To Mitigate and Combat Chief Wiggum

A scandal broke in the Sunday Times yesterday about the Audit Commission, a government watchdog whose role is to oversee and police state spending. Alarmed by aggressive manoeuvres on the part of Eric Pickles, the Tories' Chief Wiggum, which included announcing plans to abandon the Commission's raison d'etre (a certain kind of evaluative framework called the Comprehensive Area Assessment) and shift its powers to other bodies, the Commission has taken action.

This action took the form of a transfer of about £60,000 of taxpayer cash to Labour PR slicks Connect Public Affairs, a firm started by Rosie Winterton MP and now run by close mate Gill Morris. (Most readers will recall Winterton, of excessive expenses fame, after she tried to get the fees office to pay for slabs of mineral floss to soundproof her bedroom walls. What devious boudoir chatter was Ms Winterton trying to keep safely between her four walls?)

Connect Public Affairs, a red-rag-waving PR firm with a site full of Stalinesque staff publicity shots, was brought on specifically to "to mitigate and combat the activities of Eric Pickles”. Suggested tactics include sowing division in Tory ranks and to butter up local activists so as to more effectively act as a roadblock to governmental reform.

Hyena's never seen a more textbook case of a parasitic state organ turning away from "public service" and entirely inward on a self-serving quest for survival at all costs. You could barely make up a better flesh-and-blood exmaple of the way the state operates as a predatory interest group rather than as a transformative medium for the public good, or whatever it is paternalist socialists believe nowadays.

For interest's sake, among the Commission's previous fuck-ups-- uh, "missteps" - is the publication of a report highly critical of local governemnts for recklessly putting all their money into Iceland, only for the Committee itself to find it had, alas, just lost £10 million... in an Icelandic bank.

At least Chief Pickles's got this one under control, folks.

"Alright boys, I'm shutting this place down!"