Quangos - the alphabet soup revealed

NB I am not the Devil.

Today sees the publication of a TaxPayers' Alliance report which I am sure will be of great interest to many of those who sup at the Kitchen - a full bestiary of the UK's quangos.

Importantly, the report uses a meaningul definition of the word quango, including any Semi Autonomous Public Body, that allows us to catalogue several hundred which the Cabinet Office currently refuse to recognise as being quangos at all.

In total, in 2007-08 there were 1,152 quangos operating in the UK, with £90 billion spent on or through them and employing over 534,000 quangocrats. Year on year, that means that whilst the total number has fallen by 10 bodies, the total spend has jumped by £13 billion.

The total figures are instructive as to the overall state of the vast unaccountable swathes of British Government, but in particular it acts as a tool for anyone to actually dig into it. If you want to have a look through the sheer scale of the quango state, you can read the full report here.

The Mars Bar game

I really find all of this quite wearying—I'm not even getting that much pleasure from being right (almost) all of the time. What?

A few weeks back, I wrote a rather long post detailing some of the attacks on our more enjoyable past-times: I covered drinking and smoking fairly comprehensively, but ran out of steam slightly when it got to food.

Inevitably, of course, these filthy unaccountable QUANGOs—costing us over £250 billion every, single year—seem to be deliberately attempting to make it all too easy to carry on drawing together the threads of the ropes that bind us.

Today, those stinking cunts at the Foods Standards Authority are attempting to shrink the size of chocolate bars.

Chocolate bars could be cut in size to help fight the obesity epidemic.

The Food Standards Agency wants the average bar to be reduced by up to a fifth to reduce daily calorie intake.

It has drawn up plans for confectioners to make voluntary changes to the size of their snacks.

Uh oh: we all know what these fuckers mean when they say that something is voluntary, don't we? That's right: it's voluntary unless you don't do it—in which case it becaome compulsory.

By 2012 the watchdog wants all confectionary to weigh no more than 50g - currently Mars bars are 58g and Bounty bars 57g.

What? Where has this utterly fucking arbitrary figure of 50g come from? What the fuck are you people talking about?

I just don't have the energy to fisk this stupid proposal at length—perhaps I should eat a massive Mars Bar—but luckily The Heresiarch has done a sterling job.

Where to begin? I don't want to turn into Devil's Kitchen (that ecological niche is, after all, sufficiently filled already) but this is insulting and unworkable in equal measure. It's based on several layers of delusion, about nutrition science, about human psychology, and about the purpose of official advice. It's also an open invitation on the snack manufacturers to rip off their customers by selling them less for (presumably) the same amount of money.

Chocolate bars (and cans of fizzy drinks) are the size they are for good reasons. They are the optimum compromise between the manufacturer's desire to make the largest possible profit and the consumer's desire to have a moderately filling snack. If they are legislated smaller, or perhaps made smaller because of a voluntary agreement, then they would no longer fulfil their function. Many people would respond by buying more, rendering the whole scheme counterproductive. In any case, the notion that some quango should be setting more or less arbitrary targets for what people should consume would be scary were it not so absurd.

The alleged obesity "epidemic" is largely nonsense anyway, and not just because fatness is not a contagious disease. As reputable scientific studies show, there's almost no link between being "overweight" - as defined by the notoriously arbitrary Body Mass Index - and health problems. If anything, technically overweight people actually live longer than those whose svelte physiques meet with government approval. (As waistlines expand, after all, so does life expectancy.)

Do go and read the rest, because it is a beautifully written and comprehensive demolition of this completely fucking stupid idea. I am going to lie down in a darkened room and contemplate just what the fuck happened to this bloody country.

Oh wait—I know what happened to this country: I am reminded every time that a sentence like this pops up...

Health problems associated with obesity already cost the NHS £4.2bn a year, a figure that is set to double by 2050.

The Welfare State happened to this country. People decided that they were quite happy to borrow some security from the state. And now it's pay-back time: we are in hock to the state and this has fundamentally changed our relationship with our governments.

