How New Labour has wasted a billion pounds

Want to know just how the Government is spending your hard-earned cash? Be warned - the truth is even worse than you could have imagined...

If you'd like to know just how the Government is spending your hard-earned cash, look no further than 'The Bumper Book of Government Waste' by Matthew Elliott and Lee Rotherham. But be warned - the truth is even worse than you could possibly have imagined...

The world of public sector spending is nothing like the real world. It consists of a range of man-made disasters, lunatic schemes, wishful thinking, dopey planning, and plain greed, so much so that cataloguing it is verging on the impossible. Even in a book this size, we've only managed to skim the surface. We've scarcely mentioned the spindoctors, for example, but then they only' cost a few million every year. This includes the £300,000 said to be the going rate for the three people hired to take over from Alastair Campbell. Then there's the Special Advisers, policy wonks brought into the ministers' office to play the politics that civil servants aren't suppose to do. Their numbers have doubled to 80. In 2004, they cost taxpayers £360,000 in foreign trips, to add to their £5.3m worth of salaries. That averages out at about £65,000 each, several thousand more than an MP gets.

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