Drop

... in the Ocean.

I see there are proposals to cut ministers by a third, according to the Beeb. I suggest the top third, from just below the shoulders.

Ah. Reading further, the suggestion is to cut the number of ministers. To cut costs. And make parliament more independent.

Bollocks. Assuming that the third are of the really highly-paid, such as Mandy who gets the thick end of £200,000 we'd save about £8m. Fuck all.

But hold on. In 2007, the DTI became BERR. The Bureau for Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. I had a particular gripe with BERR (the reason I am now irreparably bent out of shape), which encompassed not only the DTI but all sorts of other junk such as the court "service", Companies Arse, etc, and were pretty badly named as they did nothing for Enterprise (apart from try to kill it off) and the only Regulatory Reform they did was to make sure that the government got more than they got before. Some departments were amalgamated, and costs of ministers would have been duly cut, had they not been redeployed to other non-jobs.

BERR had a budget of about £3bn.

This £8m, compared to that £3bn, is about 0.25%, one quarter of one percent. Which isn't really very much. But, as TESCO says, every little helps.

But wait! BERR is no more. Mandy, last year, reformed it. So the Department for Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has reformed. It is now BIS, the Business Innovation and Skills Department. And now it has a budget of £22bn. And our £8m is only .03% of that, aka one tenth of one third of one percent.

So it's fuck all.

What is REALLY scary, to me anyway, is that BIS, at £22bn, or to give it its full title, £22,000,000,000 or one English pound per day per man, woman and child, is only the SIXTH largest spending department in Whitehall.

I would dearly love to know what the others do. And indeed, what they, or any of them, do.