From The Daily Mail:
The cash-strapped Ministry of Defence is paying consultants nearly £4,000 a day each to advise it on cost-cutting measures. That means an MoD consultant earns more in a week than a squaddie will earn in a whole year. The department has already handed over £5.5million to consultancy Alix Partners, which was drafted in last November to find savings in military contracts...
As I've said before, this is basic maths, we first write down the two equations we know:
1. The Lib-Cons intend to increase overall spending each year for the next few years.
2. The Lib-Cons intend to reduce spending on 'frontline' stuff.
We can then subtract equation 2 from equation 1, and the answer is that the Lib-Cons are going to increase spending on the quangocracy and corporatist sectors - these made up about half of total government spending in the last year of New Labour! - quite significantly.
A grim document
16 hours ago
5 comments:
They should just close 99% of all Quangos and stop funding to all fake charities and they will save billions even after paying redundancy to Quangocrats. Or is this bollox?
Ch, that's a very good start, bung in EU contributions and DFID as well, but this is still only a third of what the government pays to corporatists, i.e. nominally private companies like Alix whose entire income comes from doing crap for the government.
This corporatist spending (politely referred to as 'private sector procurement') is about 40% of all UK government spending (or nearly £100 per person per week)!
We could hire a retired Israeli civil servant to be Permanent Secretary to the MoD.
While we have more cibil servants in the Mod, whose job is basically procurement, than we have soldiers they have about 1/40th as many. Israel does not seem have a less effctive armed forces per capita than us.
Despite the fact that being a far larger country we should have significant economies of scale.
"We could hire a retired Israeli civil servant to be Permanent Secretary to the MoD."
We could, if "we", i.e. the gov't, were actually interested in making cuts, but "we" are not "we" are only interested in seeming to make cuts. iDave is no Maggie.
NC, true, I refer you to B's comment.
B, Maggie was a ruthless politician, not an economist. As it happens, govt spending to GDP appears to have fallen from 45% to 40% while she was in charge, but the lowest point in recent history was actually under Nulab at about 37% in their first term in government (which is why I voted for them in 2001).
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