Not a fair cop, or even a raven-haired one.

What do our new masters mean when they talk of preserving frontline services?

In all the pre- and post-Budget chatter about job and funding cuts in the public sector, the most worrying concern to me is that Cumbria Constabulary, which one might have thought would be protected as a frontline service, is to suffer both kinds.

Already stretched in covering the second largest, mainly rural and sparsely populated English county and, unfairly in my view, criticised by some for failing to stop Derrick Bird's killing spree, Cumbria's police were already halting recruitment last year due to financial constraints.

Few police constables anywhere - or, indeed, chief constables - can boast 2.1 degrees in criminology and sociology, but one glamorously strapping Cumbrian lass, whom I had coached in essay writing toward graduation, and who was eager for a career in law enforcement, was told there was no vacancy for her in the police.

She had met a similar response when - having initially been offered a commission for a good degree - she applied to join the RAF police.

Having latterly been in charge of a cosmetics counter in a department store, she was this month taking tests to determine whether she was suitable to enter the Army's Intelligence Corps as a private, though I suspect she would not remain long overlooked in the ranks.

If someone so able cannot find a job suited to her talents in public service, what hope will lesser mortals, now being or about to be made redundant, have of finding employment in what our new Con-Lib masters tell us will be a recovery-driving private sector?

Maybe their best bet would be to try to emulate that celebrated breaker of banks, Nick Leeson; the plasterer's son made bad.