Just because we stopped talking about austerity doesn’t mean it went away. The Centre for Cities published research this week on nearly a decade of Conservative fiscal tightening: councils have now lost 60p in every pound of funding they got from central government under Labour. Barnsley has suffered the greatest percentage cut in day-to-day spending on services, at 40%; Liverpool has had the deepest annual cuts per head, at £816. Three of the top five cities affected are in Yorkshire; there is a clear skew towards the north.

A new funding formula explicitly redirects funds away from inner cities and towards the shires. This is far from new news: Simon Duffy, from the Centre for Welfare Reform, published an astonishing report in 2014 that detailed the cumulative effects of cuts to local authorities and to benefits. To be reliant on both local authority services and welfare over this period has meant suffering hardships that simply would not have been approved by any voter, had the consequences been spelled out in a manifesto. So the effect on local democracy sounds abstract, set against more concrete catastrophes such as that in adult social care. Yet there are lessons here, some harsh ones, if we’re ever going to get to the business of political renewal.

Plan to redirect inner-city funds to Tory shires 'a stitch-up’ Read more

In the London borough of Lambeth, the council proposes the closure of five children’s centres, with the remaining 18 grouped in some complicated fashion that involves sharing staff and pared-down services. Parents have been staging regular protests, with organisational support from Unison. The Green party has made an alternative suggestion to the council, which is seeking to balance its books: if it were to increase its financial reserves by less than currently proposed, it could keep these centres open for the next four years, while the borough holds its breath for a change of government.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of children’s centres: they’re not simply part of a tapestry of early years provision, that you can pay for or not pay for, pick and choose. There is nothing else like them, where facilities, company, expertise and support are all located in the same place. “They’re important in the way libraries are, rich and poor all walking through the same door,” Kelly Rogers, a Unison organiser, has observed.

The Labour council, faced with opposition, is cleaving to its “blame Tory cuts” line, sending out self-congratulatory emails about its successful budgets that don’t even mention these closures, and only talk about the services they’ve managed to protect. In a dynamic that has been replicated all over the country, the Labour council has become the hand-wringing instrument of Conservative austerity. An implacable opposition has built up between local activists and purportedly leftwing local government officials. Campaigners previously mobilised opposition to library closures – thousands of people on one demonstration, in Brixton – and the council closed the libraries anyway, then reopened them. While it was never said, the imputation was that it wanted to avoid a climbdown – and this between people who are all theoretically on the same side, sharing the same values. Although maybe that’s too broad a church: whose values, outside Conservative HQ, don’t include libraries?

Yet the alternative to enacting cuts is to oppose them, the history of which is vexed (professional-speak for a nightmare). The last time local spending was hit this hard was in the mid-1980s, when rate-capping amounted to swingeing budget reductions, and 26 Labour councils opposed it absolutely. The result was a schism between those councils and the Labour leadership; a further breach within the Greater London Council between John McDonnell and Ken Livingstone; chaotic meetings, unworkable budgets, alienating, strongman showboating from every imaginable side. The language of that time is incredible: its imagery all corpses and suicides.

Ultimately the opposition failed, which one would imagine is the main reason Labour councillors today, many of whom remember it, cannot countenance direct disobedience. The red-on-red warfare, anti-austerity activists against councillors, is painfully understandable, but we make a mistake if we cast it as ideological, the new Old Labour left versus the old New Labour right. It is really just a range of human responses to a critical dishonesty: you cannot make progressive choices amid radical funding cuts. The austerity agenda has turned local democracy into a farce, and its natural opponents into its helpmeets.

The optimistic bit is that parents will still demonstrate, still occupy town halls with their toddlers, because that deadening standstill just isn’t good enough when there’s something concrete to preserve. The social spirit cannot be snuffed out; it can only be ignored for so long, before formal politics has to meet it.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist