Time to slaughter the sacred cows !

The woman pictured to the left is not someone I am a fan of. I disagreed with her politics, her world view, her attitiude to society and her divisive methods. There is one area that I have admiration, she was prepared to deal with tough issues even if it upset people (usually people like me).

What have we got today. We've got Gordon Brown - the less said the better. We've got David Cameron, who no one knows what he stands for, what he believes in and what he want's to change (apart from the tenancy of no 10).

Due to the policies of successive governments, we are now faced with a situation where we are in recession, we have ballooning national debt and our economic cash cow, the finance industry, is seriously unwell.

What we need are solutions and rather like the early 1980's, whoever administers these, they will be rather unpleasant for someone. In simplistic terms, the solutions are likely to be

a) The Tory Solution - Kick the poor - Massive cuts to social programs and services
b) The Labour Solution - Kick the rich - Massive hikes in taxes

As every family now owes £25,000, a figure more than most people earn in a year, whatever happens someone is going to suffer. Gordon Brown has proved a master of raising taxes by stealth. Hitting dividend payments to pension funds being the classic example. No one noticed a hole in their pay packet so there was no political price to pay. The trouble is that he used up most of these cunning wheezes when times were good. Windfall taxes on banks can't be done as they are all broke. Sadly the most dangerous part of the current crisis is that the general election will be next year, so Gordon Brown is deferring all the pain until then, in the hope that by some miracle his luck changes. Even if it doesn't David Cameron is likely to face some horrible decisions & I suspect that within a couple of years, through no fault of his own, he'll be the most unpopular Prime Minister for many a year, making us all wish good old Gordon was back in charge.

I happen to think that there are plenty of scope for changes, which would actually improve the country, which will massively reduce the need for welfare cuts or huge tax rises. Before I started this blog, I only had a passing interest in council & government finances. I was too busy running a business & playing music. What I have found is that Barnet Council is completely inept. Mismanagement is rife. A prime example is this weeks news that the £12 Million pound Aerodrome Road bridge project is £11 million over budget. The verdict of the Barnet roads supremo, Andrew Harper "No one is to blame". Sorry, but he's wrong. A council official has already walked the plank for this. I'd be interested to know what payoff he received to keep quiet. In my opinion, if someone cocks something up on such a grand scale, they should get the absolute legal minimum payoff. That would focus their minds. As to the issue of political control. I'd say that the people responsible for wasting Taxpayers money should be identified and stripped of all allowances and responsibility.

The big issue is scrutiny. Who should do this? Well this is the job of the opposition. They should chair all committees and they should get their pick of the councillors to undertake the job. Their reports should be made public, in all cases except those with security considerations. Commercially sensitive paragraphs could be expunged. Scrutiny committees should be able to recommend that councillors be fined (ie stripped of allowances) if they've failed to do their job. A good example of this is the Iceland saga, where the head of the resources committee failed to ensure that their was any mechanism in place to ensure our cash was being invested according to the council's own rules. This was despite him receiving extra cash in the form of a responsibility allowance. Not only does that person, Councillor Mike Freer still hold his post, still receive a responsibility allowance and still hold the job of Council leader, he's still the Tories Candidate for Finchley. Would this be the case if the scrutiny committee had truly been independent?

Barnet is just one of thousands of Councils. This profligacy is being repeated up and down the country. I'm sure that there are some truly well run councils, but if Barnet is in any way representative, money is being wasted on a grand scale.

You may wonder why this hasn't been addressed? If anything, the last local government act made things far worse, bringing in the cadre cabinet system. The reason is because to the political classes, local government is a sacred cow. It provides jobs for the boys for local activists. Mike Freer can in effect be a full time PPC because he has all of his juicy allowances. If the scrutiny committee had real teeth, he'd have been out on his ear six months ago.

For all my dislike of her, what we need is a Thatcherite approach to these local government sacred cows. We need someone who is not afraid to upset people, someone brave enough to explain to their supporters that this will be good for the country and good for them. Make them earn their allowances, open them up to scrutiny and strip them of their cash if they screw things up. It would save us all billions. Before I chose either of the options above, I'd like to ensure that the cash which is being collected at the moment is not being wasted by incompetent fools with no scrutiny and no sanctions.

This isn't Toryism or Labourism, this isn't Brownite or Cameronite. This is plain common sense and if one of those gentlemen grasped this nettle, maybe I'd change my mind and say they deserved the job.