Cameron's Necessary Purge

One of the things that Cameron will need to do once he becomes PM is purge the public system system of its Labour stooges infesting the multitude of quangos and other public bodies. HT Voice of the Resistance for pointing out this article in The Spectator, which makes the point very clearly.

The closer David Cameron gets to the election, the more he may come to realise how short-lived the elation following his victory may be. Defeating an exhausted Labour party will be the easy part. Winning real power will be a separate, longer battle — and one that requires him to outwit an enemy far more cunning and resilient than Gordon Brown. To transform Britain means seeing off the cronies, placemen and political stooges with whom the government has packed the boards of Britain’s quangos.

Over the Labour years these groups have swelled from an irritant into a state within a state. With 700,000 employees and boards that read like a who-was-who of the Blair/Brown era, the quangos will represent Labour’s stay-behind fifth column. Not only are the quangocrats implacably opposed to the Conservatives’ reform programme, but they are better placed than even the wiliest Sir Humphrey to thwart change and mount a guerrilla insurgency against public spending controls.

To Quango Or Not To Quango

Cameron says quangos to be more accountable under the Tories:

He said: "There is a lot of money to be saved, but more to the point, we want to make these more democratically accountable, so that people don't feel the rage and anger against the machine that they have no control over."

Mr Cameron's remarks were made as he announced that a Conservative government would cut the number of unelected quangos in "a massive shift in power from bureaucracy to democracy".

Shadow Cabinet ministers have been told to review every publicly-funded independent body within their briefs to determine which should be scrapped or slimmed down.

A list of quangos can be found at the Taxpayers' Alliance site.

On the other side of the divide (such as it is) Matthew Taylor comes up with a number of reasons to beware of 'quango bashing'. He ends

The big challenge for Government is to stop doing things or to do things massively more efficiently. Getting rid of quangos may or may not contribute. Still, neither major party is facing up to the scale of the public sector spending cuts and, as the Sunday Times correctly reported yesterday, despairing civil servants are taking matters in to their own hands. ‘Quango bashing’ is clever politics but, too often, lazy policy making.

He doesn't consider the possibility that many quangos may actually a total waste of time and money, for instance. If they are then they should be abolished, irrespective of how small the saving is.

Another Quango - Just What We Need

Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Equality (sic), has announced the setting up of another pointless (and expensive) body: The National Equality Panel. Details here. Don't mention the 'class' word.

This reproduces work already being done by another quango ('self-standing') body, The Government Equalities Office.