David Craig, on February 13th, 2014A couple of weeks ago someone called Sally Morgan (Dame Morgan) didn’t have her well-paid sinecure as head of Ofsted renewed. So she started bleating and blubbering that she was being culled as part of a Tory drive to remove Labour supporters from public bodies such as quangos.
Well, here are the real figures showing that Labour have been stuffing Britain’s 1,600+ quangos with Labour supporters (click to see more clearly)
(The Labour Government stopped publishing these statistics in 2006 for rather obvious reasons)
And, of course, Dame Sally Morgan’s demented rant got extensive coverage in the BBC. As the reader of a magazine wrote: “left-wing quangos spreading like knotweed under covering fire from the left-wing BBC”. Odd that the BBC never mentioned that around 75% of all quango chairpeople who declared a political affiliation were Labour supporters.
The useless, overstaffed, ineffective environment agency is headed up by a former Labour minister Chris Smith (Lord Smith). What are Chris Smith’s qualifications to run the Environment Agency? Umm, none. To quote another reader’s comment: “Chris Smith, liberal arts Cambridge, labour party professional ever since is not qualified to run the Environment Agency because this requires an understanding science, meteorology, physics, biology etc. Why put someone like this in charge? It can only be nepotism of the worst kind. He probably has hardly stepped out of Islington for 30 years. Now he looks and sounds completely out of his depth. One could probably go round most of these quangos and find the same. I am not that bothered that he is a metro leftie, they all seem to be, but could the system at least try to match some expertise to the job“.
So, what went wrong at the Environment Agency? Here’s a really brilliant article by Leo McKinstry from the Daily Mail describing how, under Fatman Smith, the Environment Agency became a bloated, overstaffed, underperforming, wasteful joke obsessed with political correctness and prioritising newts and birds over humans.
It’s worth reading as it describes what is happening in almost all our useless, incompetent quangos and regulators – Ofgem, Ofcom, Ofwat, Ofsted…………………..
Category: 
For a minute there David, I misread that last line… Oftwat.
🙂
These people all have the same thing in common… They are all communitarians…
This is where budding communists went when they realised that they could not be elected… (Chris Smith is a lonely fat exception).
As far as I can remember they only made one mistake with their appointees, and that was with the appointment of Chris Woodhead, he actually did what it said on the tin, he tried to raise the standard of education, and began to succeed… He was replaced.
I quoted one of the only bits of Shakespeare that I can remember the other day in t’Telegraph…
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
William Shakespeare
From Julius Caesar.”
I feel that it is quite appropriate for these sinecures.
I’d like to know what happened to Cameron’s “bonfire of the quangos”
I live in the country and in between the gently rolling hills, water collects when it rains. One such place developed into a lake, the farmer being a thinking sort of chap, realized it was probably due to the clogged ditches and uncut hedges, courtesy of greenie tree huggers knowing best. He dispensed some chaps with equipment to the area, and lo and behold a few hours later the water disappeared. Anyone guess what the moral to the story is?