ONE PERSON'S FREEDOM

The funeral of Margaret Thatcher will take place tomorrow.  In her lifetime, as Prime Minister, she managed to divide the country.  People with firm opinions and uncompromising stances usually do encourage strong views one way or the other.  Since she won three consecutive elections and is still Britain's longest serving Prime Minister for over 100 years, those divisions clearly did not split the country into two equal parts, but the minority that opposed her of course became the most vociferous and violent.

The same will no doubt be the case during her funeral tomorrow.  There are those who still hate her and will go out of their way to show it tomorrow. But those that make the loudest noise, as ever, will not necessarily be right.  Maybe they are incapable of rational argument or perhaps after all this time (Thatcher resigned in 1990) their ineffectual resentment has still not evaporated or maybe they are just hateful, but demonstrating at a funeral will not endear them to anyone, nor elicit support for their views.  Any violence will no doubt be condemned by all political parties.  So such protesters will simply be dismissed as outside normal society.

But a separate debate has arisen which is much more interesting, and important, than whether you still like or dislike Thatcher.  The police have said that, in policing the funeral, they are determined not to prevent freedom of speech.  In this country, I'm pleased to say, dissent is allowed, even in public.  But what is the limit of that dissent?  To what extent is freedom of speech, or freedom of expression, or freedom of movement, restricted by public order legislation?

I am quite firm that freedom of speech should be permitted unconditionally.  At any time, in any place.  If someone wishes to stand up in church and say that religion is poppycock, that's fine by me.  If they want to shout tomorrow that Thatcher was an evil woman, that's OK too.  But they can't expect that theirs will be the only view expressed.  And this is where demonstrations can run into legal difficulties.  Holding up a banner is fine.  Chanting what's on the banner is also fine.  But when have you seen two opposing groups of demonstrators simply standing together chanting their opposing views?  When one group seems to be chanting louder, insults will be bandied, jostling will begin and one group will no doubt soon physically attack the other.  So where does the public order offence begin - when the chanting starts?  When the chanting takes on an aggressive tone?  When physical contact occurs?  When the fighting starts?  And which group committed the public order offence?

We can easily accept that a public order offence may have occurred when we hear a Muslim cleric preaching against the West.  But what of a group dishonouring Margaret Thatcher and preaching against her?  At what stage does freedom of speech spill over into an illegal act?  A public order offence may well have occurred if a milk bottle is thrown at her coffin.  But what if just the milk is thrown?  Or what about holding up a placard covered in hate filled words and chanting hatred against her?  Is this incitement to violence?  Or maybe it's libel, legally punishable defamation?  But at what stage would you be inhibiting a person's freedom of speech - when you take away their placard or when you move them along or when you arrest them?

There have been attempts to quantify freedom of speech for the purposes of demonstrating tomorrow. As usual it all sounds silly.  It's a bit like a contract for behaviour on a date.  This is OK, but that isn't.  In the end, it will depend on the personal judgement of one police officer.  And I suspect it will not be placards or chanting or turning one's back or singing, 'Ding dong - the Queen is dead' or even throwing milk that leads to arrest.

I sincerely hope violence doesn't arise.  And, on the other hand, I hope too that the police will get it right.  If many are arrested, far from turning in her grave, I suspect  that Thatcher will be smiling.  She had no time for trouble makers then and would certainly not have now.

So, even in death she arouses strong views.  But, in the debate over freedoms in British society and the rights of the individual, I think I know where she would have drawn her uncompromising line. 

KNIT PICKING

Since the explosion of interest here in Scandinavian thrillers, both written and on television, I suppose it was inevitable that we should start seeing British thrillers based on the same tenets - dark scenes, broody, troubled detective, lots of suspects, every character with a mysterious secret, all the players somehow inter-connected, each episode meandering mysteriously and slowly on, each ending with yet more unanswered questions and maybe a new suspect, women in jumpers, etc.

I watched the 2-part thriller Shetland last week.  It was quite good.  It was set in a bleak landscape (the Shetland Isles unsurprisingly), there were lots of secrets, the community was close-knit, the jumpers were even more closely knit, everyone seemed to have a secret, the detective was broody, but . . . I don't know, it finished somehow rather unsatisfactorily.  I think they missed the point about making it slow.  Two episodes was just not enough.  When we found out whodunnit, it wasn't really such a big surprise and, since there had been little time for many plot twists, it ended with a phut.

