Where the money could go

The Telegraph’s Iain Martin makes the key observation over the two outrageous government waste stories (here and here) in the papers today:

“This is not simply a bureaucratic failure, it is a moral failure too: taking high taxes from a public feeling the pinch and then throwing it away when it could have been put to work by individuals to pay their bills and care for their family or rebuild their savings.”

The downturn – and the human misery it catalyses – makes wholesale government waste all the more disgraceful.  From a political perspective, this strengthens the Tories’ core economic message – although there’s still a sense that the Cameroons could do more to flesh out their approach for helping those individuals worst hit by the recession.