Illusions, delusions and disillusions are common in politics.
David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ didn’t last long, nor did his ‘the greenest government ever’ pledge. The Leave campaign’s promises of ‘sunlit uplands’ and ‘global Britain’, fooled 52% of voters, but predictably came to nought, with Brexit causing trading, economic and cultural havoc and destruction.
Much worse, Hitler’s promises in 1930s Germany, to wide public acclaim there, to cure the country’s woes and restore her to greatness, caused millions of deaths and untold misery and destruction. Trump’s election promises to ‘Make America Great Again’ are a sour joke, given the current disastrous consequences for American economic, social, environmental and democratic well-being.
Many of the worst of these false promises came from right-wing politicians, willing to promise anything to get into power. Unhinged, unlikely, uncosted, unplanned, glib promises of future greatness and wonder, exceptionalism and impossibility on steroids, to woo an aggrieved electorate, backed up by favourable media and out-of-control social media coverage, lead voters to fall for it so often. And then the worst happens.
In the same way, voters are falling for Nigel Farage’s Reform party now.
The Reform Party claims to be able to turn Britain’s fortunes around with simple, eye-catching, beguiling policies. Nigel Farage sneers that Sir Kier Starmer is ‘the most unpatriotic Prime Minister ever’ and is ‘out of touch with working people’. He promises to make huge cuts in welfare spending and the size of the state, including a purported saving of £7 billion, by scrapping DEI schemes, but these savings are an illusion.
According to Reform, there is waste, inefficiency and unnecessary functions and spending in local and national government. Richard Tice, who may become Chancellor in any Reform government, says Government spending should be reduced to 35% of GDP rather than the 45% it currently is. Such a huge reduction would mean swingeing cuts to frontline services such as the NHS.
According to Darren Jones, at HM Treasury:
“They (Reform) can’t tell us how any of this would work. We only know that it would lead to devastating cuts to our public services and provoke another financial crisis just like Liz Truss’s mini Budget.”
Following the Reform Party’s success in May’s local authority elections, where they gained control of ten councils, their plans for cost savings became clearer.
At Kent County Council, (and all other councils run by Reform), according to the Telegraph, the party is ‘unleashing its DOGE Unit’, which consisted of a team (appointed by the then chairman Zia Yusuf, and modelled on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE), of software engineers, data analysts and auditors ‘to crack down on waste, fraud and inefficiency’. The team will be headed in part by the Leave campaign’s financier, Aaron Banks.
Elon Musk’s DOGE
The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was set up unconstitutionally by President Trump. Federal departments can be created only by Congressional authority. Absurd claims were made by Musk that there were huge savings ($2 trillion) to be made by cutting waste, fraud and inefficiency in the various departments of the Federal Government. The initial claims were quickly revised down, and the actual savings after 130 days work claimed by Musk were in the region of $175 billion. But even these were unverified, half were undocumented, and many remain subject to on-going court procedures.
These so-called ‘savings’ in practice were not really savings at all, but completely arbitrary cuts which came at great cost to the individuals, services and the public affected. Cuts were made to the number of inspectors at the Internal Revenue Service and employees at national parks for example, and will cost money in training replacements and lost revenue; and cuts made to the number of nuclear engineers and air traffic controllers had to be reversed and similar people re-hired. The most egregious example was the cancellation of 80% of the grants made under USAID. A Boston University study calculated that this cancellation had caused the loss of 300,000 lives already, and 1500 babies a day were being born HIV-infected because their medication had been withdrawn (Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect). Bill Gates has said that millions of people will die from the USAID cuts, which were nothing to do with fraud, inefficiency or waste.
According to Trump, ‘Elon is terrific’ (this was before their recent bust-up). But in reality, Musk’s DOGE is an ultra-right-wing-driven, macho-posturing, tech-bro performance, designed to hoodwink the public into thinking that they will be saving federal funds. It enables Trump to boast, and to blame the Biden administration for wasting billions of dollars. In reality it enabled Musk to pursue his own personal interests, and implement many of the Heritage Foundation’s and the tech industry’s objectives for accumulating personal data, and cancelling contracts, services and individuals that didn’t fit with their absurd, destructive, mindless, cruel, antisocial agenda.