There was great scenery though.  And an obscure Viking festival was featured; I had never heard of that and was fascinated that it has survived.  It could have added an even more sinister atmosphere to the context of the crime, but again, it sort of passed by.  The series was as if a producer had demanded a British rival to The Killing and someone had made the leap from Icelandic jumper to Shetland jumpers, but hadn't really followed the thought through.  The disillusioned detective's daughter had the best jumpers and all the best lines - he said to her, 'you can see Iceland over there.'  She responded, 'what the supermarket?  Oh no, I forgot, there are no supermarkets on the islands are there.'  Later she added, 'I can't even go out and climb a tree.  There aren't any!'  Unless you want to see what The Shetlands look like, don't bother to look for this series on catch-up.

I am in the middle of the longer Broadchurch at the moment.  Broadchurch beach is actually Bridport and is based around the high cliffs you may remember I featured in a recent post.  The main actors are David Tennant and Olivia Colman.  If you are a fan of David Tennant, he is brilliant.  If you're not, you might think he acts too hard.  He is the broody detective with a past to hide and, as with others in this genre, he seems to be emotionless.  But it's hard to tell whether he's trying to look like someone who's trying hide something and struggling to suppress his emotions for risk of giving too much away although not being quite broody enough to be charismatic and likeable or whether he's trying to look like someone who's a brilliant impassive detective with a broody nature, but isn't quite succeeding.

But the show is actually all about Colman.  She is just extraordinary.  Knowing all the members of the community well, her character has to help conduct an enquiry that appears to suspect any or all of them.  And of course she still wishes to be one of them and is distraught for all of them and shares all their suffering.  When she looks at the camera, you don't need any words, nor anyone else in the scene, you just feel what's going through her mind and what's going on.  Fabulous!

So far the series has followed all the rules - dark scenes, broody, troubled detective, lots of suspects, characters with secrets, all the players somehow inter-connected, each episode grinding slowly on, each ending with unanswered questions and maybe a new suspect, and a woman, not in a particularity memorable jumper, but in a nice boating waterproof anyway.  I hope it continues to unravel in this way (the series, not the jumper) (although, on the other hand . . .).  Broadchurch will be appearing on US TVs later in the year, so look out for it.

In contrast, I have just finished watching Spiral, the French detective series.  In many respects this series also followed the Scandinavian rules.  In fact it beat Shetland and Broadchurch by also having subtitles.  They both had tricky Scottish accents to contend with, but there's something about subtitles that adds to the mystery.  Or maybe that's just by association with the Scandinavian language thrillers.

Anyway, Spiral also had a woman in a jumper.  Again, not a particularly memorable one, although I might have just been distracted by the fact  that it kept slipping off her shoulder.  All the police here  seemed to interpret 'plain clothes' as down-and-out scruffy blousons.  What a waste of an opportunity for the French fashion knitwear industry.  One of the criminals disguised himself as a policeman at one stage by not shaving and putting on a leather bomber jacket.  Even he saw that it was some sort of uniform.  But I suppose it must have had an element of realism in it, otherwise it wouldn't have been accepted on French TV.  Perhaps all those louche men hanging around on French street corners with cigarettes in their mouths are actually police officers.

Spiral was also a police procedural thriller, like most of the dark, mysterious Scandinavian ones.  I am in the process of reading through the 10-book Martin Beck series, which was the forerunner of all of today's police procedurals.  The main premise there, apart from the gloomy, dedicated detective with a consequent hopeless homelife, was that society was rotten, mostly because of the actions of Government.  So most of the action takes place in run-down public housing, with understaffed police, illegal immigrants living outside the law, citizens with their lives ruined by public servants or wealthy industrialists, etc and most of the criminals evoking more sympathy than the representatives of the law.

Spiral had the dingy, run-down back streets, rather than the grand frontages one is used to in scenes of Paris, it also had the illegal immigrants and down-trodden citizens and uncaring, self-serving authorities.  The police characters too all had the usual personal problems.  But it didn't seem to have the political message of the Martin Beck procedural.  What it did have though was a great premise - instead of the gloomy, bleak, wintry, nocturnal environment of The Killing or Shetland, the atmosphere was built up with intertwined stories of crooks, lawyers and police, and every one of them operating outside of the law with greater or lesser degrees of venality.  Maybe that was the political message ie real life in France is not the one promoted in all the superficial fashion and holiday magazines?  Anyway it was fascinating to watch at every level.

