Introducing Spaff: The Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding

All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible.

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The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. His contemporary equivalents in the Treasury seem to delight in emptying those same pockets and taking lit torches to taxpayers’ cash as though it were so much kindling.

Of course, all modern states are afflicted by bureaucratic bloat to some extent. But in the US, the Donald Trump administration has set about a modern Gladstonian revolution by going line by line through government expenditure and identifying scope for savings. The initiative, named the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), is led by Elon Musk. ‘Doge’ is a play on an internet meme, the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. But while the name may sound like trolling, the intention is deadly serious. Musk is taking the same remorseless approach to cutting out waste that he did at Tesla, SpaceX and, latterly, Twitter/X, where he got rid of four-fifths of the staff. His zero-tolerance campaign has already identified countless examples of unnecessary spending – especially in the field of foreign aid.

Inspired by his example, we at The Spectator are launching our own war on wasteful spending.