Bloated Bureaucracy

I haven't ranted (or indeed posted) in a while so here goes..

I've been reading a book recently called 'Wasting Police Time' - one of the key issues the author (a policeman) has is that the UK police are so overburdened with bureaucracy that it restricts their ability to focus on solving real crimes. It's worth reading - funny and scary (given the shocking waste of taxpayers money) at the same time.. PC Copperfield has conservative views about how we should actually deal with criminals - most of which I wholly agree with. (But then I would wouldn't I?)

Bad maybe... but perhaps this is worse... Apparently the Learning and Skills Council's budget is now £11billion a year. For those of you who don't know - they run adult learning courses.... how they manage to spend £11billion however is anyone's guess - that's like funding Trident every couple of years... and what do we get for it? A lot of school drop outs not turning up to their courses probably.

I understand that the tax system has to be redistributive - but there should be a limit to the size of the state - and Labour are beginning to take the proverbial with the amount of our money they waste on supporting vast government bureaucracies and creating non-jobs for unemployable wasters. £11billion is about £184 per member of the UK population. So probably about twice that per taxpayer...just for adult learning courses.

I've got a great plan - take away half the budget from the LSC and use it to build about 5 megaprisons to vastly increase the UK prison capacity. Then bang up all these repeat offenders and make them serve some proper time. Even if it doesn't redeem them - they can't rob people and businesses whilst they're in jail can they....