Now our lords and masters not only have the whip hand: they not only do not mind wielding the crop, but they care not that we can see them doing so. They not only have the apparatus to force us to do their bidding, they also have, as they see it, the moral high-ground.

The state is the loan-shark that we can't pay back and now we are about to get our legs broken by a couple of psychotic Glaswegians. And all for our own good.

And the media is entirely complicit—they know which side their bread is buttered. I mean, seriously, this kind of disgusting illiberalism is being proposed by an unelected QUANGO and the big news of the day is that Cameron said the word "twat" on a radio show.

Oh well, it has to get better, doesn't it.

Nor is it just chocolate bars and fizzy drinks. The FSA's press release warns that "later in the year there will be further consultation on dairy and meat products and savoury snacks."

Fucking hellski.

UPDATE: much of the motivation for the Welfare State was that it would help those in extremis—those people who were in a bad way and who could not help themselves.

Now, as regular readers will know, I have absolutely no time for the obese: the human body is a very simple machine in many ways and it is a fact that if you burn more calories than you ingest you will lose weight.

As such, if someone is morbidly fucking obese, the last thing that we should be doing is giving the fat lard-bucket more money to spend on food. Unfortunately, so perverse is our government that this is precisely what they have been doing.

A 25-year-old unemployed woman who was given an £8,000 operation to help her lose 16 stone is complaining because, as well as her weight loss, her benefits have been reduced.

Laura Ripley, who has never worked, was given the operation on the NHS to help her slim down from 38 to 22 stone.

But the 25-year-old, who receives £600 a month in benefits, is unhappy because as a result of losing weight she can no longer claim disability allowance amounting to an extra £340 a month.

This, she says, means she cannot afford to eat healthily - causing her to pile the weight back on.

The solution to this is very simple: cut her benefits even further so that she can barely afford to eat anything—and then just watch the pounds fall off her fat fucking frame.

The juxtaposition of these two stories highlights the utter stupidity of our rulers, does it not? On one hand, one of their pets is suggesting that everyone be punished because of a few lazy, weak-willed cunts and, on the other, the state is stealing our money to give extra benefits to the fat bastards so that they can continue to be fat bastards. It's insane.

Seriously, what the FUCK is going on in this country?

Since the extra allowance stopped Laura has put on a stone in just three weeks and claims she is being treated unfairly.

'It's heartbreaking that after all my hard work losing this weight someone's come along and ruined it.'

Look, you fat shit, the only person ruining this is you—stop eating and you will stop gaining weight. Do you understand this, you fucking useless waste of oxygen?

'I sometimes feel guilty about all the taxpayers' money that's been spent on me but I only want an extra £100 a month, that's all', says Laura.

Yeah? If I had just an extra £50 a month, I wouldn't have spent the last week living off mouldy bread, cheap noodles and the occasional Mars Bar (for energy) but that's just fucking tough, isn't it? Seriously, why don't you just go and fuck yourself? Or, as And There Was Me Thinking suggests (in a post that well worth reading in full), someone else...?

Hey Laura, here’s some advice for you -

But the 25-year-old, who receives £600 a month in benefits, is unhappy because as a result of losing weight she can no longer claim disability allowance amounting to an extra £340 a month.

You were not disabled you were a fat pie-munching fucktard.

‘I can’t afford to buy WeightWatchers crisps and cereal bars any more so I eat Tesco’s chocolate bars and packets of Space Invaders crisps, sometimes four of each a day’, says Laura, who spends seven hours a day watching TV.

Get of your lazy ‘Jeremy Kyle’ watching arse, find something productive to do and may be, just may be, you’ll have less time in the day to nosh anything, let alone choccy bars and space invaders.

‘People ask why I don’t snack on an apple – they’re cheap, but emotionally I don’t always feel like an apple.’

