Douglas Carswell's Blog

£48.874 Billion on the nod

The House of Commons will today approve the government spending £ 48.875 Billion of your money for the Home Office, Foreign Office and Department of Communities and Local Government.  This is part of a total Estimates approval for the year ending March 2012 of £221,086,166,000.  Even today, that is a serious amount of money. 

Yet it will more or less go through on the nod, with a faux - and largely pointless - Estimates Day debate.

Once upon a time, the House of Commons had real control over how ministers spent taxes.  Indeed, it was the original purpose in having a Parliament to start with.  Yet our supine legislature has progressively surrendered it's control over government spending to the point it merely rubber stamps what the executive wants.  

Now, perhaps, you might begin to realise why spending - and taxes - go up regardless of who holds office?

Perhaps if we are serious about reducing the size of government, we need to give the House of Commons the power to veto ministers spending proposals.  Today Parliament is nodding through money for the Home Office, Foreign Office, Department of Communities and Local Government and various other parts of the state Leviathan.

Perhaps if the ministers and quango chiefs who nominally "run" their bureaucracies had to appear before the relevant Commons committee to appeal for the money - with the threat of a veto - we might at last see the government spending less of our money.

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