Re: Cameron on offensive with call for tax cuts


"Mark, Devon" <coopermg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1186843414.711614.125110@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You are joking? ANYTHING that Redwood touches is, and always has been,
an absolute disaster!

What exactly are the Tories proposing to cut, in terms of health care,
education, and law and order, to make way for their tax cuts?


Jesus, where to start? This government is criminally wasteful of the money
it steals from the taxpayer, as the evidence below will show.

According to the OECD, the UK has a tax burden higher than traditionally
socialist countries such as Germany, and higher than notorious spendthrifts
like Greece and Spain. It is 43% of GDP. In return, we get poor healthcare,
plummeting educational standards, and abysmal standards across all important
departments. When I say abysmal, I mean tremendously, heroically
incompetent, as a recent House of Commons report noted.

But first, wouldn't it be better ask where the *** all this money is going?
Answer that, and you will know where the tax cuts should fall.

A good place to start looking would be the government itself, which has
received so much of our largesse in recent years.

Take, for example the Department of Transport and its 17,000 employees. The
National Audit Office announced in June that employees were taking so much
time off for "sickness", they were costing us £24 million every year. Each
employee spent an average of 10 days off sick, and 60% of leave was for
long-term sickness. Despite ambitious target-setting, this figure simply
hasn't budged in the last five years.

Or take the dreadful performance of the Revenue. In June, the NAO reported
on accuracy in processing income tax. Astonishingly, they revealed that
almost 20% of PAYE assessments are wrong. They made an amazing 2.8 million
mistakes in a single year. What the ***!? And this year they will spend
£480 million of our money to make these mistakes, and employ around 100,000
mistake-makers.

This extraordinary profligacy even understates HMRC's performance. It
doesn't take into account the private snouts invited to the trough. Snouts
like CAP Gemini, who took away £30m of our money in 2004, and PA Consulting
who were given £10m in 2003.

Or how about the Home Office, which had a famously annus horribilis last
year? The Daily Mail reported in May that "More than 1,000 foreign criminals
were released from prison without being considered for deportation.
Officials also failed to alert ministers to the fact that convictions given
to Britons overseas had not been placed on the Police National Computer.
Despite this "collective failure", senior mandarins were still able to find
5,014 officials considered worthy of a bonus. The total bill of £3,612,916
is 75 per cent higher than in 2002".

But it's in the pursuit of IT projects that this government has truly acted
like the organised criminals they are. Egged on by the empty promises of
numerous private contractors, we find them sinking obscene amounts of money
into dysfunctional databases, SAP warehouses, rationalising upgrades, and of
course the ubiquitous private snouts - the consultants who advise the
IT-illiterate morons in various supernumerary "communications" and
"planning" departments.

The scandalous feature of government waste is that despite a slew of
consultations, target-setting, and investigations, it's actually getting
worse. The McCartney report in 2000 noted that "Government IT projects have
too often missed delivery dates, run over budget or failed to fulfil
requirements." Those very same words could have been said in 2001, 2002, or
last Saturday, 4 August 2007.

For example the Commons public accounts committee recently revealed that the
government had wasted a staggering £5.8 billion on IT for the tax credits
system. The Child Support Agency notoriously spent £500 million on a system
that only worked correctly with one in eight cases. The government's ability
to run expensive IT initiatives is absolutely fucking appalling. Joe Harley,
head of IT for the Department of Work and Pensions, said last month that
seven out of ten government IT projects are quite simply failures. And we
pay for it. Billions.

Finally, there is the endless parade of fatuous spending on random
pointlessness. Individually, the sums are slight, but together they add up.
The DTI was recently criticised for spending £12,000 on an inconclusive
study to find out if putting a towel on the bathroom floor made it more
slippy or less. Merthyr Tydfil council spent £100,000 on a Donny Osmond
concert. Newcastle council spent over £100,000 on fireworks in 2005. The
Guardian's jobs pages are littered with adverts for highly-paid diversity
officers, integration drivers, and other assorted wibble jobs that don't
involve actually producing useful things.

Perhaps we wouldn't mind shelling out all this money if the government were
competent. But they are not. They are monumentally bad at what they do. They
are literally staffed by retarded fuckwits. This was rumoured all along, but
became shockingly clear two weeks ago when the House of Commons Public
Administration Select Committee published a report called "Skills for
Government".

Essentially, this report asked "are the government departments fit for
purpose"? Do they have the skills to do their job, are they doing their job,
and will they be able to do their job in future?

The answer to all these questions was a resounding no. Hell no. Hell and
damnation no, multiplied by sixteen.

Government departments were given a score out of ten. Two passed the grade -
the Department for International Development with a respectable 7, and the
Department of Constitutional Affairs with a dubious 5.

The DWP scored 4 out of 10.

Defra scored 3 out of 10.

The dismal, awful, incompetent, unfit for purpose Home Office scored an
incredible 0 out of 10.

Just to hammer home the point: The Home Office don't have the skills to do
what they're meant to do. They're not doing what they're meant to do. They
will not be able to do what they're meant to do in future.

And you ask where tax cuts should fall.


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