We were not invited to like the thuggish police officers that much.  Nor did I have much sympathy for the criminals, certainly not for the anarchists among them.  But, if the environment revealed in this series was indeed realistic, what a dystopia!  I guess there will be another series in due course.  Watch it!

WHATEVER COMMON PEOPLE DO

There has been a bit of a debate here for some while about poshness.  The Prime Minister and Chancellor were both privately educated and both went to Oxford University.  They both have aristocratic backgrounds (if a little distant now) and come from wealthy families.  They both belonged to the notorious Bullingdon Club that you were only invited to join if you had pots of money.  They have been referred to pejoratively as ‘2 posh boys’; the criticism being that they were privileged, lived in a select strata of society and, by implication, had no idea what the lives of the rest of us are like or what affects us.  They were being tarred with the ‘let them eat cake’ brush.

This disparagement hasn’t really worked, though it is sometimes referred to in the socialist press or used in cartoons, mainly because Cameron speaks sensibly and Osborne is able to point to the mess the previous administration made of the economy.  The Coalition is not exactly popular, in poll terms, but nor, in general, is the alternative greatly desired either.

The epithet came up again recently, when a Minister was asked to dismount and wheel his bicycle through the pedestrian gate from Downing Street (where he lives incidentally).  Had he been in an official car, the policeman would have opened the main gate for him.  He swore profusely at the policeman and allegedly called him a pleb, a term which I have used oftimes, as a polite alternative to f*cking cretinous Jobsworth b*stard, but which was seized on as proof that he too is ‘posh’.  I am not in any way posh BTW, even sometimes drinking my tea from a mug whilst sitting on the settee watching television!  And I don’t like champagne.  And I get too hungry for dinner at eight, etc.

It is Party Conference season.  This week it is Labour’s turn and the Labour Opposition have now decided that this is the time to start their campaign to win the next election and have begun to state their policies.  Their initial shot across the bows is to emphasise that they are not posh.  With most of their money coming from the labour unions and thus the ‘working class’, this is an essential prerequisite anyway.  But there are a number of problems.

Firstly, poshness is an invented condition these days.  It used to refer to those who could afford to travel, of course then only the wealthy landed gentry, on the sunny side of ocean-going steamers (Port-Out Starboard-Home).  But the landed gentry are not the richest persons in Britain any more.  The only real aristo in the top ten is the Duke of Westminster (#7).  Even The Queen only comes in at 262 on the rich list, behind J K Rowling and a lot of celebs and filthy lucre industrialists.  In fact the richest woman in Britain is apparently a former Miss UK.  Is she, or Rowling, or let’s say Bernie Ecclestone, who is also richer than The Queen, but who worked in the gasworks after leaving school at 16, posher than The Queen?  Maybe not.  They might be snobs, but probably not posh.  

So it’s an alleged attitude that’s referred to here.  One which, perversely, The Queen doesn’t possess.  But it may be one that the Minister possesses.  His father was a Conservative Minister, he was privately educated and went to Cambridge, was an officer in the Army and is now a senior politician.  All that may have given him delusions of grandeur or made him an obnoxious, arrogant bully, but he is hardly posh.

Moreover, the ‘landed gentry’ these days, those that live in big houses with lots of land and people to look after them (used to be called ‘servants) are pop stars and actors.  So, are they posh?

There is also something curious about our response to these words.  If I was called ‘posh’, I’d either take it as a joke or protest mildly.  It never used to be pejorative, but clearly now is.  On the other hand, if I was called ‘a pleb’, I think I’d just accept it and perhaps try to be less common next time.  Yet the term was always derogatory. 

Secondly, the problem with Milliband taking up this anti-posh stance is that both he and his Shadow Chancellor were educated at Oxford, as was Balls’ wife Yvette Cooper, a sort of power behind the throne, and Balls was privately educated to boot.  All three also studied at Havard incidentally.  They earn more than I ever did and are much richer now.  And Milliband has a much more plummy voice than I.  So are they not posh?

It also doesn’t work to brand all Tories posh; Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a grocer and John Major, her successor, was the son of a trapeze artist.  I can understand all Labour politicians wanting to have working class roots on the other hand.

