Cindy-Lou Dale

I just found this article I wrote in 2009 but never got around to publishing it...

In 1996 the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair said, ‘Losing control of public finance is not ridicule, it’s reckless, and we will not do it.’ He went on to introduce Gordon Brown, as the Iron Chancellor (of the Exchequer), who’s catchword famously became ‘prudence’.

But the public spending figures suggested his prudence wasn’t going to last long. In 1998 public spending was £331-b, in 2008 it was £618-b. The Treasury said last year that it expected a rise in public spending in 2009 to £647-b and £680 -b in 2010. And that was before they had to bail out the banks.

Some Government departments seem to have plenty of money to spend; in particular the National Health Service. In 1997 the government spent £34-b on the NHS. In 2008 that figure rose to £111-b. The single biggest project of the NHS is it’s so called super computer - the world’s most complex information technology programme. The biggest civilian computer system in history would put all the country’s patient records on line – making them available wherever and whenever a Brit falls ill. It’s a hugely ambitious project at the cutting edge of computer technology and Tony Blair was one of its strongest advocates, who no one dared challenged or questioned its benefits. Some of the biggest technology companies were brought in to design the complex project. The cost was announced as £2.3-b over the first 3 years which has now climbed to £12.7-b. The total cost is still unclear but it’s predicted to hit nearly £20-billion (enough to pay some 70,000 nurses for the next 10 years). The project is running four years behind schedule, worst still, there is little to show for it.

When it comes to government projects that go way over budget, the ministry of defence must surely come way out on top. Soldiers complain that they don’t have men or vital equipment in Afghanistan or Iraq yet huge sums of the £33-b defence budget is squandered elsewhere. The latest debacle concerns the scrapping of a £132-m project to build a new generation of troop carrier. Another conspicuous waste was a new radio system designed for use in armoured Land Rovers. It turned out that the £2.4-b creation is much heavier than expected and unusable, now the project is abandoned. What about the 8 Chinooks that should have cost us £260-m, and that still aren’t up in the air but thus far have cost us £422-m. Costs on the multi-national Euro Fighter Jet have been projected to sour to nearly £20-billion. Then there’s the cash spent by the MOD in an attempt to find psychics who may help our troops cope with the enemy and spent £18,000 before stopping their search. But the men from the MOD don’t shirk when it comes to spending money on themselves as we are currently paying over £2-b, over the next 30 years, on refurbishing and running their HQ. They spent £3-m just on oak doors; they bought 30 big plasma television screens; 3,000 of the best office chairs in the world; and spent £250,000 on eight paintings. Yet armed service families are inadequate housed in near squalor. The National Audit Office concluded that last year alone the MOD overspent by £200-m of its 20 biggest projects and is behind schedule by a total of 40 years. Despite all this MOD chiefs have been awarded £50-m bonuses in the last year alone.

The Tax Payer’s Alliance (and organisation who campaigns for lowering taxes) have been trying to find how the government is squandering our billions. They conclude that the British government waste £101-b a year, which could bail out banks every year, forever ; plus fund 25 Iraq wars.

How does the British government manage its day to day spend? Is it as careful with its money as we are with ours? Benefit fraud costs us £830-million a year, then there’s the comparatively small yet astonishing loss of £4-m paid in income support, to prisoners! And the tax credit system that’s set out to help low income families – the government overpaid by £2.2-b in the first year, little of which has been recouped. In 2008 the government spend £188-m on snazzy television commercials, up by 25% over the past four years. On the A40 road-works went from £500-m to £950-m. The N1 went from £300-m to £600-m. The Department of Transport also has a botched computer system which spews out messages in German and was supposed to save us £57-m but instead cost us £81-m.

But don’t let us forget the world’s biggest public compensation scandal which was designed to help sick miners and was supposed to cost us £614-m but ended up costing £4.1-b, with an extra £2.3-b in admin costs.

The government supports schemes which promotes art and heritage, but never seems to learn from history. The magnificent monument to the incompetent and deluded arrogance of the ruling elite – the Millennium Dome - cost us £780-million, which we ended up giving away, for nothing. In 2000 the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield opened at a cost of £17-million but closed within a year. And then there’s the eco fun park in Doncaster which closed in 2004 at a cost of £60-million.

Then there’s the massive bill we need to pay because the government got its sums wrong - another controversial scheme is pressing ahead despite warnings that it could add billions more to the national debt. England is in the middle of one of its biggest school building programmes in its history. The government wants every one of its 3,500 secondary schools to be either demolished or modernised by 2020. The governments complicated way of financing its huge schools build is through the Private Finance Initiative, where investors borrow cash to build new schools then lease them back to the tax payer, and charge us for running them. Since 1997 the government has signed us up to +600 PFI’s on projects worth over £63-billion. After paying back interest and management charges (over the next 40 years) this will cost British tax payers £240-b.

In 2008 Gordon Brown claimed to have been ‘prudent’ and saved £26-b of tax payers’ money, yet only a quarter of this could be reliably verified by the National Audit Office. Where’s the rest of it?

These aren’t debt our generation could never pay back, nor our children’s children. How did we let this happen?

Karl Marx must be laughing in his grave.