The Land of Incompetence

Came back the other day from the US and was immediately confronted with the usual rain and gloomy weather that one should expect from the UK in October.

That, in general, fails to "rattle my cage" and I was not terribly upset by it - all after all, if it was sun what I was after, I could have as well stayed put in Italy and enjoy long, laid back days at the beach eating pasta and sipping Chianti...

What really depresses me is that, after more ten years of failed public sector projects and ideas, a bungled (and messy) tax credit system, the display of complete incompetence during the recent banking crisis, and, lest we forget, the Iraqi catastrophe, still Labour (and, of all people, "tax-&-spend" Gordon) still enjoys a lead in the polls.

Really - what on Earth possess the British public?

Can the vast majority of Englishmen and women be so totally blind to the astonishing incompetence that permeates now all walk of the Public Sector?
Can the youths be all so busy getting drunk and getting laid that they are ready to forgive a Government that lied to the Country and allowed hundreds of thousand of lives to be lost?
Can the elderly have all gone so hopelessly senile that they have completely missed how their health is being jeopardised by the awful mess the NHS is in?

I will accept that Cameron's Conservatives can hardly lay claim to competence and infallibility (what in the name of God are the Tory right-wingers up to? giving Labour another ten years in government?) but it would be extremely difficult (I'd say impossible) to beat Labour on incompetence, failed Public Sector projects and generally wasting taxpayers' money on a grandiose scale.

Lest we forget:

• Metronet - the poster-child of the PFI, the very creature of Mr Brown's warped economics - going bust, after sucking (and wasting) £11bn of public money, leaving London's Tube modernisation programme in total disarray;
• the IT upgrade of the Benefits Department, that had to be abandoned after spending hundreds of £'m, and getting absolutely nothing;
• the Dome (need I say anything?)
• the Olympics budget - nearly quadrupled (and we are still 5 years away) with very little to show for it;
• the complete failure to modernise the NHS, which, after £'bn of investment, still boasts the worst rate of cancer survival in Europe and the worst record in fighting infections (MRSA, anyone?);
• the tens of £'m wasted on the ID cards project, with realistic estimates of the costs at more than 10 times the Government's estimates (and it hasn't even started yet...)
• tax credits for working families (as if the others are sitting idle...): quite apart from the absurd complexity of the scheme (another brainchild of Mr Brown) it has resulted in hundreds of £'m lost in "overpayments that cannot realistically be recovered, ever" (even by the Inland Revenue's own admission);
• the Home Office - a sick joke of incompetence, waste and complete lack of accountability: now multiplied by two, with the likely duplication of most office functions with the creation of the Ministry of Justice (as it's obvious to anyone, but the self-serving politicians, by multiplying the number of bureacrats one only multiplies the level of incompetence and waste);
• and on and on and on...

But then, maybe, it is quite possible that after ten years of bureacratic incompetence people have become so used to it to consider it an acceptable norm - no longer to be outraged by officials wasting, literally, billions of pounds on ill-conceived, and worse-executed, initiatives and projects.

The Land of Incompetence, indeed.

Blair Legacy

In little over a month's time, Mr Blair will step down from being UK's Prime Minister, handing over power to Labour's "incoronated" new leader, Mr Brown.

Personally, I am unsure whether to be jubilant for seeing the former go, or appalled to see the latter take over; but that's probably an issue best left for another day.

What I'd like insted to do here would be to publicly express my personal thanks (yes, you've read it correctly: thanks) to Mr Blair, for proving, irrefutably and irrevocably, one of my most fundamental beliefs: one cannot make Public Sector service work by throwing more money at them.

It is, indeed, regrettable that this had to be achieved by wasting several hundred billion pounds - money that we, the taxpayers, could have more efficiently and enjoyably spent on goods and services that matter to us, instead of being poured down the drain chasing "targets" that only matter to policy wonks and to obscure civil servants; but, then again, it was probably inevitable that this had to be done, as, at least once in a generation, this point has to be (expensively) proved again and again, to an uneducated and forgetful voting public.

In fact, a very similar lavish waste of taxpayers' money on irrelevant and apathetic public workers and services had already been undertaken by Labour in the 70's (and elsewhere in the world: the Democrats in the US, various left-wingers across the globe and, surprisingly enough for those who don't know better, by endless centrist governments in Italy) to little or no effect on their efficiency and/or effectiveness.

Thankfully, a brief surge in this kind of waste (and the subsequent abismal display of incompentence and general useleness) was sufficient to wake up voters to reality and swing them back to more sane, market-oriented policies.

Not so this time - partly due to a particularly benign global economic environment, partly due to Mr Blair's quasi-hypnotic power of persuasion, but mostly due to the pathetic state of the Conservative party, it has taken the best part of ten years for the British public to start asking questions about the sanity of showering tens and hundreds of billions on unreformed, inefficient and largely useless public sector services.

I still remember being infuriated, at the time, by all the talk about public sector being "underfunded" - this was mostly from people who failed to realise that the use of "under-" (or "over-," for that matter) requires a standard comparison metric to be meaningful: a service, or business, is under- or over- funded only relative to its stated goals, and a generally accepted industry best practice.

But this was, rather conveniently, lost in election speeches and on the tabloid-reading electorate who lapped up New Labour's New Truth.

Well, all this is history now: we all now know (even Sun readers) that it is not for want of money that public sector is incapable of delivering half-decent services, with anything approaching a minimum level of respect for its users.
All the extra investment has been gobbled up in ill-thought (and worse implemented) titanic IT projects (most of which have either floundered in spectacular fiascos or are running several billions over budget, years behind), equally titanic (and equally over-budget and years late) construction projects and, naturally, in inflated pay rises for public sector workers.

Who have not, as any sane private sector employer would have done, been asked to work harder, longer or, simply, using a bit more common sense: they were just gifted with pay rises, without any regard for individuals' competence and merits.

And as we all in the private sector, running our businesses, well know there is nothing like this to sap the dedication and motivation of the best workers, and reinforce the worst ones' conviction that working hardes is for fools.