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Squandered | 
 enlarge | Author: David Craig
Publisher: Constable
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 2318
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1845298322
EAN: 9781845298326
ASIN: 1845298322
Publication Date: April 24, 2008
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Misleading and disappointing lack of focus June 6, 2008
Accountant (Leeds)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
It's no surprise to me that there is waste and inefficiency in Government. I doubt if that has changed much over the last 50 years but what I was hoping for when I bought the book was context and proportionality and maybe a better insight into what level of tax and public spending is required to provide the levels of service we demand. I was expecting issues like the impact of an aging population and the greater demands on the health service to at least get a mention not to mention the fundamental distinction between capital investment and current account expenditure. Craig does not seek to reconcile the headline numbers he attributes to wasteful expenditure to his explanations and examples - because they so clearly don't. In the chapter on the health service he quotes examples of squandering of over 700 million pa on new management and 2 billion on a failed IT system. These figures are a tiny proportion of the figure of 269 billion (over 10 years) that he quotes. Its a shame that a subject that needs some serious attention continues to generate more heat than light.
 Polemic not analysis June 4, 2008
C. P. Smith (Bristol, UK)
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I came to this book having previously read the same author's (with a collaborator) Plundering the Public Sector. On the basis of that I was hoping for some reasonably detailed analysis of how and why public expenditure has increased so much for seemingly so little return, making use of the author's own professional experience and the insight gained. Perhaps as a result my expectations were different from those of some of the other reviewers of this book, for I am afraid that I was very much disappointed.
What we have here is a polemic rather than an analysis, a parade of New Labour's high crimes and misdemeanours, and context is for wimps. The author may also have allowed his partisanship to overcome his circumspection; either that or he has been too inspired by the New Labour Book of Statistical Presentation. Thus there are a number of places in graphs and in text where various little tricks have been rolled out to encourage the unwary to jump to a foregone conclusion. This rather detracts from the seriosness of the enterprise.
After a couple of chapters I felt I was reading a very long comment piece from the Daily Telegraph. Reference to the `Notes on Chapters' explained why. Just over 40% of the references (I'm afraid I counted) are to articles in daily and Sunday newspapers, mainly the Telegraph, the Mail and the Times, plus a few to the generally more objective and reliable Private Eye magazine. The term `cut and paste job' comes to mind.
If you are someone who just can't get enough of the Daily Telegraph, or you want a list of Gordon Brown's atrocities to reel off to your mates down the pub (or on the fuel duty demo perhaps), this is very much the book for you. If you are after an even halfway serious discussion of what may have gone wrong with public policy and management in this country I would advise you not to squander your money on buying this book, or your time in reading it.
A fair successor to "Plundering the Public Sector" May 26, 2008
David Levy (London, UK)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Though this book makes your blood run cold at the thought of the profligate wastefulness of this dreary quango-obsessed government and the appalling taxation burden that must befall us within a very few years as a result of their bone-headed corporate stupidity, I don't think this is as penetrating a work as it could have been, despite its non-stop, and I thought slightly breathless, recitation of the numbers. I certainly don't think it's in the same league as "Plundering the Public Sector" (2006), written by Craig with Richard Brooks, which analysed in brilliant and occasionally hysterically amusing detail a few of the most bafflingly inept New Labour projects - most impressively from my point of view the foolish and fundamentally misconceived NHS IT system, the ludicrously misnamed "Connecting for Health". There was a real attempt in that work to get to the root of the corporate newspeak and double-think, and to convey the infuriating self-serving, self-congratulatory sneery superiority of these intellectually-challenged wastrels. Actually, the self-serving bit is very well covered here, though it isn't analysed as it should be, as an Orwellian rewriting of commonsense, but as a group of comically stupid political minnows and their slick corporate buddies on the mutual make with their salaries, expense accounts and perks - necessary but not quite sufficient. How is it that a supposedly well-informed electorate has allowed this structured lunacy to take over our lives for the past 12 years? Why are there so few serious books, like this, that even attempt to describe what has gone so horribly wrong? (One answer may be that, like celebrity-without-demonstrable-talent, or the Lottery, we are all secretly waiting for that chance call from Quangoland - or Non-Departmental Public Bodies as Craig tells us they have now been renamed - to join them at the trough.) Craig appears to work brilliantly in a team - his tenacious ability to get hold of facts and figures (and to present them in marvellously simple and dramatic graphical format) is unsurpassed by any of our pusillanimous mass-media. If he could team up next with Simon Jenkins, on scintillating analytical form in "Thatcher & Sons" (2007) we could have the book that finally finishes off this floundering and talentless government.
Whatever my criticisms, any author who can bring to light the following quote (in "Plundering the Public Sector") has to get a prize for something; when I first read it I thought I might need emergency resuscitation. Quizzed by the Parliamentary Accounts Committee about a trifling 4 bn overspend (or was it 6 bn? - he wasn't quite sure) the Chief of Defence Procurement said: "This is not money which we have overspent ... what you are seeing is a level of disappointment". Quite so.
Socialism is the cause May 26, 2008
Richard Perrott (UK)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book, and books like it, are a symptom that people are finally waking up to the Socialist fraud that calls itself government.
Socialism (disguised Marxism and Fascism), as espoused by the Political Class and the EU, has shown it's criminal bankruptcy. Big Government is finished, it just hasn't accepted it yet, it will try to suck every last bit of wealth from this country, until it faces rebellion, war or revolution.
Taxes have always been theft, but now the UK government debt and commitments are so massive that it is doubtful that most current workers will see more than tiny fraction of their tax returned in services and pensions.
The Political Class, the EU, and all Socialism should be got rid of sharpish, so that we can start to fix this insanity.
I suggest that people visit mises dot org to better understand the current crisis and what needs to be done.
 If only I had May 22, 2008
Richard Crowe (Cornwall)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was rushing for the 46 bus to Paddington Station at South End Green in London with this book in my hand and its contents boiling my brain when who should I see but that master of spin, Aleister Campbell sitting at one of the cafes there. I very nearly rushed over to thrust it into his face and demand if he had yet read it. If only I had! I sat on the bus afterwards fuming at myself. This is a book everyone should read and if only they did then canvassing for New Labour would be a real nightmare for anyone still benighted enough to do it. But as other reviewers have commented this is not some Tory diatribe this is a clear and careful analysis that reads like Gogol's Dead Souls (only its all true) of the managerial takeover of our country. A process that actully began under Thatcher. The whole of the New Labour project is laid bare. The facts and the arrogance that it reveals throughout government should be enough to start a revolution. Its actually quite terrifying to see all these elements of this takeover brought together like this and I am someone who reads the press and follows the news closely and so thought I knew how bad it was. I think we should all be buying copies wholesale and giving it to everyone we know who can read and think.
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