The full list of ministerial and related appointments has at last been published. It's a big one, which at first sight seems to contradict the idea of "smaller government".
In reality, of course, the size of the government machine numbers hundreds of thousands of Civil Servants among others, and it will take a good-sized body of political appointments to deal effectively with the Sir Humphrey Appleby types who will no doubt seek to resist and oppose any reduction in the sizes of their empires.
Once that work is done, and is stable, no doubt the political complement will be able to be considerably reduced.
In the meantime, and as promised, the full coalition government programme has been published as a 36-page PDF file. The Spectator's Peter Hoskin has been looking at this in detail (something I haven't yet had the time to do) and has a positive reaction to it, especially in terms of its dedication to accountability, and its lack of surprises.
What we voted for, between us, is essentially what we shall be getting, minus a few of the more implacable items of disagreement between the coalition partners. This includes Michael Gove's reforms, apparently undiluted (as Hoskin reports it) and the IDS-led Centre for Social Justice proposals for welfare reform.
Despite a couple of hiccups (the 1922 Committee business being the most notable), the coalition government is without much real doubt off to a flying start, and it is looking good. Indeed, even the more hostile elements of the mainstream media are struggling to find anything of substance about which to report or opine negatively.
There's a bit here and there, but there is little meat for the Left-leaning elements of both the traditional media and the blogosphere to chew upon. I've been watching, and though they are all ready and waiting to pounce, there has been hardly any material for them.
It really does look like we are going to be set back on track toward recovery and a much better quality of society in our nation. Anything could happen in the future, of course; but this is more-or-less as good a start as anyone could have wished or hoped, especially with an inconclusive election result.
As Dr Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral might well put it: we are now in the process of turning hurts into haloes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Comments welcome, with 'clean' language, though not anonymous attacks. Note that comment moderation is enabled, and anonymous comments have again been disallowed as the facility has been abused.