Thirdly, we haven’t asked the obvious question about the Downing Street gate incident.  Why did the policeman behave the way he did?  And why did he threaten to arrest the Minister for swearing at him?  Maybe because he was in fact a Jobsworth and bore a chip on his shoulder about opening a gate for important people or towards important people generally?  This is a dangerous route to go down.  The whole ethos of the British policing system, since Peel invented the police, is that they are citizens like you and I.  That’s mostly why they are not armed and don’t strut about issuing orders to us plebs.  I imagine that grates with some of them, who must feel they deserve more respect than they get from a large minority of the population who see them as ‘authority’ and thus to be reviled.  I agree whole-heartedly that we should love our police for what they do far more than we do.  I wouldn’t be a policeman, but I have great admiration for those who would and are.  But I wouldn’t have any respect for one that tried to belittle another citizen.

Fourthly, and I think this is most important, what’s wrong with people who can afford a good education and who have enough money to spend on election campaigns, etc without having to work, becoming our leaders?  On the whole, I think I’d rather have someone who ought to have some idea what their talking about as my Prime Minister, than someone who was poor and uneducated.  If my next door neighbour announced he was running for Parliament and hoped to become PM, I don’t think I’d support him much, however sensible he might be.  But that’s just me.  However, if politicians are too much like us, we would find it hard to give them leadership over us.  The first among equals applies only to the leader of the Cabinet, not the leader of the country.  In other words, the ‘equals’ are the other Ministers, not the plebs.

Interestingly, at the moment, Labour is doing rather better in the polls than the Coalition, but most people asked prefer David Cameron as leader to any of the Labour aspirants.  Perhaps they’re seen as down-market or just too ordinary? 

KEEPING MUM

When I worked in an office, I was always surprised (and maybe a little annoyed) at how often new members of staff tried to solve problems without any attempt to look through the file and see what we did last time.  I liked the new, and sometimes creative, approach, but surely it doesn't hurt to see what the regular procedure was or what others had done earlier, before wasting a lot of time on a new policy.

But I wondered whether this was how the younger generation operate these days.  Unlike us, they left the family home early and made their way in the world much more independently than we did.  Or maybe this is another way of saying that Mums or one's elders are not such an important part of the household today. 

We were asked to pop down to Worthing this morning to help out my daughter.  Imogen has chicken pox and is not so happy and Isaac is at home too.  For us, it's actually nice to go there and take Isaac out for a while, so we were happy to do so, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in the children’s library and in the playgroup.  But I suppose, once upon a time, the family would still have been living in the family house and Mum would have been permanently on hand to look after kids.

I was reminded of this the other evening, when watching a wildlife programme on television.  Three young elephant females were trying to cross a swollen river and their three baby calves were swept away in the torrent.  All was well in the end, but the commentator made the point that, if there had been an older and more experienced female there (all killed by poachers I think), they would have found another crossing point known to be safer, or they would just not have attempted to cross at all.  Having Mum around is not always a nuisance; sometimes she serves a useful purpose and stops us doing stupid things into the bargain.

I have posted several comments recently about young people today and maybe the cases I mentioned all come down to this lack of parental guidance.  Somewhere along the line, the role of Mums has changed.  Once she was the wise one who one turned to for help and advice.  Now she is more likely to be as unwise as her kids and a bit of a burden if still in the house.  This is not a dismissive criticism, but people have just stopped turning to parents every time they need to do something.  And today’s parents have often lost that contact with their mothers too.  Just like those young recruits in my office, they just bash on and hope to get it right.  Or maybe even think that they know best.

So I for one am not at all critical of the new Government initiative‎.  It does seem an unusual policy for a Conservative Government (although the present Government is not entirely Conservative of course), but if it leads to more skill and experience among young parents, and thence to more responsibility among young people, it can only be good.  Ultimately, it could save a lost of wasted time and money in the police, NHS and local services generally too and, who knows, encourage better attention to education.  Let’s hope, like my elephants, they don’t forget.

GOON FISHING

OK, there's an irony about the Assange camp complaining about being forced to give up details of his private communications.  But, whatever we thought about Wikileaks, I think we should all feel uncomfortable with the latest US Government subpoena.

As things stand, Assange has not committed a crime.  We may believe that publishing classified information that is already in the public domain is a crime; we may think that making publicly available sensitive military information received from a whistleblower is a crime; we may hold that publishing information without checking its source is somehow a crime; we may suspect that a rape of two women has been committed in Sweden and that that makes him a criminal anyway.  But, at the moment, the courts do not recognise any of this as a proven crime. 

