After all the fuss, will anything actually change?

8 May 2010

No, says Rod Liddle, the things that annoy us most about Britain will stay the same: bankers will still get big bonuses and England will lose to Germany in the World Cup on penalties

Did you vote for change, then? Or did you, as David Cameron put it during the second of those frigid televised leaders’ debates, vote for ‘hope, not fear’? I decided in the end to vote for fear, as I’ve never been very keen on hope. I think hope is overrated, if we’re honest, whereas there is a dark, brooding intensity to fear. But change? Some things will change, I suppose, but a lot of the things which make people angry will not change at all, the sort of stuff that was rarely if ever mentioned during the election campaign, but which we know thoroughly annoys many people. Here is my list of things which will continue pretty much unabated, regardless of the election result.

Over the five-year lifetime of parliament, money spent on public sector management consultants will easily exceed the amount spent on our new nuclear weapons system. The total acquisition cost of Trident is some £16 billion; we spend almost £4 billion annually on management consultancies described in a 2006 National Audit Office report as being of absolutely no use whatsoever. This will not change.

In our schools: Black History Month; Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered History Month.

Islamist asylum seekers who want to put anthrax in our morning coffee, or who have already committed violent crimes, will not be deported because of the hypothetically lethal threat posed to them by the slightly more moderate Islamic hellholes from which they originated. In general, the people least deserving of political asylum, the ones who really, really hate us, will be the ones we allow to stay.

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