*splutter* – Emotionally, WTFF, the tax payer (or indeed a bona-fide benefit scrounger like me) doesn’t give a flying monkeys chuff about your cunting fucking emotions. I suspect the best thing you could do here, regarding your emotions, is get yourself a good, hard, dirty shag but let’s be honest, all the time you look like some piss take from Little Britain, you actually have less chance of a casual sexual encounter than Gordon ‘Country Fucker’ Brown, and funnily enough, he’s also a fat cunt that lives of the British Tax Payer whilst giving little in return.

Quite.

Piles of fresh, stinking bullshit

There are times when you read an article that is so simplistic and pathetic that it just makes you want to tear all of your hair out. This is one such article...

Girls have a greater fear of failure than boys despite outperforming them at all stages of school, a report said.

And these worries could seriously affect their chances of succeeding in school and work, the Equality and Human Rights Commission study claimed.

Tough tits. Seriously, what are you going to do? Let's look at ways in which we could equalise these fears.

Perhaps you would like to start brain-washing the girls to make them braver? Or perhaps you could take them to see the Wizard of fucking Oz, who will grant them a great, brave heart? Or perhaps you could just make them not give a shit (much like the boys, I imagine)?

Or perhaps you could make the boys more scared of failure by publically kicking the shit out of any that fail? Or perhaps you should tell them that, if they do fail, their families will be tortured to death?

Fuck me, I mean, seriously: where to fucking start?

It also suggested girls often aim for careers reinforcing gender stereotypes, such as teaching, childcare and beauty.

Perhaps they want to go into these professions? Perhaps women tend to be more interested in childcare? Or teaching? Or beauty? Could it be that there is a gender difference in the things that people tend to be interested in?

Oh, wait: that's probably just a fucking imposition of the patriarchy, isn't it? I forgot, there is absolutely no difference in the parenting instinct between males and females of this species (despite this being the case in just about every other mammal), is there?

The Commission's report suggested a fifth of young people had not received one-to-one careers advice, and did not understand how to achieve their desired goal.

Or, to put it another way, some 80% of young people had received one-to-one careers advice and did understand how to achieve their desired goals.

But sometimes those goals change; sometimes "young people" change their minds, or just can't actually achieve their goals.

Your humble Devil, for instance, wanted to be a mediaeval knight or a train driver when he was very young; then he wanted to be a doctor; when he bollocksed up Chemistry A Level, he went into nursing; then he went to study Microbiology; then he went into graphic design, and thence into a job doing print design; six years after that he went into web design and these days, after a stint in project management, he is now a Head of Marketing.

Do you see? Goals change: some goals become unobtainable, and then others open up.

It said despite girls' success at GCSE, three quarters of women still ended up in the "five Cs" of employment - cleaning, catering, caring, cashiering and clerical.

This would rather imply that maybe—and I might be sticking my neck out here—that women (and men) make certain choices about their lives and about what they are interested in; that men and women tend to make different choices about the relative merits of work and leisure, about competition and caring.

Is that a bad thing? I think not.

Of course, unlike the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I do not have an axe to grind (except that of personal freedom)—nor a massive fucking budget to protect. This QUANGO thrives on people being placed into stereotypical pigeonholes: if it did not, it would have no need to exist.

If you throw away a bottle...

I happened to notice that, playing in the MessageSpace ad space under some of my posts, this WWF-sponsored advert for Connect2Earth.


The message is clear: throw away a bottle and you will get hit by a truck.

Actually, I found the advert quite amusing, if slightly unlikely: who would be allowed to practise archery in their own home these days, eh?

But let us remind ourselves of what the consequences should be: what should happen is that you break the law and then someone accuses you, the police come around, charge you and then you answer to your peers in a fair trial.

These days, you throw a bottle into the street (admittedly, a fucking annoying and despicable act) and your retribution involves being hit by a twenty-ton truck.

Still, I welcome this ad. After all, the idea of karma is a religious one and it helps to enforce the idea that these Green nutters are little better than religious fundamentalists, consistently pursuing the wrong policies—can you say "biofuels"?—and using fear to attempt to gain support.

Just like the politicians who allocate millions of pounds of our money to these organisations then...


