Today has been a warm autumn day - in fact almost an Indian summer of a day here in the north of England. While rain pours on the south the sun has been shining on Manchester and the Tory Party in their conference. During this week they have been spelling out some details of their policies in government without being too specific in order to give credibility to their claims that they are the right people to form the next government.
It seems that every political party now assumes that they will have to tackle the problem of the ever increasing government deficit in the short term rather than the long. This may or may not be entirely true but it is important that all parties give an indication, at least, of how they will eventually get the deficit down. Most of what they all propose encompasses cuts in services and increases in taxation by one means or another. The problem I have with all this is that it ignores the growth in useless bureaucracy caused by more and more regulations that serve no purpose other than to increase regulation, supervision and documentation. We have vast armies of bureaucrats and quangos passing around juggernaut loads of paperwork in order to allow ordinary people, other bureaucrats and service providers to tick boxes and answer unnecessary questions. We are told that more than 3,500 new criminal offences have been added to the statute book during the life of this useless Labour government. Police spend 50% of their time filling in forms; surely it was never intended to be like this? All the new legislation involves tons of paper and regulations and information documents and copies of dozens of forms and data bases and buckets of money. Whichever party is in office after next year's election should commit to getting rid of all this rubbish and concentrate of providing services, not on Westminster surveillance of the populace. Without such a commitment we will face a situation in which we get rid of the actual services and keep the bureaucrats. Like Jim Hacker's new hospital which had 500 administrators who were over-worked running a hospital that had no medical staff and no patients, we can run the machinery of government to provide no services whatsoever.
The problem is that armies of people work for the government shifting all this paper around and collecting all the data and if we get rid of all this, another million people will be thrown out of work. But we have to do it. We cannot carry on with a situation where the tax burden goes up and up in order to pay for all this stuff. Further the problem is exacerbated by the fact that various governments over the last fifty years have presided over the steady destruction of British industry such that now we make almost nothing for ourselves. In so many ways government - not just this Labour government - have missed one technical opportunity after another to build new industries. We live on wind-swept isles but yet we have only 2% of our electrical energy generated with wind power; the Germans have 20%. Throughout our industries there is example after example of boats being missed so that now our pathetic isle has to rely on assembling other countries cars; buying railway systems from Italians and Japanese; buying telephones from Finland; buying gas from Norway and Russia; buying computer systems from anywhere; buying ships from Europe or SE Asia - now we cannot even overhaul a big ship. The Labour government would rather employ thousands of people to administer a system of supplementary benefits that ensures that 50% of the population gets less pension rather than get rid of the paper shifting and pay everybody the same pension. The daft system used gives nobody any advantage while penalising those who have saved for their retirements.
The Tories may not do everything that I would like but they are at least facing up to the reality of government waste - I hope. After all, it was Michael Heseltine who said - when he was a government minister - that the problem in trying to cut the bureaucracy was that it was the bureaucrats who would be the ones who would have to organise it. And like turkeys voting for Christmas it was not a project that could be guaranteed to succeed.
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