Obnoxio's Manifesto

OTC makes the sensible case for scrapping large chunks of the quangocracy; buried away in the comments is his fuller manifesto, which is pretty much the same as my own:
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First step would be to leave the EU.

Second step would be to repeal every law based on EU directives. We can always re-implement later. Mass repeal of every law introduced by Labour since 1997. (Probably a lot of overlap!)

Third step would be to shit-can every consultancy contract with the government and renegotiate.

Every single drop of government funding for quangoes and charities stopped dead.

Massive tax simplification: flat tax of 25% on everything above £12,000 per annum. Dividends untaxed. Corporate tax abolished*. All duties abolished**. VAT abolished. National Insurance either abolished or replace the current Ponzi scheme with actual insurance.

Sell off the NHS.

Renationalise the trains and resell them in such a way that you don't have oligopolies on routes. Same thing for buses.

Deregulate schools and introduce vouchers.

Introduce citizens income, end ALL welfare programs. Implement program to gradually phase out citizen's income***.

Sack the entire civil service, district and town councils. Review the entire governance requirement.

Go to the market to get us out of the bank ownership business.
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* I'd quibble with this. It would be far better to have a 20% flat tax on all income, personal or corporate, than 25% on personal incomes and 0% on corporate.

** 'Duties' that equate to user charges, such as fuel duties to pay for roads; a modest tax of a few percent on new goods to cover refuse collection costs; or indeed taxes on land values seem like 'good' taxes to me.

*** I'm not sure where this is going. A higher effective income tax-free personal allowance is an important corollary of a Citizen's Income-style welfare system; as nobody can be sure which is preferable, why not give people a choice?

Quangoes of the week

From AOLNews:

Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo will announce the new Alcohol Improvement Programme at the National Alcohol Conference in Nottingham. It is hoped the £6 million* measures will help reduce alcohol-related harm.

They include establishing regional alcohol managers, pulling together local information, and increasing access to specialist treatments. Twenty of the most deprived primary care trusts (PCTs) in the country will share £3 million of the funding...

Another £2.7 million will be spent on regional alcohol managers and £450,000 will go to the National Support Team.

An extra £1 million will fund a new Alcohol Learning Centre.

Via The Fat Bigot, who sumarises thusly: "Perhaps £1million out of the 6 will actually go directly into something that might improve patient care, the rest will be spent generating and circulating paper. What better example do we need of the futility and wastefulness of government-led, top-down management of a service?"

* Maybe they'll fund this from the 10p tax on plastic bags that they are thinking of introducing in Wales? See previous post.