Baroness Morgan, Labour peer and former advisor to Tony Blair is unhappy that her three year contract as Chair of Ofsted is not going to be renewed. She sees it all as a Tory plot….
“I am the latest of a fairly long list of people now who are non Conservative supporters who are not being reappointed. I think there is absolutely a pattern. It’s extremely worrying,” she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
Much is being made of the fact that she used to be a teacher and that is quite true – for four years between 1981 and 1985. She then became a Labour Party official and remained so until 2005 when she hit the quango trail.
Morgan is just one of hundreds, possibly thousands, of the “great and the good” who populate the secretive and shadowy universe of quangos, commissions and lobbying charities, a universe that has expanded twentyfold over the last quarter century’
The ideas of Trotsky and Lenin may have failed in Britain, but Gramsci’s notion of a long march through the institutions of power has succeeded. This goes wider than the well-known Left-wing bias in universities and the judiciary. The Institute for Economic Affairs has calculated that there are 27,000 charities dependent on the state for at least three quarters of their income. By and large, any organisation dependent on tax money will argue for more of it. On a practical level, from shale gas to school dinners, reform is being thwarted by quangos.
These people are very influential and often wield considerable power. Witness Lord Smith, formerly Chris Smith, a rather nondescript Blair/Brown regime hack who, it is claimed, has ten of these positions above and beyond his six figure two days a week post as Chair of the Environment Agency.
The Somerset floods fiasco has brought the hapless Smith into the media spotlight but most of the others beaver away, often at taxpayers expense, grandstanding and schmoozing while the professionals do the actual work.
Here’s a novel idea. Why not take these troughing has beens off the public teat, give taxpayers hard earned cash only to those value for money charities who actually do something apart from PR and appoint seasoned professionals to any working quango that survives
