Tim Worstall has a very very good piece over at his place and it is one with which I find I wholeheartedly agree with. The piece in question is Mr Worstall’s criticism of a Guardian article that is hand-wringing over the latest John Lewis Christmas advertisement as being favourable to personal charity providing what the Guardian writer believes should be stuff that is state i.e. taxpayer funded.

The Guardian and Mr Worstall quoted from one of former Labour PM Clement Atlee’s most famous statements on the subject of charity. This statement is: ““Charity is a cold, grey, loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at whim.” Mr Worstall then pointed out that in many cases the services provided by the State are often worse than what might be provided by a properly run and voluntarily supported charity.

Those of us who have had to have dealings with various State agencies ranging from the NHS, through schools and on to the State muppets who are supposed, but often fail, to provide elderly care, recognise Mr Worstall’s description of state agents. Mr Worstall said: “Compare the charity with the cold, grey, loveless thing that is council bureaucracy.” Mr Worstall is bang on target here. Too many of those who are tasked with providing services to those who’ve paid for them via decades of taxation are heartless ghouls.

I’ve seen this issue first hand with my elderly now late parents who for the first time in their lives had to deal with social services when they got frail. What they got from social services was not someone who could help them navigate the sclerotic and strangulating bureaucracy of state service provision, but a bloke whose only interest was in getting my parents to hand over their house, that they’d worked a lifetime to pay for, to the local authority. What was especially galling is that the council wanted the house in order to give a home to those who had done sod all with their lives and who had probably made little or no contribution to either the economy or society. This Labour (of course it bloody was) council thought it right and proper to take from those who had provided for themselves and give to those who had not.

There are I admit some things that maybe the State does need to run such as defence, security, policing and maybe the fire service. But there is a great deal more that maybe the state doesn’t need to run and possibly should not be allowed to run as they manage such services so utterly incompetently and wastefully. Then there is the matter of accountability. Local authority bureaucracies are also very much lacking in accountability to those who pay for them to provide services. If for example your council run public library service is crap then your chances of making it better as an ordinary British subject with the current management and funding arrangements is approximately zero. The same applies to social services, schools, leisure and arts facilities and much much more.

Why not have competent charities or community interest companies (CIC) run these entities if they can do a better job than the local authority can manage? To take the example of public libraries, it should be more than possible for a charity or a community interest company to run these on a subscription basis with discounts or zero fees for those who do not have the ability to pay for a subscription. You could get as good if not better service in this area of life if those who really believed in the value of the public library system were running it as a charity or a CIC rather than some ideologically driven bean counter who is more than willing to cut library service hours in order to pay for a plethora of useless and divisive ‘diversity’ staff or to fund some boondoggle that a particular councillor wants to have as their political legacy. Personally I’d much rather see less taken away from us in Council Tax and have the ability to use the money saved to pay a subscription for a public library service that was there when I wanted it, that had knowledgeable and trained staff who loved books in charge of it, that didn’t censor or which took book stocking and shelving decisions based on whatever was trendy in the leftist mindset of the time.

Mr Worstall is entirely correct here. We are being extremely badly served by those who are paid by the state to provide us with services. Therefore if the state is failing then why should not other entities, ones that people would voluntarily and enthusiastically sign up to support and fund, provide these services? In my area there are hospices that provide a significantly better service for those at the end of their lives than the NHS can manage. These hospices are in large part funded by subscriptions, donations, fundraising commercial activities and bequests. These organisations do far better than what the state can manage to do and because they are dependent mostly on the public funding them though voluntary contributions, they have to be accountable and have to provide the best quality of service that they can. If they did not then the contributions would quickly dry up as donors would turn away in disgust and give their money to a competing but similar entity. There’s no such accountability in the area of public service provision and that is why we get crap services, often run by incompetent and arrogant scum and for which we get charged way over the odds. Let’s have services that are run by the people for the people instead of what we’ve got today which is services that are run for the benefit of the local government providers and their staff.

I’ve come to the conclusion that government does not always provide the best when it comes to public services. The more I deal with various government departments both local and national the more I find myself agreeing with the late Ronald Reagan when he said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.””