We are often spun facts from all the parties about what state the NHS is in. But if you really want to know the truth, it’s probably best to ask the people who work there. This is what The Times has done. And it doesn’t make good reading for the Government.
Whatever your views on road pricing, most would have to agree that the Government has made a complete mess of trying to get it introduced. It is expected that nearly 2 million people will have signed the e-petition on the No.10 website by the time it close tomorrow and I can not say I’m surprised.
Local government have been given £29.5m to train up snooping jobsworths council staff to hand out on the spot £50 fines to evil smokers when the public ban comes in to force on July 1st. The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health has said “Officers [seriously, he called these un-needed drains on tax payers’ money ‘Officers’] do not have to identify themselves when they go into premises and they can film and photograph people to gather evidence.” Creepy.
This is not only a waste of tax payers’ money, but also a little sinister. I do not like the idea of having these people who clearly love and crave a bit of power to be able to hand out £50 on the spot fines to the general public. Hasn’t the experience of countless dodgy traffic wardens told us that you can not trust these types of people with so much power? Policemen and women go through extensive training and are heavily regulated and by and large do a good job – but even after all they go through you still get plenty of stories about corrupt and bent coppers. So why invest so much money and entrust the power hungry to carry out such a narrow and easily abused and corruptible task? There will not be suitable checks and balances on these ‘officers’ and will virtually be a law unto themselves.
Supermarket giant Tesco and revitalised high-street giant Marks & Spencer spent £67m and £66m on advertising last year respectively. If you combine their advertising budgets you are still a way off matching the amount of money this government has wasted in its own self-publication advertising in the past twelve months. They have managed to burn up £137m television adverts, radio stations, billboards, newspapers, cinemas and other outlets. What an incredible waste of money! When they are not telling us how to live our lives, they are misusing public money to further the Labour party’s agenda and self-interest. It is not how the electorate expect their money to be spent and yet they appear to be getting away with it. Our taxes are not meant to be spent on publicising the Labour party nor drumming home relentlessly on how we should live our lives. Stop wasting our money and stop nannying us.
As my earlier post’s wishful thinking suggested, it seems that issues being kicked in to the long grass is going to be a more common theme than anyone could have hoped for. The infamous road pricing scheme looks set to be kicked in to the long grass for now. Not because one and half million people have wasted their time signing an e-petition – a tool used to make it feel like we’re entering in to the democratic process, but is actually a way of shutting us up. No, the latest weapon against introducing road charging is the incompetence of the government itself.
A quick update on a story I ranted about earlier this week. Apparently none of us are philanthropists – or at least none of us are falling for this new version of the stealth tax. In reports in the Daily Telegraph, there have been no immediate offers to pledge money to Universities from senior executives. Grant Hearn, chief executive of Travelodge said, "There is a growing engagement within the business community to get involved in philanthropy. But in my view contributing time is a much better way than giving money.”
Who exactly is running this country? Reports today suggest no-one is really sure. The “plan” to split the Home Office in to two – one section to fight terrorism and enforce national security, the other as a Ministry of Justice – has been put on hold. Apparently Gordon Brown does not want any changes until the Labour party coronate him in the summer. According to the Guardian – “the issue has been kicked into the long grass until Gordon Brown takes over.”
So Tony Blair is the PM but can not do anything unless Gordon backs it. If Gordon does back it he does not want Tony to take the credit so nothing will get done until Tony is gone. So nothing is getting done. Effectively we do not currently have a Government that can or is actually doing anything. Can I withhold all funding of the government through my taxes on this basis? On the plus side, maybe the government will be forced to kick a few more issues in to the long grass over the coming months.
With the revelations of what each MP is claiming in travel expenses finally coming to light thanks to Lib Dem MP Norman Baker, some interesting stats have been revealed.
Reports out yesterday suggest that congestion in London is almost as bad as it was when the congestion charge was introduced four years ago. I bet the Mayor can not believe his luck – revenues must be going through the roof and what better excuse for bringing forward the £25 a day Low Emission Zone? That will include 18 percent of all vehicles currently coming in to central London.
The whole extension plan has been a complete shambles from the start. Extending the zone will not reduce congestion, but actually increase it as all the Chelsea and Kensington residents will get a 90% discount to cross in to the current zone. The wider the zone spreads the more pointless is becomes, the higher the congestion gets the more excuse Ken has for whacking up the charge and more money falls in to his coffers. Forget the nonsense about saving the planet, this is about raising money and giving the Mayor more political clout. And it’s working.
Incredibly, more than a third of Scotland’s local councillors are to receive a “golden handshake” pay-off of up to £20,000 each, basically because they don’t fit the right “image”. Before I go on, you won't be surprised to learn that the money is tax-payers’ money and most of these councillors are from the Labour party. The total cost will be a whopping £7m.
It is reported that the measure is designed to "refresh" local government in Scotland before May's council elections. How do we refresh Scottish politics? Get the Government to use our money to replace middle aged “old Labour” types with “new Labour” types - how very refreshing indeed! Is this not an incredibly irresponsible use of public money – not to mention a complete waste? They are using public money to cynically further a cause that will mainly “benefit” the Labour party, using our money to pay-off a bunch of old councillors so that they will have some young blood in in-time for the local elections in May.
