HAVING felt the full force of spending cuts this financial year - to the extent of some 300 teaching jobs being axed - Lancashire's hard-pressed schools are to have their budgets boosted in the next one by around five per cent.

But while staff, parents and pupils may sigh with relief, this is no respite for education overall as elsewhere in the service the expenditure axe is set to come down just as mercilessly as it has on schools this year.

The only comfort is that the way the cuts have been targeted this time is a result of county councillors responding sympathetically to the continual and justified howls of anguish from the schools sector and sparing them another year of suffering.

Yet the upshot is only a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul exercise that might superficially make the latest cuts seem less obvious, but is unable to make them any less painful. For, despite the pressure being, quite rightly, taken off the the schools sector, the cuts still come to a whopping £6.6million and hit jobs and important areas in other parts of the education service.

And that is even to the extent of children with special needs being made to suffer.

Also lined up for a stiff dose of hardship are the county youth service and students - a group already on the poverty line - who face slashed grants or none at all.

Indeed, everything from school dinners to youngsters' swimming lessons is hit by the cuts scatter-gun now that it is deflected from the schools themselves.

But, as ever, Lancashire is being made to suffer this hardship, not by choice, but by government diktat.

Its capping of local government spending, not to mention the associated trampling on local democracy, is to blame.

That it is too much we already know from this year's holocaust in our schools.

That it is unfair we see from the ignored grassroots rebellion against capping at last year's Tory Party conference and over vital local services being slashed to the bone. There is no excuse for it.

It stems only from the government's desperation to build up an election war chest enabling it to bribe voters with their own money - and from an ideological prejudice against local government, particularly where opposition parties are in charge.

But the voters are not mugs.

They know these cruel cuts are down to the government, not the county council.

And they will remember at the ballot box.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.