Message for Guy Fawkes' Night - blow up the Government if you want - but don't expect it to change anything

“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
EU Directives on the top,
Health and Safety in the middle,
And burn the bloody lot.”

I’m sure there’ll be millions of us singing something like the above this Guy Fawkes Night. But we might as well save our breath to cool our hot buttered rum.

I’ll tell you what worried me most, as a Labour man. I feared a real libertarian Tory campaign promising bonfires of regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork, with details all worked out. It would have been perfectly possible to attach a research team to each front-bencher, identifying individual areas where everyone’s money and time was being wasted in the department the spokesperson was shadowing. Directly and openly identifying police paperwork surplus to requirements. Compiling a coherent action plan from the literally millions of ridiculous elf ‘n’ safety stories that have emerged over the years. Diversity surveys and compliance monitoring to be challenged to justify their existence in a balloon debate with schools, hospitals and pensions. Inviting citizens to write in with examples and suggestions – a “Bullsh*tWatch” campaign. They’d have swept the country.

Phew! I needn’t have worried. Yes, these things will occasionally be picked up as a stick to beat the Government with; but it’s not as if there were any real prospect of a new Government changing anything. If anything were likely to be done, Mr Cameron would surely have told us by now. What he did was to stand up at the Tory Conference and say, in the vaguest terms, that he will cut the cost of the Civil Service.

But we all know how well that will work. After his first Cabinet meeting, the Ministers go back to their departments with their instructions: “Sir Humphrey, the Prime Minister has told me to cut X, Y and Z.” The rest is television history. Whitehall will deal with this as easily as John Terry with a speculative long ball into the box.

Do I believe we could do with a 25 per cent Whitehall and local government headcount cut? Yes, with knobs on. Could it happen? No, there is no conceivable enforcement mechanism, and too many livelihoods and careers depend on this overstaffing. And they all have existences to justify.

Many critics of the present government blame over-regulation on the authoritarian tendencies of the Labour Party. But those tendencies are endemic to politicians, and are in any case not the key factor. Do you really believe that a down-to-earth bloke like Alan Johnson speaks up in Cabinet to say “We really must act against the scandal of parents looking after each other’s children, and giving them lifts to Brownies?” No – there are just too many people justifying their salaries by extending the scope of legislation, monitoring compliance, closing loopholes etc., and forcing this rubbish on the Minister, as did Sir Humphrey. If only civil servants were as lazy as is sometimes rumoured, we’d all be better off. Paying them to lounge around doing nothing would save almost as much as sacking them altogether.

So elect a new government if you must. But don’t expect it to make any difference. Not without more of the sort of plain speaking which no one these days feels able to get away with.