It’s Black Friday! Everything Must Go! (A case for less government)

The UK state does too much, does lots of it badly and, in doing so, makes the country less healthy, less rich and less happy. Close down those ministries, agencies and regulators.

“The way that Milei has cut public spending is also a helpful lesson for other world leaders. He has done this by completely abolishing several government departments. This is something which appears to be on President Trump’s agenda, and which the UK should also consider.”

Many years ago, when I had the dubious pleasure of preparing and presenting Bradford Council’s budget, the first instruction to directors was to identify pressures and savings. And I was advised by the Finance Director that, if you want to make savings, you almost always always have to stop doing things. Plus, of course, that most savings mean employing fewer people because wages are always the biggest cost.

If a future British government is serious about reducing the costs of government (or, more pertinently, to reducing borrowing and meeting the demands for entitlements) then they will need to stop doing things that aren’t ‘mission critical’. What things does Britain’s national government do that aren’t essential to the task of governing our great nation? Do we need departments for education, energy, industry, media, sport and culture? Why does Whitehall have a department for local government when we elect all those councils to look after those functions? Is it critical to have departments for foreign affairs, trade and overseas aid? And what’s with ministries for women and equalities, race relations and human rights?

Much of the focus from conservative pundits stresses the idea that government is incredibly wasteful. You repeatedly hear lines like “the NHS has too many managers” or “the civil service is too big” as well as moans about unnecessary spending (although nearly £850,000 funding research into “The Europe that Gay Porn Built” does seem to be unnecessary). But you don’t hear these pundits taking the next and logical step of calling for the closing of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) or even the defunding of the Arts Council and the Economic & Social Research Council. Yet all these bodies are entirely unnecessary existing only to sustain indulgent government patronage and the regulation of private businesses. Before 1997 there was no DCMS and, forgive me if I'm wrong, there was plenty of culture, media and sport before then. Shakespeare didn’t need the patronage of a culture ministry, the rules of football and cricket were set down without the oversight of a sports minister, and Britain had a vibrant news and media industry long before any government took it on themselves to appoint a minister to look after these things. So close down the DCMS and the regulatory bodies it oversees; from the overmighty Ofcom and woke Arts Council to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest.

There’s a lot of evidence telling us that government funded research and development is a poor investment:

“The overall rate of return to R&D is very large, perhaps 25 percent as a private return and a total of 65 percent for social returns. However, these returns apply only to privately financed R&D in industry. Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero.”

Some would argue that this is because state institutions are very bad at picking the right investments (probably true) but it is largely because bodies like the UK’s Economic & Social Research Council simply don’t consider economic or social return to be the principal purpose of their funding which results in giving £850,000 for research into the wonders of gay porn. There is no way in which this misplaced sense of priority can be resolved so the best way is for the government to only fund research directly linked to government programmes themselves. And for this investment to be done by employing researchers not by an overelaborate grant-giving process providing backdoor funding for universities. I’ve picked on the ESRC here because it is the most egregious of the UK government’s research funders but we plan to spend around £25 billion through UK Research & Innovation over three years. I refer you to the quottion above from Leo Sveikauskas’ 2007 literature review of R&D and Productivity Growth for the US Bureau of Labour and say just close down the UKRI and all its agencies.

Rowena Lawson, who tried to teach me some development economics all those years ago, criticised Bob Geldof’s Live Aid project believing that most of the cash raised wouldn’t go where it was needed. Dr Lawson was also very critical of bilateral aid programmes such as that from the UK’s Department for International Aid, believing that these programmes were politically compromised, often corrupt and nearly always misspent. For all that I believe in the value of international aid, like research and development spending, much of what governments spend has very little impact on actual economic development in poorer countries. Much of what we do with aid is to sustain the existing economic models of places like rural Africa, indulging a sense of pointless guilt rather than help people in Burundi and Sierra Leone get rich like us:

“I don't know about you but this does rather smack of keeping peasants in their place, scratting away trying to feed their families and dying at 45. Indeed the entire bien pensant development world is riddled with people promoting some sort of Maoist peasant idyll rather than looking at what happened elsewhere. In the elsewhere with the cars, TVs, computers and so forth that those peasants would like too. In that elsewhere we didn't (at least until recently) subsidise the subsistence farm but rather we encouraged mergers, enclosures and the development of commercial agriculture.”

