Culture of Waste

OK, I’ve started again now. Dangerous thing, ranting. It’s habit-forming.

This had me swearing at the radio this morning. Birmingham City Council organising a “day of culture” in support of its bid to become the UK’s first City of Culture, whatever that means and however it might differ from European Cities of Culture such as (snigger) Liverpool and (guffaw) Glasgow. And culture means just about anything, it seems. If you’re in Birmingham and you visit an art gallery, the Council are dying to hear from you. If you do a bit of dancing, do tell the Council. If you cook a meal or go out on your skateboard, the Council want to hear about it. No really, they do.

But if you forget to tell them, don’t worry, they’ll find out. From another page on this specially commissioned, taxpayer-funded website: “Throughout the 24 hours there will be roving reporters, out and about, visiting events across the city to report back live on the website on what the city is getting up to. Armed with video cameras they will capture Birmingham enjoying culture in its many forms!”. God Almighty.

And the Conservatives are getting slammed for wanting to save money ?

Birmingham City Council, it will be recalled, was recently the focus of protests and demonstrations when they announced that they need to make 2,000 job cuts over the next year. Birmingham City Council, the organisation that brought us “Winterval”. Birmingham City Council, which has overspent its budget to the tune of £75m. I wonder how they did that, then ?

All this is being fronted by some publicly-funded Council-offshoot called Birmingham Cultural Partnership. They claim to be working to: “Get more local people involved in culture (including arts, libraries, music, dance museums and galleries)”

Well, don’t. Work to educate your kids, keep your streets clean, help the homeless and mend the potholes. Leave the rest to the people. And save them a fortune in the process.

Too Much, Too Hoon

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is responsible for investigating public spending and taking the government to task over waste and inefficiency. As you might expect they've unearthed some real shockers, so when they report on one project which they say was among the worst they’ve ever examined, you know it’s going to be bad.

Step forward, the Department for Transport (led from the front by everybody's favourite idiot)

They’ve been managing (no, hang on, that’s a gross misuse of the word) responsible for a “Shared Services” project designed to cut departmental administrative costs and increase efficiency. The headlines from the catalogue of disaster unveiled by the PAC are:

...the project was supposed to cost £55m and deliver £112m in savings;
...instead, it’s cost £121m and saved just £40m;
...that’s a net cost to the taxpayer of £81m, for something that was supposed to SAVE £57m;
...confidence in the underlying IT system is so low that only two out of the department’s seven agencies are using it…
......which might partly be explained by the fact that (among other things) it’s been issuing messages to users in German.

Edward Leigh, the admirable PAC Chairman, doesn’t normally mince his words but even he doesn’t use phrases like “stupendous incompetence” on a regular basis. But he did in this case. He also described the outcome of this project as “lamentable”.

What Leigh does say - on a basis so regular that he must feel like a broken record - is that senior officials should be rewarded for success and penalised for failure. He also talked about the Department for Transport’s need to overhaul its project management, review the capabilities of its managers and subject future projects to robust challenge.

All of which will have gone in one ear of the Department (if we’re lucky) and out of the other. A DoT spokesman is quoted as saying “As with any large scale and long term project, there have been aspects of Shared Services that have taken longer to implement than others…..We welcome this report and will be responding to its recommendations in due course, with an update on our progress."

Which roughly translated means: “We could not give a toss”. You'll already have guessed how many sackings or disciplinary proceedings have taken place as a result of this fiasco. That's right...a number less than one.

Full story here, if you can stand it.

As The Crisis Grows, Our Politicans Let Us Down

According to Gordon Brown’s analysis the economic situation is thus. We are just entering a prolonged and profound economic recession which has been fuelled by debt. Of everyone with a negative balance sheet the government is top of the pile; borrowing stands at nearly £38bn for the first half of the year, an increase of 75% on last year. The answer to this is for the government to start spending even more money than it has been doing, and at the same time to cut taxes. In other words, the answer to the debt crisis is…MORE DEBT !

So, all the leaders trot off to the G20 summit over the weekend, which is little more than a massive photo opportunity and a chance for each leader to spin that this is a global problem – i.e. not their fault. To call it an unedifying spectacle is to err on the decidedly generous side. The conclusion appears to have been is for everyone to spend money which they simply haven’t got in an effort to boost flagging economies.

I find all this profoundly depressing. Governments have never been any good at boosting economies or creating jobs. That is best left to the private sector. The cost per job created by government spending is huge, and whatever entity they build in the process is usually unwieldy and inefficient. Whatever the answers to our current economic travails, yet more government spending is not one of them. The government behaves like a compulsive shopper; it has borrowed more than it ever dreamt of on the plastic, and while the red bills pile up the only thing it can think of doing is to keep on spending.

At times like this, with a socialist government looking to spend money hand over fist, I look to the Opposition for common sense. But we’re not getting it. Whilst not (yet) resorting to the government’s discredited Keynesian theories, they too are in denial about the true size of the hole we’re in.

Owing to the government’s reckless spending of the last few years, the simple fact is that we, as a nation, are broke; penniless, bankrupt, absolutely borassic. We haven’t got a pot to piss in. At times like this more spending is the last thing we need, closely followed, though it pains me to say it, by unfunded tax cuts.

