In those few, fading photos of my early childhood are shaky shots of a toddler on Sandown beach.

These evoke in me the smell of cigarette smoke and Ambre Solaire alongside the tinny sounds of the test match on transistor radios.

In the background, holidaymakers soak up the sun in deckchairs hired from Sandown-Shanklin Urban District Council.

A few years later, in 1974, the deckchairs changed from SSUDC to the new South Wight Borough Council.

The era of autonomous local government for Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor was over as local government reorganisation swept the country. 20 years on another wave of reorganisation hit.

The first unitary authority in the country was created here on the Isle of Wight, and those deckchairs got a new proprietor in the Isle of Wight Council.

Since then, the trend for creating larger unitary authorities from smaller councils has continued under Labour and Conservative governments, and even now, with new unitaries created this year in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Somerset.

Larger, single-tier authorities are created because successive governments suggest that the way to gain funding and support is to band together with neighbouring authorities.

In the case of the Isle of Wight that would mean working with Hampshire - or parts of it.

Politically this is unpopular. Nonetheless after failed bids to various Westminster-controlled 'deals' and 'funds', and the non-appearance of Boris Johnson's Island Deal, it remains business as usual for the Isle of Wight Council to be the junior partner in the latest scheme to dress up the Solent area into something that looks like a local authority.

In June this year the leaders of Southampton, Portsmouth and Isle of Wight councils asked the government to consider a joint bid excluding the rest of Hampshire, which, along with the Island, is already being proposed by yet another consortium of councils. Are you confused?

Possibly we are supposed to be. This sounds boring and irrelevant. But if you have an interest in how councils provide services to us, it isn't.

It's difficult to understand why another local government reorganisation would be a good use of our council funds.

The pressure for reorganisation is from central government, not from councils or local people.

This was true after the 1996 reorganisation, when the government-appointed commissions - the Banham Commission and the Cooksey Commission - found that in the majority of the shire counties, a move to unitaries was not justified for efficiency reasons, nor did it attract public support. But unification continued.

Are we fooled into rearranging the deckchairs on Sandown beach when we should perhaps be paying attention to the iceberg of government funding cuts?

Central government grants were cut 37 per cent in real-terms between 2009/10 and 2019/20.

Government must stop playing about with these abortive and wasteful reorganisation scenarios.

We should get fairer funding for our local services, and until we do, no amount of deckchair rebranding is going to fix the problems of local government on the Island or elsewhere.