Where's the public outcry?

The other day I posted about how quangos are swallowing up around £124 billion of tax payers money every year. From The Business, I now find out that a further £70 billion is spent by this government on "consultants"!

So our government is spending around £200 billion on getting advice about the best way to spend tax payers money. I wondered what this represented as a proportion of tax revenue. From here we see that the UK takes around 36% of GDP in tax (these are 2002 figures, but I expect it's more rather than less). UK GDP is around £1250 billion - which puts the total tax revenue at around £450 billion.

So 45% of what our government takes in tax is spent by the government in getting advice on how to spend our money! Compare this to the 18% we spend on the NHS and around 10% on defence.

The Tories refuse to promise tax cuts and are now promising to maintain public spending levels to maintain services. Why? It is clear from this that any political party with any real sense and ambition could promise to cut taxes, cut government spending and improve services just by getting rid of this monumental waste.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert on government spending, economics or taxation - but as a Project Manager, I do know a bit about handling a budget and one thing I am absolutely certain about is this; if I were spending 44% of my budget on getting advice from others on how to run my project I wouldn't last very long in my job.

Why aren't the Tories in a rage about this? Why isn't Cameron demanding that this scandalous waste of public money is ended? Same for the Liberal Democrats. Perhaps it's because half of them have shares and directorships in these "consultancy" firms - and of course, they all look forward to some cushy little job on a quango in the near future.

We need a total shake up of our political system. The current parties are devoid of any feelings of public duty, responsibility or morality and are clearly just in it for themselves. There can be no other explanation for such a blatant waste of tax payers money.

Get angry, people.