Light scorching of the quangos.

So much for buggering off for a blog free weekend, but there's just a couple of things I want to touch on before I look up directions to the town of Off in the atlas and fuck there with alacrity. For this post that's the not-quite-bonfire of the quangos.

Sounds good, eh? Well, no, not really. For starters twice as many will survive as will definitely be chopped, and that's nothing to get excited about. Maybe there'll be more abolished, possibly as many as 94, but maybe that'll be the lot. And secondly, a lot of the functions of those quangos are not being abolished at all, just brought back into Whitehall (my emphasis).

The biggest cuts concern the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs with more than 50 bodies to be abolished, and the Department of Health, where about 30 bodies will be cut or have their functions transferred back to the department.

For which the department will no doubt demand an increase in its budget so as to take on staff to deal with the increased workload, and if DEFRA is the only one I'd be very surprised. The Cobbleition have failed to realise that it's not just the quango that must be made to justify its continued existence and funding, it's the function being carried out that must be justifiable as well, as explained by Raedwald.

... the test applied, you see, is whether the quango has been shown to perform a technical role that cannot be better discharged by government, or sufficiently demonstrated their independence from government, i.e. from tax funding. Not whether the technical role is necessary at all, or can better be discharged locally, or whether the function needs to be discharged at a national level.

Which means, as he says, that the state has at best lost a little weight, but retains almost all of its strength and its grip on power. The Cobbleition Twins will no doubt present it as a great reform that blahblah and blah for the blahblahblah people but the reality is that it's probably no more than a minor set back for the quangoracy. The powers aren't gone and they can be re-issued to new quangos by future governments, and possibly even by this one when everyone's forgotten and it can be done without attracting attention.

Nice opportunity squandered, fellas. Fuck you. Fuck you very much.