The Insanity Plea

As our political parties vie to promise the most macho cuts in public spending and thus keep the bonus culture at a level which the City feels it can, in good conscience, accept, the head of the Audit Commission has taken it upon himself to condemn as insane their simultaneous promises to keep the spending on frontline health and education services at its present stratospheric level. The head of the Audit Commission is concerned lest the parties become so eager in their notorious zeal to purge the public sector of management consultants, human resource executives, public relations planners, logo designers, tick-box enumeration facilitators and so forth, that they will forget the many efficiencies (sackings, in Oldspeak) which could be made among the nurses, teachers, consultants, cleaners and other such throwbacks to a less humanitarian age.

New New Labour's idea of an efficient national health service is the model which is now failing so efficiently in the United States; the Conservatives' idea of an efficient national health service is the same, only more so. New New Labour's idea of a good national education system is one where those who can pay are trained for power and profit, while churches and charities teach the rest to be flexibly marketable consumers; the Conservatives' idea of a good national education system is the same, only more so. The Liberal Democrats disagree with them both, except insofar as they find it expedient to be more or less in debatably qualified accord with one or the other. Hence any promise to spare frontline services, be it a promise by New New Labour or by Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives, or even by the party of Nick "Who?" Clegg, is not insane at all; it is merely dishonest. Now that our Mother of Democracies has entered its terminal phase, with not just one but every available party manifestly incompetent to govern, the head of the Audit Commission must be an endearingly old-fashioned sort of chap if he thinks political promises have sufficient psychological reality to qualify even as mildly delusional.