Nothing seems to work anymore

The Business of 4th June 2006: "Nothing seems to work anymore; the economy is losing its competitive edge; educational standards are slumping; violent criminals are on the loose; the underclass continues to grow; immigration is out of control; and the culture is coarsened by a prevailing yobbery. Yet the most well-resourced government in British history – in terms of manpower and treasure – has proved to be useless in the face of such challenges – and sometimes worse than useless...

Incompetence has become the hallmark of everything the Blair government touches. Consider just the last seven days...

• we learned that the Department of Health is braced for a £13bn overrun on an IT project which was supposed to cost £6.5bn;
• the Department of Work and Pensions is granting National Insurance numbers to illegal immigrants while its bureaucrats give official instructions on how to defraud their own system;
• Mr Brown’s disastrous tax credit system made a further £1.8bn in overpayments last year (the third consecutive year the system has massively malfunctioned);
• and it was revealed that more than 50% of pupils leave school without a basic competence in mathematics and English (even though spending on state schools has doubled).
• Meanwhile, over at the Home Office, the department which grants one-legged Romanians work visas as roofers and releases foreign criminals tagged for deportation onto the country’s streets, a chief immigration officer is taped demanding sexual favours from an 18-year-old Zimbabwean asylum seeker while another official fills in an immigrant’s “citizenship test” in return for cash – the sort of corrupt madness usually associated with the bureaucracy of a collapsed former Soviet state rather than one of the richest countries in the world."

Comments

[Paul Kennedy]

Yet another gem, keep them coming. I accept people might think that such things are frivolous, but sometimes humour can be an effective way of communicating a serious message.

[Voice from the South West]

May I make a suggestion Editor? Perhaps instead of "probably the most incompetent government", why don't you replace it with just "THE most incompetenet government..." - slightly more hard-hitting would you agree?

[Paul Kennedy]

Yes you are right VFTSW, but as it is a take on a certain alcoholic beverage, then I don't think the effect would be the same.