‘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 with the declaration: ‘The advent of Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US has inspired The Spectator to launch our own war on the UK’s wasteful spending: SPAFF. Use our searchable tables below to join us in hunting down areas that are in need of the axe’.
Welcome to the party, some of us might say. The Taxpayers’ Alliance have been toiling away for years. Charlotte Gill has a substack called Woke Waste and has founded Doge UK. ‘Voters had been fed this narrative of austerity’, she told GB News. ‘I don’t see any of that’. She has investigated millions in academic grants sent out by a quango called UK Research and Innovation. One of its subsidiaries is the Arts and Humanities Research Council – which awarded £841,830 to a research project titled ‘The Europe That Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000’.
Gill has come up with plenty of other examples – some being cited by other media outlets without attribution to her as the source. That’s show business, I suppose. She has certainly been doing heroic work, and if some patriotic businessman wishing to avert the nation from going bankrupt wished to give her a grant that would be welcome. There is scarcely much point in her applying to the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
I myself have been putting in freedom of information requests to local authorities on occasion about their dubious spending – before this activity was considered cool.
The Americans have caught the bug too – establishing a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Early this month the White House announced: ‘For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.’ It offered as examples:
- $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities’
- $70,000 for production of a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland
- $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
- $47,000 for a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia
- $32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru
- $2 million for sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala
- $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt
Of course, it can be countered that spending of a few million (or even billion) here or there is a footling matter when the US Federal Government spends nearly $7 trillion a year. Even on our small island, we are faced with Government spending of £1.3trn this year.
But it is not surprising that these more exotic spending items have prompted popular indignation. Nor that they should have provoked suspicion about much more widespread spending being similarly wasteful or damaging.
So this is a welcome cultural shift which has taken place over a relatively short time. The defeatists – not least in the Conservative Party – have been silenced. Those who claim that it is ‘not possible’ to find any savings in public spending – as the state is already being so frugal – lack any credibility.
Is there any chance that we might apply similar scrutiny to what the state owns? It is often related to state spending, of course. If we employ fewer quangocrats and civil servants, they won’t need offices to visit – even if they are the few who are not ‘working from home’.
Lord Agnew was the minister of state for efficiency and transformation from 2020 to 2022. He writes in The Spectator: ‘I did manage to cancel 33 government property leases in London, which saved about £1 billion. But the biggest termination of all, signed and sealed by two cabinet ministers and myself, was overturned after I left (102 Petty France, overlooking St James’s Park). Why? Simply because the civil servants didn’t want to lose the lovely view.’
Last year, the Ministry of Defence published an estimate that its land holdings amounted to 845,000 acres. That’s equivalent to the size of Cornwall. No doubt there are a few more acres here and there that they have missed. We don’t really know how much land the public sector owns altogether so vast is the scale of it. ‘When everybody owns, nobody owns and when nobody owns, nobody cares,’ as Milton Friedman put it.
Just this week we had a report that there are 46,000 empty council homes in the UK.
In London alone, we have around 20,000 empty Council garages – many of which could be demolished and replaced with housing.
Apart from the scope for easing the national debt – and thus interest payments – selling surplus state property could give substantial scope for the new homes we need.
But it is also a matter of civic pride. How many of those derelict eyesores in our towns and cities turn out to be owned by the public sector? In this age of cutting-edge technology, it should be easier to find out how to rescue such sites from the dead hand of the state.
A system of sticks and carrots could facilitate the disposals. Rather than the Treasury nabbing all the proceeds, the local authority or government department could keep a share to spend on improving services. But where surplus buildings are hoarded without a valid reason, such state land banking should cease to be tolerated. There should be forced sales and penalties for the delay.
Let’s see if we can develop some crowd-sourcing so that public-spirited citizens can help identify sites in their communities that could be brought to the market and brought back to life.
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