Here is a man elected as an MP under Margaret Thatcher, who served in the Cabinet of Iain Duncan Smith, the most Eurosceptic Tory leader ever,
Can someone check the history books: did IDS actually win a General Election while I wasn’t looking?
Quentin Davies II
In
7 responses
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Only in our dreams.
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He kept it very quiet.
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You know what Tim, if the DTI is abolished today, you and Chris Dillow can (dubiously) claim to have “scalped” an entire government department…
Tim adds: And wouldn’t it be even better if Quentin were in charge of it ….for the few hours before demolition? -
Katie, they are not going to abolish it, in that sense, they are just going to split it up and spread it round and create a few new sub-departments within other ministries and so on.
Anyway, the Lib Dems suggested this yonks ago. -
The CBI evidently takes a different view about the DTI whatever it is called, but then what would they know?
“Gordon Brown has been told by Britain’s leading business lobby not to weaken the standing of the DTI in the Whitehall overhaul that is expected in the next few days as the new prime minister takes control.
“The CBI is concerned about speculation that the DTI could be downgraded by the loss of some its responsibilities – although plans to dismantle the department are understood to be on the backburner. . . ”
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article1980578.ece -
When I become benevolent dictator of the UK, one of my first acts will be to despatch a brigade of troops in the wee small hours to take over the DTI building. They will hold it until a team of technicians can remove every hard drive from every computer and set up the bulk shredders to destroy every scrap of documentation that can be found. The staff will be summarily sacked, the doors locked and the budget added to the cuts being made elsewhere (such as the near eradication of QUANGOs and the defunding of the Arts Council. The procedure for DCMS will be similar except the offices will be demolished and the ground sown with salt)*. As Sean Gabb has pointed out, merely shutting down government bureaucracies is inadequate: the institutional knowledge base must be effaced, otherwise like a refractory fungal infection the tax-suckers simply slink off into a dark corner to regroup.
* I think I could probably cut public spending in my first year by £150–200 billion. -
Of course, among the many consequences of destroying DTI records and abolishing the DTI, there will be no one in UK central government left to monitor and advise on whatever the EU Commission gets up to on trade policy, industry regulation and technical standards unless those functions are taken on by some other government department(s).
Naturally, that doesn’t and won’t worry the Lib-Dems because they don’t believe our government should intrude in such important matters best controlled by the EU Commission on our behalf. Some of us aren’t so sure – successive UK governments have been much less enthusiastic about the EU’s evident enthusiasm for so-called “Anti-dumping” measures – see Table 5 in:
“The politicisation of EU Anti-dumping Policy” (PDF file) by Simon Evenett and Edwin Vermulst
http://www.evenett.com/articles/evenettvermulst2.pdf
“On his blog, Libération journalist Jean Quatremer reports that EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding has condemned remarks made by her colleague Gunter Verheugen in Süddeutsche Zeitung .. , in which he criticised the power of high-ranking EU civil servants. She told the same newspaper: ‘I am surprised that Verheugen speaks of the difficulties with his team in public in this way’, saying that in her opinion, EU civil servants are ‘excellent, well-trained experts, the best in Europe’ and that ‘there will always be controversies with our civil servants, but in my department, we sort them out internally.’”
http://www.open-europe.co.uk/media-centre/summary.aspx?id=176
Obviously, the EU Commission should be left to get on with regulating the British economy without any meddlesome interference from UK government ministries.
And as for regional aid in Britain, why shouldn’t UK regions compete among themselves with taxpayers’ money to attract inward investment projects? Foreign companies like it.
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