on a general upward trajectory over the past decade. That trend has been caused by rapidly rising demand from the world’s emerging economies. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

Consumers and companies in the West are going to have to get used to the idea of permanently higher prices.

We are going to have to learn to share the earth’s resources with more people, whether that be oil, copper or food, at least until such time as there is a big improvement in supplies.