Brace yourself for a gargantuan squandering of billions of our money

Wednesday-Thursday blog

I don’t know if many readers have ever experienced working with our public sector. If so, then you will realise how mindbogglingly lazy, useless and wasteful most public-sector employees are. Today the (IMHO) incompetent and economically-challenged Rachel Reeves will present her budget and will, I expect, announce billions of supposed “investment” to supposedly “improve our public services”.

Let’s start with the word our financially-illiterate politicians and journalists are using – “invest”. The definition of “invest” is: “put (money) into financial schemes, shares, property, or a commercial venture with the expectation of achieving a profit.”

This does clearly not apply to spending on public services. What Labour are doing is “spending more” on public services and there is no prospect of a financial return or profit. After all, hiring another army of DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers is hardly a financial “investment”. So, please don’t be fooled by the use of the word “invest” by our lying politicians and pig-ignorant journalists.

Next point: We’ve been told that our chancellor has rewritten the country’s fiscal rules. I (like most politicians and journalists) don’t understand how she has done this. But I think it has something to do with reclassifying any money spent/squandered by the government on supposed ‘investments’ as a credit, rather than a debit, on the country’s balance sheet. If this is the case, it would magically make the country’s finances look much healthier than they actually are. This would allow the useless Reeves to borrow even more when our national debt is already above 100% of GDP and moving up towards the level of permanently bankrupt countries like Italy and Portugal:

Now let’s look at a few examples of how British governments spend/squander (sorry, of course I meant “invest”) our money.

Scottish Parliament

Some years ago I attended a meeting with a high-level Scottish bureaucrat. I was representing a company which helped clients get value for money from their suppliers. The Scrots has just spent over £45m on a new parliament building which was budgetted to cost less than £10m. When I explained how we could help our clients, the (IMHO) utterly useless individual said: “There’s not much suppliers can get past us canny Scots”.

HS2 trainline

I have written before about why the whole HS2 stupidity was unnecessary in a small country like England. France is a big country – about 640,000 km². Germany is quite a big country too – 357,592 km². The UK is a small country – about 242,000 km². England is an even smaller country – 130,000 km². So, France is 5 times the size of England and Germany is almost 3 times as large as England. Both France and Germany have extensive high-speed rail networks. It makes sense to have high-speed trains in a large country. It doesn’t make sense to have high-speed trains in a small country.

Now let’s go a bit deeper. The French train route from Paris to Lyon to Marseilles can probably be seen as comparable to the UK train route from London to Birmingham to Manchester in terms of how it connects major cities. But the differences in distances are huge. Paris to Lyon is 292 miles, whereas London to Birmingham is only 128 miles. And Lyon to Marseilles is 488 miles, whereas Birmingham to Manchester is a mere 86 miles.

Or if we take Germany, the route from Berlin to Frankfurt to Munich could also be compared to HS2’s London to Birmingham to Manchester. The distance from Berlin to Frankfurt is 341 miles – much more than London to Birmingham’s 128 miles. And the distance from Frankfurt to Munich is 244 miles – considerably more than Birmingham to Manchester’s measly 86 miles:

The much greater distances in France and Germany justify high-speed rail networks. But squandering over £100bn on cutting just a few minutes off the train time from London to Birmingham and then even fewer minutes off the 86-mile train journey from Birmingham to Manchester is utterly ludicrous.

There never was and never will be any need for a high-speed train network in England. The distances are simply too short. On the now-cancelled Birmingham to Manchester leg, the train would hardly have enough time to get up to speed before it had to slow down. Why the political, bureaucratic and engineering geniuses who planned the whole thing couldn’t see this more than minor problem defeats me.

Another trillion squandered

I don’t have room here to explain why the NHS computer system was a waste of £4bn+ and could never have worked anyway. I go into this in excruciating detail in my 2006 book PLUNDERING THE PUBLIC SECTOR. Then in my 2008 book SQUANDERED: How Gordon Brown is Wasting over One Trillion Pounds of Our Money I go through pretty much every government department showing how they have “invested” (squandered) over a trillion pounds of our money and got pretty much zilch in return for this “investment”.

The great squandering is about to begin

I could go on and on and on and on about how our governments have “invested” our money. But I’ve written several books about this, so I don’t have room here.

In conclusion, I guess the point of today’s blog is to warn readers that every time they hear the word “invest” they should automatically replace it with the phrase “spend and most likely squander”. Please believe me that until you have worked with government bureaucrats and politicians you can never really grasp the stupendous uselessness, profligacy and incompetence of our ruling elites and the financial ignorance of their paid prostitutes in the mainstream media.