Slightly Disconnected

Economics, of course, is no more an exact science than similar vocations like theology, astrology and quack medicine; and thus it frequently happens that certain actions in the economic sphere can appear to have unfortunate results even when the actual results are wholly benign. At the beginning of the present Parliament, for example, the coalition dispensed with several thousand nursing posts on the grounds that they constituted needless red tape; now, somehow or other, the NHS has all sorts of problems with patient care, but of course there is no connection. Similarly, the coalition has spent the last four and a half years taking money away from people who barely had enough to start with; somehow or other this has coincided with a massive upsurge in poverty, malnutrition and suicide, but it would be quite unscientific to imply any causal link.

For its own part, the Home Office has paid out nineteen million taxpayers' pounds in redundancy packages so as to save money at the Passport Office; only to discover that, somehow or other, there are now fewer staff to cope with a workload which has not always been obliging enough to diminish according to the Government's convenience. You would, of course, be a fool and a terrorist to believe that there is any real connection between the Passport Office sacking lots of people and last summer's backlog fiasco; nevertheless, the Passport Office has now launched a hurried recruitment drive, because the economic wisdom of inconveniencing thousands of potential Farage Falange voters during an election year is dubious even to the the mad old cat lady at the Home Office.