After all the fuss, will anything actually change?

Did you vote for change, then? Or did you, as David Cameron put it during the second of those frigid televised leaders’ debates, vote for ‘hope, not fear’? I decided in the end to vote for fear, as I’ve never been very keen on hope. I think hope is overrated, if we’re honest, whereas there is a dark, brooding intensity to fear. But change? Some things will change, I suppose, but a lot of the things which make people angry will not change at all, the sort of stuff that was rarely if ever mentioned during the election campaign, but which we know thoroughly annoys many people. Here is my list of things which will continue pretty much unabated, regardless of the election result.

Over the five-year lifetime of parliament, money spent on public sector management consultants will easily exceed the amount spent on our new nuclear weapons system. The total acquisition cost of Trident is some £16 billion; we spend almost £4 billion annually on management consultancies described in a 2006 National Audit Office report as being of absolutely no use whatsoever.