Letter: Steely anger

IT WAS not just residual anger over the profligate waste of the World Student Games that makes Sheffielders reluctant to give back their council tax rebate ('Sheffield says 'no thanks' to a chance to give', 31 July). Services we were asked to 'restore' were cuts the council itself made in the first place. We once spent a whole year in which no new books were bought for libraries. And yet, the council could still find an pounds 80,000 write-off on a private company's 'Sheffield Festival', a pounds 5,000 contribution to a private company to defray the costs of their appeal against a drinks licence refusal; finance a recording studio; spend thousands on a 'Media Centre' project; and many more thousands earmarked for a Museum of Popular Music. The majority of Sheffielders consider our council as a disgrace to the national Labour movement. Hence their loss of eight seats in the last election. This is, I assure you, no Red Republic, just the last outpost of autocratic, centrist and apparatchik self-indulgence.

Robert Blackmore

Sheffield