P.S. As standard, I like to check charity accounts to see just how much the British taxpayer has been forced to contribute to these so-called charities. So here's the accounts for WWF-UK, and below are the relevant sections.

Only £5.7 million from the EU and other government agencies. A bargain, wouldn't you agree?

Obviously, it would be more of a bargain if it wasn't your money being stolen from you and being used to support WWF-UK, whether you approved of their aims or not. You know, if "charity" actually meant "charity"...

Gang warfare

Apparently the odious Jacqui Smith—how is it that I find even her tits offensive?—decided that she'd try to placate the police by announcing a crack-down on gangs. Over at the ASI, Eamonn Butler identifies a few more gangs that the government might consider tackling.

Mind you, there are a number of slightly older gangs that the government could usefully tackle. Like the legal profession, for example, which succeeds in extorting vast amounts of cash from their clients, making it impossible for people to get real justice these days, unless they are very rich (or very poor and eligible for Legal Aid). By restricting the supply of lawyers, they can charge what they like. And the fact that the courts are a state monopoly doesn't help either. Sure, you can go to arbitration on contract disputes. But if someone owes you money, for example, you don't have much choice.

Doctors are another gang that should be tackled. Again, they decide how many people should qualify as doctors. So they don't go out of their way to pass too many. And again, the medical system is a state monopoly. People might not have to pay cash, but they certainly do pay in terms of reduced access, poor service, and lower recovery and survival rates than in many other advanced countries (and some non-advanced ones).

I could go on. There's the Health and Safety gang, which cancels village duck races and stops firemen from using ladders. And another shady group, known as the Quangocracy, which has all sorts of powers to regulate and fine people, without any democratic control. Not to mention the Westminster Gang itself, which is adept and robbing ordinary people in order to line the pockets of their own supporters.

Quite. Especially that last one: the state—the ultimate monopoly...

UPDATE: Martin Kelly (occasionally of this parish and who happens to be a lawyer) in not too impressed...

QUANGOs: invisible government

Now, this is a report that I've been waiting for for a very long time: the Taxpayer's Alliance Assessment of UK QUANGOs [PDF]: here are the main findings.

• There are 1,162 quangos in the UK, running at a total cost to the taxpayer of £64 billion, equivalent to £2,550 per household.


• Even under the Cabinet Office’s restrictive definition of quangos, the cost of these bodies has risen 50% in the last ten years.


• UK quangos now employ an army of almost 700,000 bureaucrats.


• Even the Government itself does not know the full extent of the unaccountable quango industry, which range from the massive e.g. Job Centre Plus (Staff: 70,042, Cost: £3.5 billion) and the Courts Service (Staff: 19,986, Cost: £704.8 million); to the bizarre e.g. the British Potato Council (Staff: 49); or the West Northants Development Corporation (Staff: 34, Cost: £15.3 million).


• When the total number of quangos is added to the other government subsidiaries such as local authorities and NHS trusts, the total number of organisations controlled by the UK Government rises to 2,063, costing the taxpayer £257 billion and employing over 5.1 million people.

Obviously, when Libertarian Party UK were looking at the best way in which we might slice away state spending in order to present our Income Tax Abolition policy plausibly, we (somewhat flippantly) looked to QUANGOs as we reasoned that there were considerable savings to be made in this department.

Furthermore, we also dislike QUANGOs—even were levels of spending much lower—because they are not directly accountable to the electorate: whilst we can vote MPs out, there is no way in which we can directly affect QUANGO budgets or the people who administer and spend said budgets (indeed, it is for this reason that LPUK policy is to dissolve them).

The figures that the TPA have unearthed are, quite frankly, staggering: LPUK shall be trawling through the report with a fine toothcomb (when I get some time) and establishing which QUANGOs can be abolished outright—yes, Potato Council: I'm looking at you and your International Year of the Potato—and which could be drastically scaled back within a short timeframe.

Just remember that the total spent by QUANGOs and organisations that are QUANGOs in all but name is £257 billion: by contrast, income tax raises a little less £150 billion...