IT WOULD be easy to paint the people running Oxfordshire County Council and the county’s NHS as pantomime baddies over total projected cuts of £346m which threaten local government and health services.

It was a coincidence that both bodies announced their cash crises yesterday — the health service revealing £240m needs to be saved over three years from 2011, while the county council highlighted which services it believed would be affected by cost-cutting measures.

Patients will be concerned, while motorists facing higher costs and poorer conditions, and youth and social services groups, will be naturally outraged at some of the proposals.

But both organisations can quite rightly say their hands have been tied by the financial shackles of Government funding.

We are in a recession and the billions used by the Government to prop up sectors like the banking and car industries has to come from somewhere.

Local authorities are the ones in the firing line today and it should be a surprise to no-one. If it does then they have been living on Mars.

We must be realistic about this.

But what the taxpayers of Oxfordshire can justifiably demand is that the Government spending axe does not fall disproportionately on local authorities.

The pain would be made bearable if there were corresponding cuts to the behemoth national civil service that has sprouted over the past decade.

In good times, these legions of civil servants made hay from a system awash with money.

Now, when things are tight, it is time for Gordon Brown to take the axe he has poised over our local services, and apply it equally to the inflated administration arm of Government.