Ever wondered where your taxes go? It turns out that there are 529 quangos supported by the taxpayer. So says a report entitled The Essential Guide to British Quangos 2005 published by think tank Centre for Policy Studies.
The BBC quotes the the mission statements of what the report calls the nine most useless quangos. The funniest is that of the British Potato Council:
Our main functions are to fund research and development, transfer technology, collect and disseminate market information, and to advertise and promote potatoes at home and in export market
Potatoes need promoting?
Perhaps the most insidious sounding quango is the Economic and Social Research Council:
The UK’s leading research funding and training agency addressing economic and social concerns. We aim to provide high quality research on issues of importance to business, the public sector and government. The issues considered include economic competitiveness, the effectiveness of public services and policy, and our quality of life.
This doesn’t sound at all quasi-autonomous to me. This sounds like a body set up to prove whatever the government wants it to prove so that the government can come up with convenient evidence to justify whatever mad-cap policy it has most recently come up with.
Update: I take it all back. Apparently, “1 in 3 people don’t know where chips come from.” So obviously we need the National Potato Council to tell us. And what better way to do so than National Chip Week. I’m sure it all fits in with the government’s food and health action plan somehow…