Product Description

Who are the guilty, the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers who have brought this country to its knees? Over the past decade some £3 trillion equivalent to £50,000 for every person in Britain has been taken from us by the ruling elites. Half was wasted in a splurge of poorly-managed public spending in the boom , while the other half evaporated in the bust siphoned off by city bonuses, vaporised by a collapse in pension savings and extorted to bail out the banking sector. In their explosive new book, David Craig and Matthew Elliott trace where the money has gone and who has become richer as a result. They name and shame the guilty : the incompetent bureaucrats that fail to deliver the services the taxpayer deserves; the multitude of ineffective regulators and watchdogs; the politicians that have betrayed our democracy and enriched themselves; and the self-serving and arrogant city bankers. Moreover, they calculate the enormous debt that awaits the British taxpayer as a result of our rulers avarice and economic mismanagement. Fleeced! exposes the greatest impoverishment of the public in British history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5523 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
David Craig has spent most of his career as a management consultant working for and competing against some of the world's best and worst management and IT systems consultancies. He has helped to sell consulting to almost 100 organizations in 15 countries across Europe, Asia and the US, as well as the British public sector. He is the author of the controversial bestsellers Rip-Off!, Plundering the Public Sector and Squandered. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MBA from Warwick Business School. Matthew Elliott is co-founder and Chief Executive of the Taxpayers Alliance, the UK's most high profile campaign group. He has written the Bumper Book of Government Waste and with David Craig has co-authored The Great European Rip-Off.

Customer Reviews

Chronicles Britain's final decline and fall
Given the author's previous books, predictably excellent account of how 12 years of NuLabour has wrecked Britain, impoverished millions and rewarded the few beyond the dreams of avarice.

The gravy train you just knew existed but could never get on is laid bare and the Fabian nomenklatura in the 'big tent' are identified.

Every day now, the papers uncover more corruption, cronyism and theft amongst the elite who for years have sneered at the 'little people' they've crushed under the tax burden. (The unlucky ones having been killed by medical bungling or MRSA).

Brown's 'scorched earth' policies will mean the incoming Tory government will inherit the worst economic situation for in a 100 years, having left NuLabour one of the best in 1997.

If anyone has doubts about the wisdom of fleeing bust, broken Britain then buy this book!

When are we going to wake up?
This book would have benefited from more and better referencing and perhaps a list of suggestions for further reading, especially concerning the state of the NHS, education and how the banking system works. With such a wealth and diversity of material crammed into a mere 280 pages (including tables and charts), you will certainly feel better informed than you did before, but you may end up feeling you know "a little about a lot". Despite these deficiencies, it's a book I would highly recommend for anyone who cares about the future of Britain. It is written in a refreshingly punchy, direct style and the authors cite many reputable statistical sources to back up their arguments.

Fleeced! consists of twelve chapters grouped into four main sections, entitled "Making Us Poorer", "The "Bureaucratisation of Britain", "The Untouchable Elites", "Fighting Back".

In chapters 1-4, the authors start by putting our current national woes into the context of the global economic crisis, while making it brutally clear that this does not absolve the UK government. They explain how persistent low inflation and low interest rates led to banks and large investors being tempted by risky financial products in search of higher yields, small investors going into buy-to-let, and consumers and governments alike embracing "lend-and-spend" culture. The authors are sceptical about the value of the banking bailout and predict rough times ahead, as banks squeeze both borrowers and savers in order to build up their capital reserves and continue to flog various over-hyped investment products to the unwary. As if that's not enough, stocks and shares may well continue to provide poor returns, sapping the performance of private pensions.

Britain's economic boom of 2000-2008 was, according to Craig and Elliott, largely illusory - in contrast to some industrialised countries like Germany, very little real wealth was created. But there was nothing illusory about Gordon Brown's spending splurge or the borrowing binge that underpinned it (chapters 5-7). Public spending more than doubled in the period 1997 to 2009, and, even more incredibly, the Government managed to spend more than it gathered in tax in every financial year since 2001. The authors make the shrewd observation that if increased public spending is properly prioritised and coordinated, a self-reinforcing positive spiral should set in, the end result being that taxes can be cut. For instance, if extra funds for education are wisely spent, this ought to mean a better educated workforce, leading to more competitive industries, higher exports and more wealth creation; less youth unemployment meaning less spending on benefits, and so on. Most of this is, as we know, is the exact opposite of what's happened.

So where has all the money gone? Part of the answer lies in the increasingly bureaucratised nature of our public services. Amazingly, the number of managers in the NHS has doubled, contrary to Labour's pre-1997 pledge. Unnecessary new quangos and regulatory bodies are created that duplicate each others' functions, and we have witnessed the endless proliferation of highly remunerative "non-jobs" at both national and local level (Heads of Transformation, Directors of Vision - how the devil did we manage without these people before?). Alleged efficiency gains in the civil service usually turn out to be feats of creative accountancy, and conceal hidden costs such as massive redundancy packages.

In chapter 7, Craig and Elliott succinctly demonstrate why publicly-funded projects have an inbuilt tendency towards wastefulness and budget-busting in a way that private enterprise doesn't. In a nutshell, the reason is that "wasting public money never affected a civil servant's career, but acting to prevent waste can be hugely detrimental" (p118-120). The Millennium Dome is the best-known example, but there are even more scandalous instances of "domeonomics" to be found, notably the 2012 Olympics which are already 500% over budget, and the fiasco of the NHS computer system.

Chapters 8 and 12 revisit the banking meltdown, casting a spotlight on the disgraceful complicity of regulators, auditors and politicians, and in chapters 10 & 11 we are given a full account of the MPs' expenses scandal; at the time of writing, still fresh in our minds but in danger of being forgotten.

So, what is to be done? In the last two chapters, some radical measures are proposed that may help to return us to fiscal sanity and give us value-for-money services. These include halving the number of MPs and councillors, putting all public-sector managers on a four-day week, and giving localities more control over service delivery. But what we need even more, according to Craig and Elliot, is a change in political culture from the bottom up. Although Britain has spawned numerous campaign groups devoted to the environment, animal welfare and eradicating Third World poverty, what we so far lack - and desperately need - is citizen's activism on regular, nuts-and-bolts political issues. This doesn't necessarily mean US-style tax day tea parties, but it does mean finding ways to use corporate manslaughter laws, the Freedom of Information Act and even the Human Rights Act to turn the tables on the smug, self-serving political/managerial elite who treat us like peons.

So will we take their advice on board? Or will we get fleeced again . . . and again . . . and again?

truth hurts and lies worse
extremely well written synopsis of how we have slid into a financial mess, from the self-serving banking ego-maniacs, to the government ministry of lethargy, these authors should be in government as they are totally on the pulse and send a call to our leaders who have been governing very little.