TIMES WILL BE HARD BECAUSE THE STATE IS WASTING BILLIONS
Express 21 Jan 2010
MISERY: Bank of England governor Mervyn King says he will be 'sorely tried'
By Leo McKinstry
THE political establishment is doing its best to deepen the sense of January gloom that hangs over the country.
A series of public figures has warned that bleak times lie ahead as the economy struggles and the Government is forced to make spending cuts to reduce its vast deficit.
Only this week bank of England governor Mervyn King said that the patience of millions of householders “will be sorely tried” over the next couple of years, while the chancellor Alistair Darling has predicted that this March’s budget settlement will be “the toughest in 20 years”. David Cameron has joined this chorus of depression, claiming that his party’s “incredibly tough” policy decisions will herald “a new age of austerity”.
Yet this outbreak of fiscal masochism is based on flawed thinking. conventional wisdom holds that state expenditure is overwhelmingly used on essential services such as “schools and hospitals”, to quote the mantra constantly repeated by labour politicians in their socialist propaganda.
Any cuts in funding are therefore bound to cause severe pain to the public. but this is nonsense. in truth the Government machine is so expansive, wasteful and mismanaged that massive savings could be made without any damage to front-line operations.
Far from bringing misery, spending cuts would actually be liberating. They would allow our taxes to be reduced, with the result that our earning power would be increased and commerce boosted. A climate of cuts would see a vast transfer in wealth from the parasitical parts of the public sector to the productive private sector, ushering in a new era of prosperity rather than austerity.
In 1960, average skilled workers paid just eight per cent of their income in tax and national insurance. Today, thanks to the extension of bureaucratic socialism, that figure has reached almost 30 per cent. It is little wonder that so few, except benefit spongers and the very rich, feel better off in Labour’s Britain.
The modern British state has become an instrument of oppression, not of service. That is why it must be reduced in size before it completely destroys our economy and freedom. it is a bloated monster with a rapacious appetite for our money.
The more it consumes, the more useless it becomes. Our only hope is to put it on a ruthless diet. The idea that there is no scope for cuts without hitting the public is absurd. One straightforward measure would be to take an axe to the colossal bureaucracy that now prevails across our public life, reflected in the endless tiers of paper-shuffling, pen-pushing, box-ticking, procedure-following, report-issuing management that prevail in central and local government.
With rare candour, the labour MP Denis MacShane admitted recently: “I do not know of a single Minister who privately does not despair at the waste of money on pointless projects, publications and legions of press officers that add no value.”
The grotesquely high earnings for public sector bosses are a particular scandal, given that their jobs involve neither risk nor wealth creation. There are now more than 800 officials earning more than £150,000 a year, including such luminaries as lin Homer, the head of the ineffectual UK border Agency on £231,000 a year, and Mark Haysom, chief executive of the much-criticised Learning and Skills council on £289,000.
The state sector is riddled with departments and quangos that are of no comprehensible benefit to the public. We could abolish the £70million Equality and Human Rights commission tomorrow and the only consequence would be a feeling of relief at an end to this outfit’s politically correct bullying. The same is true of the £2billion network of self-serving Regional Development Agencies and the £600million po-faced, posturing Arts Council.
Even bigger savings could be achieved if we withdrew from the European union, to which we have to pay a gross contribution of £15billion a year for the privilege of having our nationhood destroyed by the autocrats of brussels.
Another £8billion could be saved annually by abolishing the mammoth overseas aid budget, which is just a monument to Western guilt and does little for the developing world since most of the money is siphoned off by corruption and bureaucracy. it is patently ridiculous to have handed over £1billion in support to India, a country with far more billionaires and millionaires than Britain.
The £180 billion welfare system is another ripe target. There is nothing more unjust than the phenomenon of hard- working jobholders handing over a third of their income to the state, only to see the money squandered on underwriting the cushy lifestyles of the feckless and indolent.
It is particularly outrageous when the benefits go to grasping migrants who have made no contribution to our society, as highlighted by a string of recent cases where new arrivals have been given housing benefits worth more than £100,000 to live in luxurious houses in west london, far beyond the dreams of most Britons.
Why should we be required to support in our jails foreign criminals who should be de- ported, or give welfare hand- outs to Muslim extremists who want to blow us up? This abuse of the taxpayer has to end. Radical surgery of the state would be a gain, not a pain.
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