The botched chopping of 706 BSF school-building schemes will have much more serious results than the 25 deplorable errors in informing schools that their projects were going ahead, only to be quickly told by a red-faced Secretary of State that actually they were not.   We now know what a senior Departmental source meant when he leaked his view that it had been ‘bloody chaos’ inside DE.   It shows when an inexperienced and administratively incompetent ideologue takes charge.    But that’s the least of it.

Politically it registered the first tremors of the impact that this torrent of deep cuts is going to have.   We were warned that everyone’s way of life will be affected, but Tory and LibDem MPs hadn’t expected it would be them.   And this is just for starters – when the cuts begin hitting local hospitals, social care centres, police numbers, transport facilities and housing availability, it won’t just be Labour MPs defending their own patch, but the furore will cross party lines and spill over on to the streets.

But cuts on this scale eat into the public service fabric of society in unexpected ways too.   This BSF massacre was intended to save £3.4bn to provide the funding space for Gove’s ‘free schools’.   At my constituency clinic tonight it began to be apparent what this might mean.   I had a delegation, even when the fall-out from Gove’s shambles was still continuing, arguing that they wanted State funding under these new free school provisions for an all-girls primary and secondary school to serve the Muslim community of Oldham.   I was also lobbied to press the case for a new Catholic school for the population of Oldham which would release the site for an Academy.

It’s not just Gove’s initial announcement that has been taken apart and ridiculed,  it’s the wider implications that have not been properly worked through which are about to unleash a Pandora’s Box of no doubt unintended, but still deeply troubling, consequences.

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