All around us, a familiar disaster grinds on: constant increases in demand on our most crucial public services, which the financially blitzed councils charged with providing them simply cannot meet. The result is a story that speaks volumes about Westminster’s state of contorted denial: increasing numbers of our cities, towns and counties now face municipal bankruptcy, but no one in any position of national power and influence seems to want to talk about it.

The dire predicament of councils all over England now invites an obvious question: at what point might we collectively realise that hundreds of local crises now add up to a national catastrophe? Our political culture is too Westminster-focused to follow the stories and join the dots; the dreaded term “local government” still causes eyes to glaze over. But all over the country, the picture is now the same, and things are rapidly nearing the point of complete breakdown.

Up until last year, the handful of councils that had issued section 114 notices – a reference to the part of the Local Government Finance Act of 1988 that covers insolvent local authorities – were mostly mired in stories of financial mismanagement. Then came the fall of Birmingham city council, tipped into bankruptcy late last year by its mishandling of an equal-pay claim and a £100m IT project. By that point, a longstanding fear was becoming inescapable: that whatever the faults and flaws of particular council leaderships, a systemic crisis was about to break. The proof arrived when Nottingham city council hit the skids amid talk of a grimly familiar gap between local revenues and the sheer cost of constantly trying to patch up our fraying social fabric.

Nearly one in five council leaders in England now say they are likely to declare bankruptcy in the next 15 months. The latest places to sound warnings about financial collapse include Stoke-on-Trent, Middlesbrough, Somerset, Bradford and Cheshire East. The recently announced 6.5% increase in funds the government gives to councils will barely touch the sides. In both deprived and affluent parts of the country, the millions being cut from local services echo the fiscal savagery of George Osborne’s austerity.