The bewilderment of the UK Left’s chattering classes as Labour ratings sink would be enjoyable were it not for the devastation their ideas have created.
Thus Polly Toynbee in the Guardian today, who still seems to think that squeezing the super-rich will make some sort of useful difference.
She opines: What should the good government do when facing hard times? Make sure the pain falls as fairly as possible on everyone.
We can all perhaps agree on that. On one condition. That Government includes itself when sharing out the pain.
I know a Lib Dem councillor in a London borough who presides over a vast council housing empire. He tells me that there are some 2,000 people employed by the Borough to run this bureaurcracy, of whom roughly half do nothing useful. How to downsize? One problem is that the internal appraisal system has collapsed under the weight of political correctness, so that mechanism for heaving out serial underperformers is not available.
So in this one part of London alone millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are simply being thrown down the drain. The opportunity costs of this sort of thing across the country and indeed across Europe are beyond calculation.
Polly T does make one good point: Administrations are thrown out when they become ossified by the sheer bloody complexity of everything…
She’s right. The complexity of governing as created by successive governments is now a threat to our civilisation. Governments attempt to do far too much, and end up doing too many things badly.
But help is at hand. An initiative to turn off the tap.
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