Assange’s whereabouts are known and he is on bail.  He is not yet a criminal and he is not charged with any crime relating to Wikileaks.  In fact, whistleblowing is a legitimate, non-criminal activity.  I don’t know what happens in America, but many government organisations here have to spell out that they will not prosecute whistleblowers.  And publishing the information received from whistleblowers is not necessarily criminal either, especially when, as in the Wikileaks case, it so blatantly didn’t affect national security and merely exposed the shocking over-classification of material and the enormous public expense needed to protect it. 

So, gathering enormous amounts of data to try to find evidence of some criminal activity is extraordinary.  The manpower to be used in collecting all this information and pains-takingly sifting through it will be an incredible drain on government resources.  The cost to tax-payers of pursuing this is incalculable.  But it goes further than that.

Every message to the Assange operation will be scrutinised too.  I managed to restrain myself from writing to him saying, jolly good show, or whatever, but maybe you said something to him?  There are at least 2m followers of Assange on Facebook and Twitter alone.  But now I’ve commented here (I don’t remember whether I Tweeted about him), all my personal details will presumably be combed through.  And what have I blogged about that might offend the US or UK Governments?  And what crime will be found to prosecute me for my views?  Or will ‘free speech’ prevail?

The only official comments on all this seem be that the trawl is part of ‘an ongoing criminal investigation’.  There is no explanation of what the crime might actually be, although it seems as though retaliation, embarrassment about the leaked material and the resulting reluctance of other countries now to tell America anything confidential are the most important triggers for this obsessive reaction.  And one official suggested that the subpoenaed material will help show where Assange has been and where his operations have been.  Well, we know where he is and, except for making it possible to disrupt his operation (though it seems not to be illegal) or target his supporters (who don’t appear to have committed a crime), where he has been won’t contribute much to the investigation.  Of course Assange is probably only the excuse.  There are many more whose records will now be available for examination and we may eventually see prosecution orders made against others who have engaged in ‘anti-American’ activities.  Normally, it would be illegal to gather evidence in this way without concrete reasons to suspect a criminal offence.

I suppose this might seem like the investigation of Al Capone, whom no one much seemed to mind being prosecuted for tax evasion, even though he was head of a mass murdering gang.  But I don’t know that people feel the same way about Assange.  He’s hardly a mass murderer.  But there will be many of us whose normally private affairs will now be closely examined on the back of this ‘ongoing criminal investigation’.  We might even turn out to have committed some offence.  But, whatever you think about Assange, if we justify an entirely arbitrary trawl through our affairs to check whether any crimes have been committed, we have lost the freedom of the Internet and are one giant step nearer a Big Brother society, not just in America, but worldwide..  I wouldn’t have expected that from a liberal administration.

CAN'T BUDGET

I thought that this was just another Daily Mail campaign against the Foreign Office (FCO).  I would have ignored it but for the rag bag of misinformation, deliberate misunderstanding, snide remarks and general blame avoidance that has driven the story into other newspapers.

The articles refer to the Head of UK Trade and Industry (UKTI) as a ‘quango chief’, a head of a ‘Whitehall body’, ‘a group of officials dubbed the club class elite’ that operates ‘with the help of the Duke of York’, and the Foreign Office ‘urging him to splash more tax-payers’ cash’, ‘to burn through a spare £1m’ and ‘go on a splurge’.  But all this inflammatory and carelessly written language misses the target.  

I can’t be bothered to go into here whether being a quango is inherently a bad thing, but, if you want government advice on exporting or investing overseas, you go to the UKTI.  It is clearly a different body from say the Advisory Group on Hepatitis or the Zoos Forum.  But there is a movement currently to dismantle quangos and, by implying that they are all a waste of money, to use the term ‘Quango’ disparagingly.  Well, many could be run by volunteers or subsumed into existing civil service departments and thus cost less (though the cost of the already overworked civil servants is not taken into account).  But there is no other government department that offers expert export promotion assistance.  In fact UKTI is jointly funded by the FCO and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).  I notice that The Guardian has now edited the word ‘quango’ out of its article.

Mentioning the Duke of York is just an attempt to have rubbed off on UKTI some of the mud thrown at him through Wikileaks.  There is a lot of controversy about the Duke of York’s role, and I have personally come into contact with His Royal Awkwardness, but he is unpaid and he travels overseas and meets influential foreign persons to promote British business, and whatever we think, he carries weight.  Most businessmen, as far as I know, value these efforts and British business benefits greatly from them.

