THERE’S a contempt for ordinary people and their concerns that our political classes barely bother to hide these days.

First we had half the Remain camp demanding a rerun of the EU referendum.

Having failed to carry public opinion with them, they declared that the voters didn’t know what they were doing, that they must have been misled by Boris and his Brexiteers, and that their opinions could therefore be ignored.

I voted Remain, but I wouldn’t dream of being so disrespectful to the majority of my fellow electors who took the opposite view.

If we give the public a vote, we must put up with the result.

Even though it means Salisbury ends up under the political control of someone elected to our unitary authority by just 820 apparently sane individuals residing somewhere between Chippenham and Chipping Sodbury.

Now we’ve had the disturbing spectacle of Baroness Scott of Bybrook, OBE (for it is she!) seeking government help in the House of Lords to break up the recently-merged Wiltshire and Dorset fire service.

Why? Because she wants to put Conservative Police Commissioner Angus Macpherson in charge of our county’s firefighters – though I expect she’d be taking a close personal interest in the progress of the project.

Call Me Jane didn’t want the merger in the first place.

Although both counties’ fire chiefs declared that joining forces was the best way to avoid frontline cuts and to safeguard lives and property, and although two-thirds of people who responded to a public consultation agreed with them, she hasn’t accepted that they might have been right or extinguished her hopes.

Because what all those folk wanted wasn’t what Wiltshire’s elite wanted. Which was more power concentrated in their hands – so that they could ‘maximise the efficiency of our blue-light services’, naturally.

Just as they ‘maximised the efficiency’ of our police force, by closing the Wilton Road police station without a clue what to do next.

Hence the shambles over where to base response cars, with the choice veering as wildly as a speeding joyrider between Five Rivers community campus and Amesbury police station (soon to be no more either, by the sound of it) and now Bourne Hill, where their constant comings and goings are upsetting residents.

Hence the continuing failure to provide Salisbury with a custody unit, forcing the ferrying of felons to Melksham, where they may well find a neighbouring cell occupied by some poor soul for whom no mental health bed can be found.

And hence the sale of our CCTV headquarters before replacement crimefighting cameras were up and running.

Efficiency? Wiltshire’s a byword for it.

Meanwhile over at the combined fire authority, chairman Rebecca Knox, a Dorset councillor, has pronounced the joint venture a success and insisted that there are “absolutely no plans to change our governance arrangements”.

I’d say: Not yet, there aren’t. But don’t ignore those alarm bells.

anneriddle36@gmail.com