A return from a holiday is always interesting, because it offers a chance to catch up on what’s been happening and review it from a little distance.
The big issue of the past few days concerned the cut in council tax benefits  to working age people, who will see their council tax benefits cut by 25%– with the severely disabled and families also sharing the pain.
And is that bad news?
Not a bit of it.
In Worst Street-speak this is all about being fair – which many now see as a euphemism for making the less fortunate even more so – in this case through financial penalties.
Critics claimed – and it’s hard to argue with them – that the cuts will affect the most vulnerable and lowest-paid people of Boston.
At the meeting which approved the cuts, it was left to the council’s youngest member, Councillor Aaron Spencer, who represents Five Village ward, to accuse opponents of  “making statements to appease the public to get re-elected again.”
And his interpretation of the benefit cuts was to say: “We live in a country now where everybody has to be seen to have equal rights
“We can’t be seen to discriminate one set of beneficiaries from another. I support this entirely, it’s the right thing for this council.”
Regular readers might recall mention of Councillor Spencer in last year’s Boston Eye, when he was pictured on a friend’s Facebook page slouched in a chair variously puffing on a Churchill-sized cigar and upending a bottle of Glenfiddich  - although he told us that the latter was simply striking a pose.
Just the kind of  image we need for a  lecture on equal rights for rich and poor alike.
It seems to us that our ruling Tories seem to have lost sight of the Cameronesque mantra that we are all in this together.
Equality works both ways – so why does no one ever suggest reducing the council tax paid by people who aren’t receiving benefits to the level of those who are?
It’s now the second time that the disabled have taken a hit – the last was the abolition of free parking for blue badge holders with the laughable “concession” of an extra half an hour’s free parking to allow the disable extra time to limp back to their cars.
On that occasion we heard the pitiful argument of Councillor Derek Richmond - who insisted that disabled people resent free parking because it discriminates against them, and his colleague Gloria Smith, who subsequently uttered the even more pathetic “It’s nice that we are not going to be discriminated against, we are going to be treated as equal and being charged.”
Everywhere we turn, it seems that the Tories are trying to re-write the dictionary as they ramp up charges for parking, dying, relaxing – you name it, they’ll tax it.
Most recently, we heard Council Leader Pete Bedford summarise the pressure caused by inward immigration as being little more than one of noise.
This idea of false equality and a diminution of reality is just what we don’t want to hear.
We think that most people understand the need for economies, and that we all need to play our part to share the burden.
What we don’t need are facile, glib, councillors who are convinced that they are proper politicians treating us like idiots.

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