Cameron in chaos

WHEN David Cameron was trying to get into Downing Street, he made great play of Labour’s incompetence and squandering of public money. Little more than a year after taking office, he looks guilty of both these mistakes and also a third: of sitting in London and patronising the regions.

By The Newsroom

Published 24th May 2011, 01:00 BST

The latest manifestation of this is a consultation on the closure of England’s nine regional development agencies (RDAs), the powers of which Mr Cameron has previously described as a “disaster”. Clearly, it will not be much of a consultation.

The coalition’s handling of RDAs has been shambolic. First it pledged to abolish them before it had carried out a sufficient analysis of their economic impact, then it presided over the chaotic introduction of local enterprise partnerships and now it proposes to waste money on a pointless PR exercise while continuing to lecture local authorities on the importance of financial responsibility.

In doing so it continues to ignore the economic problems in areas like Yorkshire, where a large proportion of people work in the public sector. Such an attitude looks hollow, vacillating and ignorant.