Apparently, there is a leadership contest going on in the Labour Party.
Does anyone care?
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The Queen asked ministers for money to heat Buckingham Palace from a fund reserved for low-income families, it has been revealed. Royal aides pleaded for the cash as they claimed gas and electricity bills had risen by more than 50 percent in a year - totalling more than £1million. They thus complained that the £15m government grant to cover the Queen's palaces was inadequate and her energy bills had become "untenable".
And now for the "money quote": The dosh would have come from £60million of energy-saving grants reserved for cash-strapped families, housing associations and hospitals.
But what Queenie really needs to do is have a word with her son Charles. The lad has recently embarked on a tour of Britain to promote his sustainable living initiative, START. The initiative, we are told, aims to combat the confusing messages around climate change, global warming etc, and just get people to "start with something really simple", like having a clothes swapping party or walking the kids to school.
Whilst there's nothing new in what Prince Charles is doing, burble its supporters, "it's refreshing to see a simple message of community, responsibility and sustainability without the hysteria and nay-saying that's usually associated with environment stories."
So there you are ... Charlie - the boy wonder who wants energy bills to increase so that we can save the planet - can meet his cash-strapped mum and arrange a new START. It's a bit late for her to start walking the kids to school, but I'm sure the clothes swapping party would go down an absolute bomb.
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On the face of it, we should be delighted with the news here that a bonfire of quangos is being planned.
However, while we may be looking a gift horse in the mouth, to commit the cardinal sin of mixing metaphors, I smell a rat. Having spent more of my life energy than I would care to admit researching the theory of deregulation (so much so that I never got round to publishing), my crucial finding was that every cyclical bout of deregulation presaged a further spate of regulation.
The dynamics are so locked together that there is good evidence to suggest that each leap forward in state control actually requires a period of deregulation, that being used as the scapegoat for all government failings and thus the justification for more and greater controls.
Thus, the way the progression works is that you have a spell of regulation (with the creation enforcement and administration bodies) and then a reaction, which leads to a partial deregulation. This, however, simply acts as a step towards a new bout of regulation, giving the march towards authoritarianism a jagged, "staircase" profile.
Just abolishing quangos, therefore, is of little avail – unless you address the reasons why these bodies were created in the first place. Otherwise, all that happens is that the bodies transform themselves into different structures, but do not actually disappear (either that, or they go into hiding for a few years).
And what is not visible is any attempt to address those reasons – the root cause of excessive regulation and officialdom, which probably means that this highly publicised initiative is just window dressing.
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