How Maude believes government could save more taxpayers' money

By Paul Goodman
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For all Francis Maude's ultra-modernising views, his Conservative roots run very deep: after all, his father, Angus Maude, was Margaret Thatcher's Paymaster-General and co-author, with Enoch Powell, of Biography of a Nation.  In his time, man who now holds the same post as his father has been a Treasury Minister, lost a seat, found another, served as Shadow Chancellor and been Party Chairman.  In short, Maude is a veteran politician who could have put his feet up in office - as others have been known to do as they age - and treated his appointment as a bit of a last hurrah.

This hasn't happened.  Even his critics concede that he has made "far-reaching reforms", and Maude himself points out that the civil service is now at its smallest since the Second World War.  And although some of the work will doubtless have been outsourced, there's no doubt that the waste and extravagance of the Brown and Blair years is being curbed.  Behind the Times's paywall today, Rachel Sylvester describes how a team of civil servants helped to drive finding £500 million of savings last year, and believes that there are big digital reductions to be made across Government - "the Cabinet Office believes it can save 40 per cent on the cost of building secondary schools". (Peter Hoskin has described the enthusiasm of younger civil servants for change on this site.)

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Voters have good reason not to believe politicians and their statistics

By Mark Wallace 
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"Pity the rational politician", laments the header on Peter Kellner's Telegraph article today. Leaving aside the question of how many rational politicians there are, why should we pity them?

Do so, Kellner tells us, because they're lumbered with such a stubborn electorate. Voters just won't believe the facts. The numbers and the academic analysis tell us that immigration is falling, educational standards are rising and crime is down, but the people don't buy it. That, he argues, leaves us prey to a "knee-jerk", "populist agenda".

It's undeniable that the people do not trust the political class. Saying that voters think politicians are prone to lying is about as insightful as revealing that Wayne Rooney doesn't keep a copy of Wittgenstein's collected works in his kit bag.

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Boris and Carswell show Conservatives how to win

By Mark Wallace
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The need for politicians to reconnect with the electorate is beyond debate. Falling turnout, the collapse in party memberships, and widespread disillusionment with politics and its practitioners all demonstrate the scale of the problem. 

The initial reaction of the political class to this problem was to come up with the worst possible response: blaming the people. 

Even the choice of word to label the issue was patronising and inaccurate: apathy. All the polling, as well as the clear evidence of growing online activism and rising pressure group membership, shows that people don't care any less than before about political issues.

Rather, voters increasingly feel that the political process, and the parties who operate within it, does not offer any solution to their problems. Why donate, volunteer and vote if in return there is no appreciable change?

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Why is Cameron letting Labour, which last won 29% of the vote, gain 77% of the appointments?

By Paul Goodman
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Before Margaret Thatcher, the following was true as a rough rule of thumb.  The arts leaned left, as now.  The armed forces, the judges, the police and even, arguably, the teaching profession leaned right.  The civil service was somewhere in the middle.  In short, the left's "long march through the institutions" hadn't gathered pace.  The EEC had not yet become the European Union, and the European Court of Human Rights was a distant presence.

Today, the judges certainly don't lean right, and nor do the police.  That some of the main organisers of the anti-Thatcher protests are teachers helps to show how the ethos and culture of the profession has changed.  The Militant Tendency used to dream of nationalising "the commanding heights of the economy".  It failed to do so, but it's scarcely an exaggeration to say that the Left is squatting on the commanding heights of culture.

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Departmental budgets are coming down: 5) CLG spending. Eric Pickles wins the golden axe award

By Paul Goodman
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Harry Phibbs wrote about Eric Pickles's record this morning.  CLG spending is counted under two headings - CLG Local Government and CLG Communities.

The former, the larger of the two budgets, has risen by about a £1 billion, and is slightly south of £27 billion.  Figures for the latter come in as follows:

2010 - 2011 Outturn: £10,348,900 b

2011 - 2012 Outturn: £5,566,000 b

Pickles has thus cut almost half CLG's non-Local Government spending in his department.  He thus tops the league table and scoops this website's golden axe award.

"Unprecedented reductions in spending on public services" - Paul Johnson, Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Departmental budgets are coming down: 4) Education

By Paul Goodman
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And now for something bigger still: Education.

2010 - 2011 Outturn: £59,922,700 b

2011 - 2012 Outturn: £56,391,000 b

Michael Gove's department is a particularly interesting one to examine, given the plan to cut his department's administrative costs by half, which Peter Hoskin reported recently on this site.

I gather that the Education Department's own administrative spend is £500 million.  That figure comes with a health warning, since administrative costs can be a moveable feast.

Of course, every penny matters, and it's a good thing that the department is striving to save money.  But however you cut it, those costs are clearly a tiny fraction of the total.

"Unprecedented reductions in spending on public services" - Paul Johnson, Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Departmental budgets are coming down: 3) Justice

By Paul Goodman
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And now for something a little bit bigger: The Justice Department.

2010 - 2011 Outturn: £9,338,400 b

2011 - 2012 Outturn: £9,026,000 b

Tim Montgomerie has set out in detail on this site how Ken Clarke made these savings as Justice Secretary.

Mr Clarke may not be ConservativeHome's biggest fan (nor we his) but Tim praised this "master of the departments he leads"..."this effective and fiscally-dry-as-dust minister".

"Unprecedented reductions in spending on public services" - Paul Johnson, Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Departmental budgets are coming down: 2) Cabinet Office

By Paul Goodman
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Cabinet Office

2010 - 2011 Outturn: £2,544,200 b

2011 - 2012 Outturn: £2,473,000 b

"Unprecedented reductions in spending on public services" - Paul Johnson, Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Departmental budgets are coming down: 1) Law Officers

By Paul Goodman
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I concluded our The Wrong Right series this morning with Why does so much of the Right treat cutting spending as light entertainment?

To follow it up, a series of posts will go up today showing how, despite suggestions from some on the right to the contrary, departmental budgets are coming down.

Let's start with a relative minnow - the Lord Officers' Departments.

2010 - 2011 Outturn: £682,000

2011 - 2012 Outturn: £610,000

"Unprecedented reductions in spending on public services" - Paul Johnson, Institute of Fiscal Studies.

In defence, for once, of Bercow

By Paul Goodman
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In some ways, John Bercow has turned out to be a good Speaker, speeding up business, discomforting Ministers by allowing more Urgent Questions, and generally standing up for the legislature against the executive, which is a big part of what he's there's for.  In one particular way, however, he is a bad one, in that his troubled relationship with his former party has compromised his impartiality.  This assertion is backed up by facts.  Rob Wison, the very capable Conservative MP who's taking an active interest in the Savile scandal, has meticulously reviewed Mr Bercow's Commons interventions, and doesn't mince his words about them.  The Speaker, in his view, is biased.

My reaction on first reading today's news of the resignation of four out of five of IPSA's board members was thus to raise an eyebrow, and my assumption was that the flammable Mr Bercow had messed up again.  But first readings aren't always right and stories sometimes need a second glance.  For example, the Guardian's story today about Chris Heaton-Harris, James Delingpole and the Corby by-election suggests that Mr Delingpole was never going to put down a deposit - so its implication that Mr Heaton Harris "backed [a] rival [candidate] candidate" is wide of the mark, which perhaps explains why these words are in quotation marks in the article's headline.

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