Civil Servants Are Deliberately Destroying Documents From The UK's National Archive

Zero Hedge

In yet another galling example of historical revisionism put into practice, the Guardian reported Tuesday that thousands of documents from the National Archives have gone missing in recent years – and some may have been deliberately destroyed by civil servants hoping to purge unflattering details about the UK's abuses of power from the historical record.

Per the Guardian:

Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost.

Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.

Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and long-running territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina.

Almost 1,000 files, each thought to contain dozens of papers, are affected. In most instances the entire file is said to have been mislaid after being removed from public view at the archives and taken back to Whitehall.

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How officials spent £100m on taxis, first class rail travel and business class flights

The Telegraph 

Whitehall officials have spent more than £100million on taxis, business class flights and first class rail travel over the past four years, according to official figures.

Government departments have spent £60million on business class flights, £26million on taxis and £13million on first class rail travel.

In 2011 George Osborne barred civil servants from using first class rail travel unless there were exceptional circumstances.

David Cameron subsequently said that all ministers and civil servants should take economy class flights in an attempt to enhance his Green credentials.

However, despite the bans several government departments are still spending tens of millions of pounds on luxury travel. 

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How do you spend £3.7bn in just 8 weeks?

The Telegraph

Answer: ask the Department for International Development (Dfid), which has turned sensible spending plans on their head 

How do you spend £3.7 billion in just eight weeks? In a Government supposedly wracked by austerity, this was the unusual problem faced by officials at the Department for International Development (Dfid) in 2013.

All around, their Whitehall colleagues were finding ways of imposing cuts, but in Dfid’s imposing new headquarters off Trafalgar Square, the big worry was how to shovel money out of the door.

This is the central message of the latest report on Dfid from the National Audit Office. The most powerful objection to the Government’s promise to devote 0.7 per cent of national income to overseas aid was that spending money would then become an end in itself.

The rational way to run anything – whether a Whitehall department or a fish and chip shop – is to decide what you want to achieve and then spend as little as you can get away with. Once you subordinate everything to hitting a spending target, you turn the rules of rational management on their head.

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