The distinction between investment and expenditure is one that many, probably most, politicians do not make. This is for at least five reasons: i) most of them have never been in business and have never had to make the distinction; ii) the money they ‘invest’ is not their own; iii) when the waste becomes apparent and undeniable, they are usually out of office; iv) they cannot be held financially responsible personally for the losses incurred; and v) expenditure will always please one constituency or another, so is therefore never a complete political liability.
While Mr Blair’s ‘Education, Education, Education!’ resulted in an even greater lowering of standards, Miss Reeve’s ‘Investment, Investment, Investment!’ will no doubt result in Debt! Debt! Debt!
But I do not intend my remarks in a partisan spirit, because in this respect no party is blameless. My local county council, which has long been Conservative, is a case in point. In 2018, it bought, or ‘invested in,’ three shopping centres for £51 million. Within 2 years, they were valued at £38 million less. The council had lost, at least nominally, £480 per four-person household in the county.
Has any councillor been held responsible for this? It would be libellous to suggest fraud on anyone’s part: but to have committed fraud would at least have required some mental alertness on someone’s part. Honesty may be the best policy, but it is not sufficient in itself.
A reader of the local newspaper made this pithy comment:
Lesson for councillors everywhere. You are not businessmen, if you were you wouldn’t be working for the council. Leave business to the experts and concentrate on what you should be doing, emptying bins and repairing potholes. Business is too complicated for you people.
Technically, councillors, though now paid, are not working for the council: they are the council. But the point remains valid. Councils should not be in the business of risking ratepayers’ funds or pretend to be property developers.
Alas, I think the problem started with Mrs Thatcher. It is quite right that the public service should be run in a business-like fashion, but public service bureaucrats are not therefore businessmen, who should have all the perquisites of businessmen. Mrs Thatcher found the public service inefficient and left it inefficient and corrupt. Of course, with the eye of the true spiv, Mr Blair seized his chance to extend the system she instituted.
Without intending to do so, therefore, she laid the foundation for Reevian socialism, in which the milch-cows in the private sector will be subject to ever-more frequent milkings.