According to Michelle Goldberg (NY Times, ‘Musk’s Legacy is Disease, Starvation and Death’): ‘Musk’s DOGE thought USAID was a ‘radical-left political psy-op’, and ‘the most gigantic global terror organisation in history’.
Musk’s DOGE operation was and remains a ghastly, expensive, destructive failure for the American people on all fronts, costing far more than it ‘saved’ in Federal funds, disrupting millions of lives and services, and permitting widespread corruption inside the departments of government. This so-called ‘waste and efficiency operation’ included the illegal theft and misuse of intimate personal data, the installation of Palantir Foundry software for mining, collating and matching data, enabling undocumented migrants to be identified and found, the cancellation of legal investigations against Musk’s companies, pressure on countries to purchase the Starlink communications system as a condition of tariff negotiations, and the enablement of Musk company government contracts.
DOGE was ‘A full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire’, according to former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper, and ‘an arson of public assets’ according to Max Stier, Partnership for Public Service. (Quotations from Heather Cox Richardson, Letter from an American, May 31).
Senator Elizabeth Warren, in ‘130 days of Elon Musk’, documents 130 cases where Musk, his companies, and his family profited from his insider status in the American government.
The UK Reform Party and DOGE (now renamed DOLGE)
Given the atrocious reputation and widespread contempt for Musk’s DOGE operation in the US, it was a surprise to hear that the Reform Party were launching DOLGE, modelled on Musk’s DOGE, on the English councils that they control (The L stands for local).
Misbehaviour, waste and inefficiency frequently occurs in the private sector, for example Nick Leeson (Baring Brothers), the absurdly complicated and wasteful financial and legal engineering at the UK water companies, and Fred the Shred’s outrageous emoluments after being at the helm of the Royal Bank of Scotland before the 2008 financial crash.
That kind of scandal, on that scale, is rare in the public sector. Having myself worked in central and local government for 30 years, I can say there is almost no waste, inefficiency or fraud. Reviews often are undertaken, and the organisation reshaped, or the methods reworked. Productivity improvement opportunities exist, usually requiring investment.
In local government, much of the spending is on statutory services, or is finance provided by and ring-fenced by central government. Local authority budgets have been decimated since 2010, cut by up to 40% in real terms by the austerity agenda, and there is nothing left to cut apart from the actual (already reduced) services provided.
Reform have said that their agenda includes net stupid zero, and that they will stop, hinder or frustrate all initiatives in their areas related to the green agenda. Reform-led Lincolnshire County Council have already closed their Floods Committee, and many Reform-led councils have cancelled investment projects like solar panels and electric vehicles. Reform’s agenda also includes zero net migration, meaning that they will frustrate services and expenses relating to the hosting or well-being of immigrants in their areas. One Reform council has already cancelled English classes for immigrants.
But these actions are not the elimination of waste, fraud and inefficiency, they are policy-driven service cuts.
There is likely to be much more of this short-sighted and self-defeating approach to so-called savings to come as Reform councils get themselves organised. It is also likely that, unlike their counterparts in the US, their DOLGE units will operate legally, thanks to the primacy of the Rule of Law in the UK.
Conclusions
Reform are a classic right-wing party – their over-riding objective is to reduce the size of the state, reduce the level, quality and expense of public services, and reduce taxes (the other major part of their mission is to reduce or eliminate net migration numbers and to toughen the regime against asylum seekers).
But they are also right-wing extremists, and their ambition is to is to achieve those budget reductions by annihilating many of the traditional and fundamental functions of government which citizens now expect, rely on and take for granted.
Reform’s DOLGE units are a cover for that extremist agenda(see also Byline Times). They will not find waste, fraud or inefficiency in local authorities. But they will claim success by saving money through cutting services.
Voters, do not be taken in.
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