How Brown wasted £1,229,100,000,000

I have just ordered this book: Squandered by David Craig.

I read about it in one of today's papers (The Mail on Sunday) and it looks like illuminating reading, full of facts like these (as in the Mail's article):

• During the last decade the Government has increased public spending by more than a trillion, a cost of £50,000 per family.
• In health this about £269bn, where the number of managers has doubled, the number of beds has declined.  Rates of hospital acquired infections are now more than 50 times higher than some of our European counterparts.
• The budget for the police has risen by more than 40% which has fuelled a rise in officers of 11% and a rise in admin staff of 62%.  The Labour decade has seen violent crime double and the closure of 700 police stations.
• Despite a 90% increase since 1997 on education spend,  the number of Neets (people not in education, employment or training) has increased so we now have more 16-24 year olds who are unemployed and unemployable than almost any other European country.
• While vowing to reduce pensioner poverty, the number of private sector final salary pension schemes has halved, while the cost of public sector pension schemes has doubled.  This has led to 23m private sector workers paying more each month to fund the pensions of a few million retired public sector workers than into their own pension savings.

How very depressing.  But I do appreciate it when people like David Craig take the time to document our perverse development.  Lest we forget.

Some comments on the book over at the Adam Smith Institute.

Comments

[Norm]

In yesterday's Observer there was a book advertised entitled 'Gordon is a Moron',
it obviously covers much of the same ground.
Blair went on to the lecture circuit and Middle East envoy, perhaps Brown will go on to a job as commentator on Raith Rovers.
We can only hope.