Is kill all the quangos. Sir Simon tells us why:
I served for five years on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and resigned with one conclusion ringing in my ears. If you want to deny women control over their bodies, you can rely on liberal-minded women (who dominated the authority) to do it for you. To them, other women were not to be trusted with their eggs or their wombs. Anyone seeking help to have a baby must be put under state control, for their own good of course.
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The third consequence is that statist reactionaries, led by the professions, will gather round the innovation to try to kill it at birth.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Fertility Society are already proposing that egg freezing be permitted only for "medical" conditions, such as prior to a cancer operation, but not for "non-medical or lifestyle" reasons.
A member of the HFEA, Bill Ledger, was reported on Sunday as saying that "the group I worry about are women who are healthy and want to have kids, but do it later". I imagine they worry too, but what business is it of his? He added that the process is still uncertain and that these women were "taking a gamble for their future". Who is he to deny them that gamble? He then says that it costs £5,000, presumably more than the professor feels the poor things can possibly handle. He is a professor, but not the editor of Which?
Another fertility professor, Melanie Davies, agreed that freezing "should not be used for women who want to guarantee a family in the future". She attacked clinics for offering to store some eggs in return for women giving others to needy recipients. It was de facto egg-selling, and thus a shocking incentive. Besides, it might lead to the "emotional trauma" of a child knowing and possibly finding its natural mother, as the present law allows.
Shaw never spoke a truer word than that all professions are a conspiracy against the laity. What has a woman\’s lifestyle to do with Professors Ledger and Davies? Precisely the same arguments were deployed against contraception. It allowed women to choose when to have babies. It was indeed a lifestyle choice and, initially, something of a gamble. It cost money. I am surprised Ledger and Davies did not invoke those old enemies of scientific advance, the will of God and the natural order of things.
If we didn\’t have such appalling organisations making the rules by which we must live our lives then we wouldn\’t have such appalling rules foisted upon us by which we must live our lives.
Simply cut off their funding at source. You know it makes sense, kill a quango today.
Indeed.
I think that they should not be scrapped, but any statutory powers removed and then the funding cut off.
Leave them to sort out their own finances and pay their own fat salaries. Watch how the Chattering Classes and Fabian Fifth Columnists sack lesser staff in a twinkling so as to preserve their income and personal payoffs.
They are the Righteous With Divine Mandate.
Appointed, not elected. Unaccountable to me or you. Utterly beyond the confines of democracy as it would be unconscionable to most MPs to ever make the state take a few steps back from whatever avenues it interferes with.
Chancellor Brown promised a bonfire of the Quangos. It’s been a bit of a shit bonfire. Elfin Safety must have ruled it was too dangerous. No toffee apples.(Too sugary) No sparklers.(Too much like good fun) Fire replaced with an orange cloth wafted about with a fan. The Royal Navy have been drafted in to shout ‘bang’ in place of fireworks and the laser pointers standing in for the explosions of colour have been confiscated by the Plastic Plod.
One of my very first acts as benevolent dictator, after evacuating the buildings used by DEFRA, DCMS, DBERR, DIUS, DCLG and DID (then deploying the Household Cavalry to guard them with orders to shoot on sight any civil servant trying to sneak back in) would be to abolish all quangos by fiat. The staff would be ejected, troops would be similarly emplaced, the paperwork and electronic documents carted off to a secure destruction facility, the buildings (unless particularly fine) razed, and a blacklist put on employing any of the staff for five years. Oh, and I’d make it a criminal offence punishable by arbitrary detention (I am a dictator, after all) to advertise any Civil Service or local government position in the Guardian or Independent (there’d be no hiring anyway until staff numbers were cut by 90%). That way if Polly and Moonbat wanted to foist their insane drivel on us they’d have to get a blog like anyone else.
Trebles all round!
Just want to emphasize (as is my “wont”–whatever that may be) that striking at the branches and leaves is no more effective than Don Quixote’s attention to the vanes.
Freedom is tangled (and smothered) in the roots. And it’s actually important that those capable of understanding that fact (at least to the present) are a relatively small group, a small minority within a minority.
I believe that many-times-larger numbers of people are capable of understanding the truth of matters in such (basically, economic) relationships. If they are not, a return to barbarism awaits. But if (as I believe) they ARE so capable, the fault of those who do understand will have been to waste intellect, effort, and time in useless tilting against innumerable minor insults while neglecting “job one,” with the inevitable outcome being as if they hadn’t existed at all.
I may be pessimistic but I believe we’re running out of time.
“You know it makes sense, kill a quango today.”
How about a game-show format? Each quango could have a champion who would argue for the benefits of tax-payer funded milk development or whatever. Each night, two quangos would enter, one quango would leave, with the winner decided by phone vote, raising further money.
Let the Wine Standards Board go up against the Defence Vetting Agency, Investors in People UK fight it out with the Pesticides Safety Directorate – that’s the kind of TV I want to watch.
Mr P has the germ of an idea.
A combination of Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice.
Each show the QANGO comes on and does its dog-and-pony and then the Dragons can either support the cause with their own money or the QANGO is “FIRED”.