The NHS and failed IT projects – it rolls off the tongue like money down a drain. Unfortunately, when the NHS wastes money on dodgy systems it doesn’t just mean an inconvenience for the public and another dent in the public purse (these two outcomes are taken for granted by other government departments these days), it is actually putting patients at serious risk. For some reason, best known to the incompetent technogeeks within the Government, the implementation of a multi-billion-pound computer system linking doctors and hospitals is flawed.
Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime. Now that is picking a winner. This is what the government should be doing. However, it seems that being tough on crime and its causes has more to do with sitting behind a desk pushing a pen than actually getting out in to towns and cities and actually catching some criminals. According to research, as few as one in three officers are available to respond to 999 calls and tackle crime – particularly at night when the police are most needed to tackle drunken hooligans.
Why do we pay millions of pounds a year in taxes to train up and pay the wages of our police officers when they spend half their shift writing about what they have done that day? It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the police would better tackle crime if they are at the crime scenes or even better out and about stopping crimes taking place in the first place. I do fear, however, that things are unlikely to change and even if they do the government will probably have to set up an “independent” think tank first to tell what we already know – uniformed officers are tough on crime and its causes, not bic biros.
Official government figures showed that more than seven million households are getting most of their income from government handouts. That is one in three households across Britain who is now dependent on the state for at least half its income. How on earth has this culture of dependency come about?
Gordon Brown (and successive governments before New Labour) have orchestrated a society that feels that relying on handouts is the better option compared with the reality of getting back in to work. The benefits system is now so generous you can not blame many people for “playing” the system. While the government might like to think that it is giving a leg up to those living in relative poverty in this country, it is actually keeping them there as it is the better and easier option for them.
Tony Blair, when not trying to save the planet or fight the just wars of the Middle East, is making his stake to be Britain’s leading philanthropist. The government will give £1 for every £2 donated to English universities in an attempt to embed a "culture of charitable giving" across higher education. There is nothing wrong with former students and businesses donating money to the universities – from a business point of view it may well be a wise investment. However, the government claiming it will “embed a culture of charitable giving” by giving away money that was raised by the tax payers in the first place is absolute nonsense.
The Prison service has been told to find savings of £80 million for each of three financial years from an annual budget of £2 billion. Yes, the same prison service that has been in the headlines recently for being overcrowded and poorly run. Some might say throw more money at it. To me it begs the question, if one of the worst run areas of government can tighten its belt to the tune of £80m a year why can’t the rest of the government’s departments and agencies?
The environment debate, and I use the word debate in its loosest form, has become rather like the so called “war on terror”. That is to say, you can’t really question the government over with it without being accused of being some sort of self-serving monster that has no interest in the well being of the world and its people. As a result, the government (and opposition parties) are not only trying to out “green” each other, but they are cynically using climate change to impose “big brother” like regulation and also use it as an unquestionable form of taxation or method of raising money for Treasury’s deep, deep pockets.
Everyday it seems we are being told what to do more and more. In the latest attempt to tackle climate change the EU are going to change the way we drive. That is to say, they are going to force us to drive exactly as they want us to. All new cars will be fitted with devices that tell drivers when to change gear, what speeds to drive at and even when to pump up their tyres. You could not make this up – even if your name was George Orwell. I don’t know how this is going to work, but I can imagine the car relentlessly nagging me like the worst back seat driver in a dalek like drone. Of course, it goes without saying that we will have to stump up an extra £2000 (on a typical family car) for the privilege.
Congratulations to the Gordon Brown who has claimed to have made a whopping £13.3bn a year efficiency savings across Whitehall. Fantastic headlines for our PM in waiting. Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Timms, has described the savings as “robust”… Cue alarm bells...
According to the National Audit Office, and I hate to break the news to you, but not all is what it seems at the Treasury. Auditors have claimed that nearly £10bn of these savings is open to question either because they could not be properly measured or because they are plain and simply wrong. No wonder tax payers' money is being wasted everyday - our chancellor can not even do his sums properly. Either that or someone is doing some very creative accounting…
The Department of Trade & Industry seems to be in a bitter and very personal battle with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to see who can fritter away the most public money. It seems the DTI have struck the latest blow with their low carbon buildings programme, designed to boost the installation of solar panels and wind turbines on houses.
Yet another token effort by the government to make it sound like they are doing something, when they are actually just paying lip service to popular issue of the day – achieving absolutely nothing and throwing away our money in the process. Do they really think £3.5m worth of solar panels and wind turbines protruding from a few roofs is going to stop anything (apart from the neighbours view)? They have managed to burn their way through their annual budget in just six months! That’s £3.5m spent on achieving absolutely nothing and it was all done twice as fast as they had planned to do it. Brilliant. Miliband has his work cut out.
Tory MP Philip Hammond, shadow work and pension’s secretary, hit out yesterday at the Government's failure to help people who lost their life savings when company schemes went bust. Mr Hammond said the Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) set up by the Government 18 months ago has made partial payments to only 871 people out of 125,000 whose company pensions collapsed.
Since when was it the Government’s job to bail out people who have invested in to private pension funds? If I invest in a private company and it goes bust I don’t expect the government to hand back my cash and say better luck next time. So, why should individuals be guaranteed their money back when the company scheme they chose to invest in goes bust?