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."