Another tale of waste

A very interesting piece on Radio 4’s File on Four last night.  It discussed the failure to properly account for EU and UK regeneration funds distributed to the English Regions.  From my own experience, this rings true.  The diversion of dfunds to local pet projects or the failure to properly account for monies is endemic in the UK.  We do like to think we know how to do public administration better than the rest but, in practice, we exhibit many of the behaviours we deplore in others.

You can listen again at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/fileon4

The transcript of the programme will appear on the website in about two weeks time.

Back from the Summer Break

It has been sometime since the last message was posted.  Apologies – it has been a hectic summer.  And, as always in the UK, nothing much happens in the summer.  We call it the silly season for good reasons.  The newspapers are full of stories that would never be covered at any other time – falsified sightings of sharks in the Bristol Channel, for example.

But more recently, we have also seen British politics at its very worst.  The absurd guessing game – will there be an election this autumn – merely emphasises the informal, idiosyncratic and, one might even argue, undemocratic nature of our ‘democracy’.  But the full return to ‘punch and judy’ debating styles in the House of Commons just tops it off.  If we thought (and there seemed to be signs of this in the early days) that Brown would be different, the prosepct seems to be slipping away fast.