The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

It’s a pleasure to be able to report some good journalism at the BBC because it doesn’t happen very often these day. Laura Kuenssberg may lack Nick Robinson’s trademark glasses and gleaming pate but it hasn’t stopped her vastly outplaying him while he’s sunning himself abroad.

For a blog that is usually highly timid about criticising the government in any meaningful way, her story about the total shambles that is the MoD procurement report - and government attempts to not publish it – have been clear, candid and questioning in a way that the insider Robinson is not.

The details of the story itself are shocking but we should not be shocked. This kind of flaccid, complacent and obscene disregard for value is rife across all government departments (go and read Private Eye), where government appears to be run for the benefit of private sector contractors rather than the British taxpayer.

Ironically, few of the private contractors would survive with fiscal control as disastrous as the government’s. In this way, money from the UK government either goes to foreign contractors (notably within the EU) and leaves the country or to British contractors, only to be taken back through taxation.

As a nation, we need to break this cycle and start considering how we can bring in more money into the country than we hand out. We are a long, long way from that situation at the moment because we have not much to give the world.

But using what we have more effectively will help – hopefully Laura’s exposure of this dreadful, sickening wastefulness will help bring about an adequately rigorous approach to spending our scant resources.