LabourDoNotDo.com

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."

Brown's poorly timed gold sales cost taxpayer £2 billion

Bill Jamieson, The Scotsman: "Higher still and higher climbs the price of gold... This is all deeply embarrassing for our Chancellor, Gordon Brown.  Remember how some six years ago he declared he would sell 60 per cent of Britain's gold reserves held by the Bank of England?  Many suspected the exercise was designed to inspire confidence in the then soon-to-be-launched European single currency. This was because some of the proceeds were to be earmarked for the purchase of euros.  In due course, Brown sold off 300 tonnes at just $275 an ounce - close to a 20-year low.  Roughly a third of the proceeds were then invested in euros - which then proceeded to plummet.  The gold price did not do much for a time. Now it has enjoyed a stunning rally.  The result is a stonking loss on those Gordon Brown gold sales. In fact, the Chancellor's disastrous foray into international asset management now looks to have cost the British people some £2 billion."  More.

Treasury overpays tax credits by £1.8bn

Daily Mail: "Gordon Brown's tax credits fiasco will cost the nation £3billion... The revelation will be a huge embarrassment to the Chancellor who has made tax credits the cornerstone of his social policy.  The Inland Revenue will reveal that billions have been paid out in error - and cannot be claimed back.  Some £2billion has been given to families by mistake every year for the last three years. Ministers accept that nearly £1billion of that will have to be written off for each year."