Richard Murphy is a hyperactive socialist/collectivist whose main role in life is to expand the state in all directions. He even calls this expansion ‘courageous‘:

       The result is that the Courageous State needs to have policies to:

  1. Constrain the world of feral finance that has so dominated the economies of the world in the last thirty years;
  2. Rebuild the role of the state in supporting real business activity;
  3. Encouraged a balanced, sustainable economy;
  4. Support the broader goals of family, community and society and the achievement of purpose through identity;
  5. Cooperate internationally to support the rights of Courageous States.

This sounds a lot like Mussolini. Wait. It IS like Mussolini. It’s just the latest wave of Liberal Fascism.

Back in real life, here is the state courageously oppressing old people who recklessly want to keep some pictures on a corridor wall.

My own encounter with the Courageous State’s vivid imagination on the subject of health and safety was no less interesting:

My professional concern about PP is that far from promoting policy common sense it can diminish it.

Take the refurbishment of the British Ambassador’s residence in Belgrade back in 2001. The building had been neglected during the long Milosevic years. Everything which could be painted was either Excrement Brown or Rose Pink. The main reception room looked like the forlorn warehouse where all the worst sofas and curtains in the FCO crawled away to die in shame.

So it was agreed that we should upgrade things in the next couple of years. But we had not reckoned with "what if" PP as articulated by the FCO works people…

One idea we had was to remove the vile dark sticky polish and ugly carpets from the original nice woodblock floors and go for a lightly coloured, varnished modern look. But when we asked for this to be done along the upstairs landing we met: "what if a child skids and shoots up and over the landing and plummets down and dies?!"

We asked for the kitchen to have something other than industrial strip lighting, to make it a more pleasant place to work. "What if one of the cooks is ill and cuts himself and drips infected blood into food being prepared for a member of the Royal Family?!"

Work began to replace the nasty tin sentry box for our local staff Serb security team with a small brick building. I happened to stop by and asked why the roof was such a fatuous heavy design. "It is being made of reinforced concrete. What if terrorists attack and try to break in through the ceiling?"

In each case I had to order them all to stop being ridiculous and come to a calm, elegant solution. Had I not done so the taxpayer probably would have had a worse and more expensive outcome.

Yet countless stupidities are not stopped. How does one cost this mess?

Come on, courageous state. Show us the numbers. Then go away.