We should sustain our commitments to the World Bank but otherwise scrap the entire programme of international aid because it is corrupt, badly spent and probably does more harm than good (of course I note that an ever growing chunk of the budget is being spent on housing refugees and asylum seekers in the UK).

The foreign secretary is, of course, a great officer of the British state. This is the politician who gets the comfy business class flight or swift private jet to make platitudinous speeches at the United Nations or to eat good dinners with fellow boondogglers at the latest ‘conference of the parties’ or other international shindig. It is true that we probably need somebody to do this challenging job as well as provide a little political oversight to our diplomatic service and the bits of spying that aren’t done by the military, police or Home Office. But do we need such a person as well as ministers and a department of trade? Seems to me that the primary mission of our engagement with other countries (other than to avoid wars) is to promote trade - imports and exports. No UK minister should attend an international get-together without his or her objective being to promote British economic interests.

The foreign office, overseas aid and the department of trade should be merged into one department for British interests (for reasons of tradition ideally called the Foreign Office) with all the funding directed towards those interests. This would entail us scrapping our payments to the World Health Organisation. International Labour Organisation and others of the myriad of international boondoggles managed by grifters like David Miliband in the nicest cities in the western world.

Local councils in England spend about £125 billion every year and, to look after this money, we elect councillors and, in some places, mayors. So why do we also have a Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government run by a secretary of state (and currently the Deputy Prime Minister) in Whitehall? Why is there also an Office for Local Government, Oflog? Don’t we elect people to run councils and aren’t they accountable to the people who elect them? Isn’t that how democracy works? Apparently not.

The MHCLG has 16 ‘agencies and public bodies’ under its aegis the most important of which is the Planning Inspectorate which spends time and money second guessing the decisions of local councils. If we had a sensible planning system we wouldn’t need this function of course. But do we really need a whole department that sees its function as looking over the shoulders of elected local councils while tutting and offering corrections? Why, for example, is the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation run by the MHCLG and not Dartford Borough Council or Kent County Council (or even a private company)? And why not be truly radical and let social housing companies and councils set their own rents rather than have a regulator in London to do it for them? The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government should be scrapped as should Oflog, Homes England, the social housing regulator, and the Planning Inspectorate (along with the planning system). Conference centres and development corporations should be sold off and any residual functions devolved to local government.

I haven’t kept a running total here of spending but we’ve probably saved £50 billion or so through the simple process of streamlining government. If, for example, we moved to a free and open market in energy generation (now that’s a thought), we wouldn’t need a department for energy. Because we have a lot of loss making public transport there’s likely to be some residual functions while we work out how to make these systems not inherently loss-making (or shut them down). And some functions of the state - national defence, the courts and police - might now be given more priority. Even in these important areas, however, there are regulatory bodies and national agencies spending lots of government’s money - the Commission for Countering Extremism and the Forensic Science Regulator, the Great Britain-China Centre, the School Teachers Review Body, and many others. Scrap most of them.

The wise will, of course, observe that saving £100 billion makes only a small dent - about 10% - in the cost of Britain’s government because the largest chunk of spending (and the biggest problem) is our desire for free stuff from the government. And the regulatory state overreaches because the administration of that free stuff must be monitored. It isn’t enough to give mums some cash to buy childcare because they might buy the wrong sort of childcare or, god forbid, keep the cash and look after the child themselves rather than be a dutiful peon and go back to their minimum wage hospitality job.

But it is a start. The British state sticks its neb into too many aspects of our lives (let’s not mention public health just now) and, in doing so, makes business less efficient, workers less productive, and the average person’s life just a little less pleasant. When we look across to the USA under Trump all the noise of his revolution will be about tariffs or trampling on the ‘woke mind virus’ but the real revolution may well be shutting down large parts of unnecessary federal government. There’s no hope of the current UK government taking the axe to unneeded government agencies but a serious right of centre party should be setting out such an agenda, especially if it wants to appear different. Governments do too much, do lots of it badly and, in doing so, make their countries less healthy, less rich and less happy. Close down those ministries, agencies and regulators.