You Can Whistle For It

Well, lookee here. Those coalition pledges are dropping faster than Clegg's knickers during the second week in May. They're dropping like the collective IQ of the Commons chamber when the Conservative members walk in. They're going down like the Venerable Tony on his favourite chimpanzee, like Daveybloke on his sugar-daddy in Belize, like Willem den Haag on the Euro-fascists.

Today's price worth paying for our bankers' future is the pledge to protect public-sector whistleblowers, to which Daveybloke presumably signed up on the grounds that the public sector is such a wastrel's paradise that it would be a good idea to have it stabbed in the back from the inside as well as cut to pieces from the outside. However, it has now been borne in upon Daveybloke that the various applications of George's little chainsaw over the next five years will probably result in a lot of nasty, uncouth whistles being blown about the wrong sort of problem, i.e. the sort of problem which has been caused by the various applications of George's little chainsaw. Also, as George's little chainsaw continues to sculpt British society into Lord Ashcroft's vision of a smaller, cheaper and meaner United States, and as Daveybloke's Big Society thingy comes parachuting in like Mary Poppins to magic away the gaping wounds and clean the bloodstains off the ceiling, there will no longer be any need for whistleblowers because we'll all be Doing It For Ourselves. If anyone in the local volunteer militia puts a foot wrong, for example, the friendly persuasion of his vigilant neighbours will be enough to get him back on the right path again; and if that doesn't work, I suppose we can always add some overtime to our overtime and take up a collection to pay a man from Serco to put the case a bit more emphatically.

Hence, the pledge to protect whistleblowers has been put on indefinite hold, much as the Venerable Tony once did with electoral reform, and much as Daveybloke and his orange muffler will presumably do with the alternative vote system should the public favour it in the referendum. The Government has attempted to bury the bad news behind the announcement that plans for Daveybloke's Big Society Thingy Day (some kind of Stakhanovite celebration of the wonders of running your own fire brigade) have also been cancelled; but the whole business still puts rather an unfavourable spin on the phrase transparency in government.