WHILE the four-months-old US administration has caused some distraction for disturbing the current international order by endeavouring to rebalance trade, a real revolution in governance is taking place.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk has revealed what most of us suspected: our huge deficits are a function of government-led grift. Billions of dollars of quasi-criminal spending is being uncovered.
This explains why taxpayers are paying ever more for ever less; in the worst-case scenario we are paying ever more to feed a beast intent on destroying our civilisation.
Remarkably, Elon Musk is on track to cut the United States deficits by half. Should he succeed in closing the gap between revenue and expenditure by removing fraud at the federal level, he will have transformed the Western world’s prospects and given us hope that the same could be done here in the United Kingdom.
Our country is, it is no exaggeration, already on life support. Not least because the UK’s not-for-profit, life-sucking sector is gigantic, in particular compared with the size of the economy. There are more than 300 quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (quangos), not to speak of the state-funded elements of the charitable sector.
These organisations are designed to operate independently from ministerial control and wield considerable power. They are responsible for regulation, public services and policy implementation.
Figures published yesterday by the TaxPayers’ Alliance showed that at least 1,472 quango staff received over £100,000 in total remuneration (comprising salary, expenses, benefits, bonuses, compensation for loss of office and pension benefits or contributions) in 2023-24, while 315 received a higher salary than the £172,153 of the prime minister.
Here is a list of quangos published by the Adam Smith Institute.
They employ close to 400,000 people on a budget of £390billion per year, nearly 300 per cent more than our total deficit and over a third of our entire yearly £1.3trillion government spend.
Added to this richly funded, unaccountable, relatively new branch of government, we must add the partially or fully state-funded charitable sector, which is in effect the PR arm of the vitality-sapping UK quangocracy.
Nearly a third of the £100billion budget for UK charities comes from the government. Around £30billion is spent by the government on ‘charities’.
For comparison, housing received £5billion; the department of (no) Energy and Net Zero £14billion; policing £18billion for the fiscal year 2024-2025.
This represents a huge amount of lobbying firepower, paid for by the public, often (if not always) against their interest.
These bodies are not accountable.
They are certainly not capitalist revenue generators.
They are leeches.
The people manning them are mainly from what one would generously call the progressive political side of the aisle: anti-business, anti-borders, anti-Western.
The United Kingdom is sinking into the quagmire of mediocrity and potential global irrelevance because successive governments have allowed the growth of permanently funded activist charities and NGOs to become the all-powerful arm of the State’s incontestable power.
Democracy in the shape of our parliament is now but a sham.
There never was a politician who sold to voters the destruction of our car industry, the dismantling of our borders, or the legalisation of either shoplifting or burglary, not to speak of grooming gangs in many towns and cities across the land. But this is exactly what an out-of-reach taxpayer-subsidised politicised public sector has delivered over the last three decades.
Our energy industry, which has burdened us with some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world – four times higher than the US – has been sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero.
Meanwhile, the UK government has cynically moved to take control of British Steel amid fears that the blast furnaces at its Chinese-owned site in Scunthorpe could be at risk of shutting down, essentially ending steel production in the UK, not that what remained was anything to be proud of.
Any reprieve is but a stay of execution. Net Zero zealots are waiting in the wings.
All the while Ed Miliband is looking for a CEO to sit at a desk of an organisation called Great British Energy. The total compensation is advertised at £525,000, no less.
With such budgets, NGOs wield enormous political power and exert veritable and unwanted influence over government policy. Unfortunately, these are largely unaccountable to the voting public. This is little more than political activism dressed up as social justice.
In short, the transmission mechanism between the taxpayer and the State, its supposed servant, is fractured. From one perspective, we, the taxpayers, are milch cows; from another, we are indentured and powerless serfs with no rights but to pay and keep quiet.
Voters have no say, consumers little choice and businesses less freedom. All the while the out-of-touch, inevitably ‘woke’ quangocrat yells from his ivory tower that this societal destruction is for our own good and that he is doing this only to save us from ourselves.
Great Britain will not prosper until the axe is taken to this rotting edifice.
It is high time that they were knocked off the pedestal that self-interested parties built for them. Without cutting the £400billion budget for unelectable power, Britain will never be great again.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on April 28, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
