On June 2, Zia Yusuf, the Chairman of Reform UK, tweeted that a UK version of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – had been launched. Promising an ‘Elon Musk-style’ slashing of government waste, the initiative echoes the American attempt to apply Silicon Valley’s business mindset to the public sector. Now, with Musk stepping […]
The Institute for Government was sceptical, to say the least, in its initial response to Pat McFadden’s bonfire of the quangos. As it stated, ‘the number of bodies is the wrong measure of success’, given that it is ‘an easy metric on which the media can focus’, but which can ‘create an illusion that major […]
The increasingly volatile voter is clear; something is rotten in the state of Britain. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, only 40% of respondents believed the current system delivers effective government. A record 45% said they ‘almost never’ trust any party in power to prioritise the country’s needs over political self-interest, and 79% […]
One of the most obvious causes of our country’s economic distress is rarely commented on. Yet if we just step back from the turmoil of ever-higher taxes, over-breeding regulations and now tariff turmoil, we will discover the blindingly obvious. Unelected, well-funded, self-appointed lobby groups wield enormous political power in our daily lives and exert outsized […]
Quango bonfires are back in fashion – not that they were ever really put out. For years, successive governments have promised to slash the size of our bloated state. Instead, they’ve quietly outsourced power to an alphabet soup of arm’s-length bodies, many of which operate with minimal scrutiny, high costs and an ever-expanding footprint on […]
Michael Gove was, without a doubt, the most able secretary of state produced by the last 14 years of Conservative government. This sounds like praise, and of course it is. But great ability is a two-edged sword. When an able individual sets themselves to good purposes, they can do great things, as Gove did at […]
…the UK also has its own – somewhat quieter – examples of success. High agency individuals who have done a ‘tour of duty’ and changed the wiring of government to respond to major challenges. Neuroscientist and former No 10 adviser James Phillips helped to set up the Advanced Research and Invention Agency; AI engineer and […]
Around a year ago, I became a father. At the first midwifery appointment during my wife’s pregnancy, in one of the fluorescently-lit rooms of our local GP surgery, a midwife told us – very cheerfully – that she wouldn’t see us through to the birth. She was moving, along with ten of her colleagues, to […]
Next year will be 20 years since we first published the ‘Bumper Book of Government Waste’. It put public spending under the spotlight, challenged Whitehall and local government to up their ante and encouraged people to hold ministers and budgetholders to better account. It won an Atlas Award in Washington DC in the process, for […]
‘Do the Wokey Cokey’ splashed on The Sun’s front page this week. It detailed how an £8 billion research fund went towards ‘trans-friendly robots’, ‘queer animals’ and a ‘TikTok dance’. Last week, The Spectator’s cover had the message ‘Wasting away’. It added: ‘Michael Simmons launches the Spectator Project against Frivolous Funding’. The website follows up […]
Baroness Carr, the most senior judge in England and Wales, has attacked both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch in extremely strong terms for having the temerity to criticise the courts – specifically, a recent decision by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal to allow six refugees from Gaza to settle in the United Kingdom. Referring to […]
If you need to hold a summit, Paris comes highly recommended: since the peace conference which produced the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, there have been at least four similar major meetings in the French capital. It was natural enough, then, that European leaders responded to President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation and converged on Paris on […]
In a lecture titled ‘Politics as Vocation’, the philosopher Max Weber noted that: ‘To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word.’ It was true when he said it, in 1918; it is even more true now. Much of Weber’s speech, given to Munich […]
Who is in charge of the Civil Service? A simple question, with a supposedly simple answer: it is the Head of the Home Civil Service, who is also the Cabinet Secretary. The Permanent Secretaries of all government departments and the Scottish and Welsh governments are responsible to him for the day-to-day management of their organisations. […]
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