More Gadget

Gadget's book made a double-page spread in the Daily Express on Saturday and Phil Johnston, the assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, writes about him and his book (and Copperfield and Chalk and their books) in today's paper.
'The bloated bureaucracy that is crushing Britain' just about sums it up.
"At the Labour conference," Johnston writes, "Gordon Brown boasted of his great investment in the public sector as though he had paid for it out of his own pocket. But what happened to all that money? No doubt there are new hospitals and computers in schools. But the big change has been the creation of a vast administrative bureaucracy to oversee how it is spent... Figures released a few days ago by the Office for National Statistics showed that while people are losing their jobs in the private sector, public sector employment increased by 13,000 in the second quarter of 2008 to 5.771 million."
Where is the money for all of this coming from, given that this country is next to broke?
Politicians of all stripes act like it gushes from a never-ending spring but it actually comes out of our pockets. Worse, much of it isn't even ours any more; it's being lent to Brown and his cabal of incompetents by the Chinese government, and one day we'll have to pay it all back. That's when the pain will really begin.
This all comes against a backdrop of repeated incantations about how we're all going to have to tighten our belts in future; when is the government going to think about tightening its belt?
Gordon boasts a lot about what he's done for small businesses - the engine of what's left of our economy - but as people involved in a small business we can tell you that he is wreaking havoc.
A while ago, a friend of ours who ran an industrial shotblasting and painting company, employing anywhere between 3 and 50 people depending on contracts, closed his business down and retired early because of the increased costs of insurance (which had quadrupled in one year despite his exemplary record) and because of demands that he and his men become 'accredited' to some new government scheme.
He pointed out that he was accredited by the people who mattered - major clients like Texaco, BP and Shell, who tend to sack incompetent contractors - but this fell on deaf ears. The deaf, by the way, were people who hadn't an ounce of his real world experience.
In our own sphere, we'd love to employ an editor now.
But employment legislation, inflation and the busting of Brown's debt-led boom mean it's just not feasible.
We know many other small businesspeople in similar positions, and it must be a pattern repeated across the land.
If Brown had left more money in peoples' pockets and had not sought to strangle entrepreneurs with red tape, most of it entirely pointless and some of it actually harmful, the employment situation (and the tax take) would be heading north instead of south.
Still, we haven't been petrol-bombed yet, unlike the people at Gibson Square, who are publishing The Jewel of Medina (and previously published Londonistan).
That's something to be grateful for, I suppose.

All our books are available in all good bookshops, from Amazon and direct - from www.mondaybooks.com or by calling 01455 221752.