The United Kingdom Elections 2010

[Tellos Athenaios]

@tibilicus: “waste” typically means “the myriad ways governments fail to invest and stick to a single coherent plan”. The follow up explanation can be summarized mostly thus: “And I am going to waste some more, but pretend I am not by cutting the amount of money other projects get: this will look like reducing waste, but really means that the actual, `effective' funds are reduced while waste is kept at a higher level over all”. Hardly ever means it making a though concession and choosing one project (i.e. voter group) over the other (i.e. different voter group presumably feared to vote opposition next time for such heresy).

For example consider the MOD (and this is a problem the US has as well, incidentally):
How much money Britain could save itself (the same goes for quite a few countries, incidentally) if army, navy and air force weren't 3 separate castles all crying “if the other gets something, then by God we shall get something too”. And if it could choose not the most militarily exciting but costly and inefficient plans possible; but rather more items of more austere equipment. So right now, if your army in the middle east needs helicopters to supply itself, you can be sure that there is no money for that because it was just spent on fighter planes that only serve to sit in a hangar all day. If you need carriers you can be sure that there won't be planes, because some other military branch has just ordered a batch of completely different and incompatible ones, too. It would literally save billions if armed forces were on a tighter financial leash; and government could effectively force it through ingrained institutional intransigence in the armed forces and dictate that there is only one budget to serve all military needs, rather than three budgets to fail to meet even a single need.