The problem is what we need now is an opposition party with guts, a party prepared to say the unpopular. But far from preaching the classical virtues of sound money, the Conservatives have allowed themselves to have get locked into a bidding war on tax cuts which we simply cannot afford. Anyone who seriously believes that the tax cuts put forward by Cameron and Osborne will not cost money, at least in the short term, is deluding themselves. The Tories’ claim for fiscal responsibility rings hollow.

What we need is for someone, somewhere to stand up and say this: “We are broke. We cannot cut taxes and we need to cut spending. The reason is that for the last ten years the government has been spending money it does not have”. And no one’s got the guts to say it.

Brown's Britain

A selection from today’s news stories…

It has emerged that eleven crime suspects whose DNA details went unchecked for over a year have offended in the UK. The data disk was sent over here by Dutch police, and is believed to have stayed in someone’s desk drawer while they were on sick leave.

Doctors’ leaders have claimed that the health and safety of prisoners is being jeopardised by putting them in ill-equipped cells at police stations and courts (bear in mind too that many of these prisoners will not have been found guilty of any crime at this point in their incarceration).

The Public Accounts Committee has found that since the government started spending £800m over the past five years trying to reduce the number of students who leave their university courses, the drop-out rate remains unchanged at 22%.

A murder inquiry has begun after a 16-year-old boy was found stabbed to death in Woolwich, becoming the fifth teenager to be killed in London this year.

Don’t you just love this government ?

What Do These Guys Do All Day ?

The more I see of the State's activities, the more I think that there must be a serious number of people in its employ who have nothing to do.

Yesterday both Womble On Tour Juniors arrived home from school with a letter from the Council informing us of the perils imposed upon all-and-sundry by those who park on the zig-zag lines outside the school.

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At the bottom of the letter there was an invitation, complete with tear-off slip (see above) for parents to make a signed declaration that they wouldn't park their cars on the zig-zag lines. Once we've filled in this form, we're expected to return it to the school.

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What happens to these forms then, I wonder ? Do you think they get collated, and sent to some sort of "Zig Zag Tsar" at the Town Hall ? Perhaps schools that don't return more than a certain percentage get penalised in some way ? Perhaps parents who don't fill them in get enrolled for Remdial Parking Classes ?

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More fundamentally, how can it be that we end up paying so much in taxes that we're actually funding this kind of rubbish ? If they want to stop illegal parking outside schools, all the have to do is send a traffic warden up there every so often, which is what they're threatening to do anyway.

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I'm intrigued as to what happens with these forms. I'm going to mail the guy who's sent them out to discover the truth. If you want to mail him too, you can do, at david.warbuton@kirklees.gov.uk. Go on, give him something to do.

The Right's Dilemma - Adapt, Fight or Die ?

The announcement that the Conservatives are going to match Labour's public spending commitments for the next three years has created a lot of comment on Conservative blogs, and not all of it complementary.

You can really divide reaction into two camps:
Camp 1: this is realpolitik and the only way to go;
Camp 2: this is complete sell-out, what the hell is the Conservative Party for is it isn't to campaign for lower taxes at a time when we are taxed more than ever ? (Even Iain Dale, not known for being a mouthpiece of the Right, expresses the view that we ought to be able to find a couple of billion worth of savings from somewhere).

There's an element of truth in both arguments. To the pro-individual, anti-State, anti-high taxation, brigade we live in deeply depressing times. There is no doubt that we have, in the eyes of the public, lost the debate on public spending. Just as the Left lost the debate on that and on other issues such as privatisation and multilateralism in the 1980s, so we have to accept now that we are not in tune with the public mood. The public are oblivious to (or don't care about) the ratchet effect of public spending identified by the likes of Thatcher, Joseph and Friedman.

That means two things. Firstly we have to keep campaigning and explaining the moral imperative of low taxation. Secondly we have to accept that if a tax-cutting party is to come into office, either we wait for a long time - during which more damage is done - or we support a party seen as one that doesn't want to cut public spending, at least for the moment. That's the dilemma which every natural "Conservative" has to face: do we swallow our principles and vote for George Osborne matching Brown £-for-£, or do fight on alone (or possibly not at all ?)

The Conservative Party is in the same position as Labour were at the start of the 'nineties. Public appetite for their traditional agenda is low, so they've got a choice; do they adapt to the public mood, or stick to their age-old principles and hope to win the public over at some point ? And if it's the latter, how much damage is done before they start winning elections again ? Would it be better to be in charge of the public expenditure bandwagon, but able to have the accelerator pressed down a little less firmly that it would be with Labour in the driving seat ? (Apologies for mixing metaphors !)

New Labour chose the "adapt" option, and are now, with the public seemingly on their side, arguably moving to the Left. Does the Conservative Party do the same thing ? Does it seek power based on a centralist agenda and then seek to move to the Right by stealth ? And if it doesn't, is it risking terminal decline, playing a tune that the public no longer wants to hear ?

So what's the answer ? For me, wherever it lies, the fight has to go on. We must never accept that public spending has to rise inexorably and taxation with it. To come to that conclusion would be to give socialism free rein to do whatever it likes. When the public has decided that it's had enough of the tax-and-spend agenda, and when they conclude that ever-rising expenditure doesn't actually achieve anything, they have to have someone to turn to. I only hope there's someone left come that time. It won't be Cameron and Osborne, that's for certain. And that's why I won't be voting Conservative at the next General Election. They can sway with the current public mood if they like, but I won't.

In the meantime I'll just cheer myself up by playing Fantasy Government.