As for the ‘tax-payers money’, all government money comes from taxpayers.  That’s how governments raise the money for their expenditure.  They don’t ‘splash’ it about (except maybe on military helicopters) or ‘burn’ it or ‘go on a splurge’ – there isn’t enough of it for that.  But it sounds worse using such words during a recession, when there are so many budget cuts.

UKTI is one of the departments of the horribly oversized compendium Ministry, BIS, created by the last Government.  It has 8 Ministers, to underline its size and diversity.  Overseas, UKTI staff have desks in British Embassies and Consulates.  Through an arrangement with the FCO, some of the Embassy staff posts are filled with UKTI personnel and some of the UKTI jobs are undertaken by FCO.  Their job is to advise businessmen in the UK of trade opportunities overseas, to locate British products required by foreign importers and to help businessmen of both countries contact each other to promote trade. 

But how do staff know who to introduce businessmen to?  How do they find out about opportunities?  How do they oil the wheels of business and smooth the path for businessmen into a foreign market?  Well, basically, it costs money.  And, yes, it is money that has come from taxpayers.  So UKTI and FCO staff travel the country concerned calling on foreign companies, talking to local experts, visiting regions (agricultural areas, dying or booming industrial areas, up and coming retail sites, etc), and chatting up officials and business leaders over meals or drinks to get them favourably disposed.  And of course it is this last that ignorant, envious reporters, dislike most.  But, yes, government funds have to be used to do the job.  And, yes, sometimes a senior foreign businessman is won over over dinner, rather than by disturbing him at his office.  And, yes, sometimes government funds are used to pay for the dinner.  Strange to say, businessmen in this country make deals over dinner or at drinks parties too and use company funds for the purpose.  They don’t do it to splash shareholders money about or because they want to drink the best champagne or simply to live the high life (except for bankers of course).  This is winning friends and influencing people for the good of the business or Britain.

The budget for these overseas activities comes from the Treasury.  It is not possible to overspend; careful penny pinching is required to get through the year.  Of course, to save money and make ends meet, you could sack a staff member, or you could drop a trade promotion visit or two, or you could cut out an approach to a couple of targeted companies, or you could save some of these activities until later in the year to see how you manage with fixed costs, rents, services, etc.  At the end of the year, any left over money is taken back by the Treasury and disappears into the balancing account.  This is also tax-payers money and, if not spent on doing the job, it disappears into the Treasury maw and pays off some imbalance here or some currency adjustment there.  Having around a million unspent at the end of the year is not bad budgeting.  And spending it on core UKTI activities before the end of the financial year while you have it in your budget still seems to me like a good idea, not somehow wasting tax-payers’ money.  Whereas throwing it into the Treasury pit without trace couldn’t easily be thought of as good for tax-payers, or in any way good for business, or good for Britain, except in the most tangential way.  And in case a million does sound a lot to you, the FCO budget is about 0.4% of the total government spend and it has also been left with the problem of currency fluctuation from its overseas operations as set out here which hardly makes budgeting easier.

But why do we have this crazy policy?  Why are Ministries given a budget (usually by May when all the details have been calculated) and then told they can’t spend any remaining at the end of the year?  Treasury rules now prevent carrying money over to the next year, pre-purchasing ie buying train tickets in March for April, bulk buying eg photocopy paper for the year, or anything that allows a project to run satisfactorily for more than a year.  If I ran a business like that, it would go bust in no time or be taken over by some more efficient concern.  If you don’t want Ministries to have odd expenditure items at the end of the year, Mr Cameron, then end this nonsensical Treasury budget system so that proper long-term planning can take place.  Then UKTI might send its staff on regional travel at the start of the year, safe in the knowledge that it doesn’t have to save up its annual budget and risk it being taken away. 

If the media wishes to sneer and complain about the way a government department does its job, they should check out the Treasury’s daft short term budgeting regime; and if they think someone is not doing his best to promote and support Britain, they might have a look at the way Treasury budgeting hinders British business; and if they think it’s wrong for a department to try to spend all of its budget, change the Treasury rules that prevent budgets being applied to long-term projects. The only thing missing from the articles was a suggestion to spend the million on Ferrero Rocher chocolates.