Cameron’s follies

Was a political brickbat from the left ever more elegantly lobbed than J.K. Galbraith’s jibe that conservative governments create ‘private affluence and public squalor’? It came to sum up perfectly the feelings of many people towards Britain in the 1980s, when Londoners would step over the homeless as they made their way back to flashy new homes.

It is not an accusation David Cameron cares to risk being levelled at his own Britain. But this (partly) Conservative government is suffering from an equally pernicious problem: pointless, gimmicky public spending. We may be deep in austerity measures, but they seem destined never to reach the sports stadiums, the high-speed rail lines or any other pet public projects. The battle to control public spending is disguising a fascinating pattern whereby cash is increasingly being diverted from the everyday things we all need into Cameron’s vanity projects.

On Monday, the Prime Minister continued a pointless Gordon Brown innovation: holding a cabinet meeting — in private, of course, the minutes not released until New Year’s Eve 2042 — away from Downing Street. Only the photoshoot was public, the venue being chosen purely to show off the Olympic Park. There seems to be no limit to the cash available for the Games. Never mind the recession, David Cameron recently announced a doubling in the budget for the opening ceremony from £40 million to £80 million.

Meanwhile, school sports partnerships — which seek to increase participation in sport among children whose schools, in some cases, have lost their playing fields — have lost all but £47 million of their £162 million funding, and would have lost the lot had it not been for a public outcry. Half an hour of pyrotechnics, in other words, has been put above half a year’s school sports.