BY ALEX STORY

Ever since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, it has been common for economists to quip that when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.

If it was true then, the opposite must have been as well.

If the health of our cousins beyond our shores got ruder, so should our prospects.

Whilst the four months old US administration has caused some distraction for disturbing the current international order by endeavouring to rebalance trade, a real revolution in governance is taking place.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, the eclectic entrepreneur, has revealed what most of us suspected: our huge deficits are a function of government-led grift.

Billions of dollars of quasi-criminal spending are being uncovered.

This explains why, in best case scenarios, as taxpayers, we are paying ever more for ever less; in the worst, we are paying ever more to feed a beast intent on destroying our civilisation.

“One of the biggest scams we have uncovered, which is really crazy, is that the government can give money to a so-called non-profit with very few controls”, Elon Musk explains in an interview with Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, adding “and there is no audit subsequently of that non-for-profit”.

The managers of these then “gives themselves extremely lavish…. insane salaries, and expense everything to the non-for-profit”.

Ted Cruz interjects: “They live like kings and queens”, adding “on the taxpayer dime”.

“Yes” answers Mr Musk.

Remarkably, Elon Musk is on track to cut the United States deficits by half.

 Should he succeed in closing the gap between revenue and expenditure by removing fraud at the federal level, he will have transformed the Western World’s prospects and given us hope that the same could be done here in the United Kingdom.

In our country is, it is no exaggeration, already on life support.

Not least because the UK’s non-for-profit, life-sucking, sector is gigantic, in particular compared to the size of the economy.

There are over 300 quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (Quangos), not to speak of the state-funded elements of the charitable sector. 

Here’s a list of quangos published by the Adam Smith Institute:

They employ close to 400,000 people on a budget of £390 billion per year, nearly 300% more than our total deficit and over a third of our entire yearly £1.3 Trillion government spend. 

These organisations are designed to operate independently from ministerial control and wield considerable power.

They are responsible for regulation, public services, and policy implementation.

Added to this richly funded, unaccountable, relatively new branch of government, we must add the partially or fully state-funded charitable sector, which is in effect the PR arm of the vitality-sapping UK Quangocracy.

Nearly a third of the £100 billion budget for UK Charities comes from the government. Around £30 billion is spent by the government on “charities”.

For comparison, housing received £5 billion ; the department of (no) Energy and Net Zero £14 billion; and policing £18 billion for the fiscal year 2024-2025.

This represents a huge amount of lobbying firepower, paid for by the public, often (if not always) against its interest.

These bodies are not accountable.

They are certainly not capitalist revenue generators.

They are leeches.

The people manning them are mainly from what one would charitably call the progressive political side of the aisle; so, anti-business, anti-borders, anti-western.

The United Kingdom is sinking into the quagmire of mediocrity and potential global irrelevance because successive governments have allowed the growth of permanently-funded activist charities and NGOs to become the all-powerful arm of the State’s incontestable power.

Democracy in the shape of our parliament is now but a sham.

There never was a politician who sold to voters the destruction of our car industry, the dismantling of our borders, or the legalisation of either shoplifting or burglary, not to speak of grooming gangs in many towns and cities across the land. But this is exactly what an out-of-reach taxpayer-subsidised politicised public sector has delivered over the last three decades.

Our energy industry, which has burdened us with some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world – four times higher than the US – has been sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero.

Meanwhile, the UK government has cynically moved to take control of British Steel amid fears the blast furnaces at its Chinese-owned site in Scunthorpe could be at risk of shutting down, essentially ending steel production in the UK, not that what remained was anything to be proud of.

Any reprieve is but a stay of execution. Net Zero zealots are waiting in the wings.   

All the while Ed Miliband is looking for a CEO to sit at a desk of an organisation called Great British Energy. The total compensation is advertised at £525,000 no less.

With such budgets, NGOs wield enormous political power and exert veritable and unwanted influence over government policy.

Unfortunately, these are largely unaccountable to the voting public. This is little more than political activism dressed up as social justice.

In short, the transmission mechanism between the taxpayer and the State, it’s supposed servant, is fully fractured.

From one perspective, we, the taxpayers, are milch cows; from another, we are indentured and powerless serfs with no rights but to pay and keep quiet.

Voters have no say, consumers little choice and businesses less freedom. All the while the out-of-touch, inevitably “woke” quangocrat yells from his ivory tower that this societal destruction is for our own good and that he is only doing this to save us from ourselves.

Great Britain will not prosper until the axe is taken to this rotting edifice.

Elon Musk called NGOs the biggest fraud.

It is high time that they were knocked off the pedestal that self-interested parties built for them.

Without cutting the £400 billion budget for unelectable power, Britain will never be great again.

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Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.