Wise Spending - A Guide to UK Public Sector Insurgency

This year HMG plan to spread out £620 billion in expenditure

Going through an audit and doomsday type update of central and local government organisations for Stone Tiger it's not hard to see why.

What can be quantified, no matter how ghastly, can be seemingly controlled.

So what have I learned. Well although English local government has seen early evidence of amalgamation with district shire councils being absorbed in Cornwall, Shropshire and Northumberland, in central government it's a different story.

Although the quango cull seems to have begun, much civil service function has been hived off to areas that can be kept clear of overall head count. However, it's not hard to see through the smoke and mirrors (a phrase deriving from the early days of the Ghost Train, precursor of carnival and theme park rides the world over).

We can still find our dear old friend The British Potato Council hidden with the other food levy boards inside the Russian doll which is the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board.

Although raised for obvious sniggers, this is a serious point for those losing concentration at the back of the room.

Especially given today's news that Lord Voldemort's desires for the New Labour Government to launch an insurgency operation agains the behemothic state sector it has developed and grown by the expedient of throwing countless millions in the Comprehensive Spending Reviews from 2000 onwards. (Goya's unsettling image of Saturn devouring his children comes to mind at this juncture.....)

Indeed, although we are protected by not one but two audit bodies in the shape of the NAO and Audit Commission, parallels with the aftermath of Iraq in 2003 are quite promising. And here I would draw your attention to Rajiv Chandrasekaran's account of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

One gets the feeling that back in these safe shores we've seen a fair few shytery Custer Battles type outfits in the consultancy and outsourcing industries palling up to win contracts that couldn't or shouldn't have been delivered. It's not the process of outsourcing that is largely at stake, but the need for the activity to be managed and ordered by or on behalf of the state in the first instance that has to be questioned.

Just think about everyone suddenly getting present to the post-Soham rationale for creating the Independent Safeguarding Authority...

Now the 'bonfire of quangos' has become such a lifeless trope promised by every contender to power. It simply never happens. The machine don't give a damn.

But with fiscal deficit looming, Whitehall delaying all it can until safely in pre-election purdah maybe there is some hope.

If only the people of this country could be liberated to smash, take back or destroy the wasteful apparatus of state machinery, in the wilful spirit of the liberated Iraqi people in spring 2003.

Do you think what I'm thinking?