Bean counters an endangered species?

Great reforming news: the Audit Commission gets dumped- completely!

We are spared more inane claptrap such as:

"This draft strategic plan aligns with the Commission's diversity scheme Value for all, which focuses on the relationship between equality and diversity and achieving more for less. Well-designed, efficient, value-for-money services recognise that, while everyone has the same basic needs, if services are to be effective, some people need them to be delivered differently. They may also need help to locate and use them. Failure to understand and address this issue can lead to poorly designed services that are ineffective, often costing taxpayers more in the long run."

We searched their site with the phrase "cost of audit commission" and didn't get one direct response. But who on earth will want to hire 2000 institutionalised jobsworths?

Maybe Alex Salmond's Socialist People's Republic of Scotland ?

We bet this has put the wind up a lot of Brown's old fiefdoms; send for the next sacred socialist cow, please!

Down the emergeny escape

Hats off to the airline steward who quit in such a grand manner after getting hassle from the public.. 


Too bad the public don't have a similar option to arbitrarily escape the clutches of bad service at the hands of the millions of jobsworths that modern business practises have created in collusion with governments that have permitted mostly unaccountable cartels to take over - because they are easier to regulate and tax than thousands of smaller and more diverse businesses that would have to try harder to survive.

Inconvenient redundancies

Like many other self-perpetuating contrivances of those who have traded objectivity and common sense for a comfy job in the nanny state's many hysteria industries, environmentalists thrive on subjective scaremongering. There's been a very nice reward for those willing to go along with the absurdities of the PC persuasion, and don the peaked cap and uniform of our angst and surveillance society. So why would they declare their work done, and go and find a proper job?

An increasingly possible but inconvenient truth is that that climate change will be capped because we will have run out of oil to waste before the polar bears get their paws wet. It will be those much derided features of capitalism - markets and economics - that actually sort it out.

The speed at which energy saving devices like LED lighting is developing is impressive. Not only can we now get a replacement for a 50W GU10 halogen ceiling lamp that consumes around 3W for £5, it is supposed to last 30-50k hours - 15-30 times as long. And the prospect of viable processes for the liberation of hydrogen for fuel cells (or even combustion) from renewable resources, is not fanciful.

The most serious and potentially intractable issue we face is that of overpopulation: the population of a countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh has increased 6 fold in 60 years (from 30m to 180m). But nature also has a very brutal way of dealing with that problem as well, in extremis.

Speed cameras - a sad loss

The possible end of the speed camera industry is an interesting moment for our risk-obsessed society - yet curiously the biggest losers are likely to be those insurance companies that automatically stick £50-100 a year on the premiums of vicims (regardless of record ...grrr) for the life of the endorsement. 

Speed cameras were introduced by the Tories in 1992, and we'd guess that the amount of cash mugged off motorists by City insurers vastly exceeds the amount taken in fines. 

It's simpler than we thought

Lord Mandelson, aka The Pink Baron, has indeed revealed all about New Labour. The chief challenge appears to have been that they were/are all fundamentally not very clever. In detailing the inner dysfunction of the Blair/Brown years, Mandelson himself comes across as a considerable idiot. So how come it's taken 13 years to suss this out? The notion that Mandeslson was somehow a towering intellect has been blown wide own, and the proof that he is merely a scheming chancer in penned by his own oleaginous hand.

If you accept that Blair/Brown and the rest of the Labour politicians were/are actually big on animal cunning and scheming, but low on intellect and intelligence, just about everything can be explained. Cameron, thus far, has begun to remind us again what it is like to have a presentable, properly determined and ruthless leader in charge once again; and one who doesn't need to do it for the cash. It's been a while.

He's even manage to properly neuter the Libdems in the process, and force the Labour party to parade a collection of yet more embarrassing misfits as prospective leaders.