Safety checks run down and boom time for criminals: this is why the UK is becoming the ‘dustbin of Europe’ | Polly Toynbee

The officials who ensure our consumer goods are safe are being lost to Tory neglect. They work without fanfare but they are vital

Never forget that all the sound and fury in Westminster is about something very real. Politicians and their parties are not all the same". On one side, the Conservatives diminish and damage the public realm, the lives and livelihoods of those with least and the quality of civic values. On the other side, Labour strives to improve public services, the public sphere and enhance the life chances and living standards of those people that the Tories do down.

I'm not sure why I am still so easily shocked by the Tories' vandalism. But time and again I come across some new act of sabotage that takes my breath away. This time it's their stripping out of an already thin veneer of civilisation by laying waste to trading standards. Now this is a dull and invisible service, you might think, the sort of thing anyone from a first-world country could take for granted. No longer, just as you no longer assume the rivers are safe from sewage.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist