Customer Rating: 
Summary: I recommend this book without reservation and urge everyone to read it.
Comment: I bought "Squandered" and I finished it recently. I whole-heartedly recommend this excellent, very detailed and well-researched book.
I hope it will be more widely read. The appalling waste, the fraud and hypocrisy, the cruel, casual unconcern for the have-nots in every sphere is horrifying and shameful. The sheer scale of waste defies belief.
We need urgently to halt the abuse of power and the insidious change from democracy to bureaucracy as our mode of government.
In the light of the current financial scandals that are precipitating us to Hell in a handcart I expect David Craig is busy writing another book!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A real eye opener
Comment: This is one of those books that I thought at first would be another boring book about politics written by another dry academic. It couldn't have been further from the truth. Daniel Craig has a very readable, at times witty style of writing, but over all that are the incontrovertable truths on almost every page. A picture emerges of a government marked mainly by its totally inept management of the economy and its inability to use the tax-payers money other than on grandiose schemes with no other hidden agenda than to make political points, and even that seems to have backfired. Craig shows us that this seems to be true of all governments in recent years of no matter what hue.
This book should be required reading for everyone who cares about the future of our country and, given that the past is often a harbinger of the future, who cares about the calibre of the people we vote into power. It should definitely be required reading for all sixth formers.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good points but please don't quote the Dail Mail!
Comment: As a long time NHS employee, first as a nurse then latterly as a manager, I've seen first hand how billions have been pumped into health, the ranks of bureaucrats have swelled enormously and efficiency and quality have nose dived. As far as the NHS goes, everything in this book is spot on and I suspect that if you picked teachers, soldiers and policemen at random they would agree that the same has happened in their field. The only issue I would raise however is in how the book is referenced. I'm not sure you can get away with quoting newspaper articles in a book which, while clearly aimed at the general public, is also very specific about facts and figures and is sold as a genuine critique of government mismanagement. The most frequently quoted source is that publication well known for its accuracy and balance, The Daily Mail. Sorry, this just isn't on! There may indeed be substance to the points raised in the newspaper articles referenced in the book but I'd be a lot happier if the original source were used. I'm as harsh a critic of the performance of this government as the next man but I'd take The Daily Mail's views with a huge pinch of salt and using them as a source significantly detracts from the credibility of the arguments I'm afraid. No one would seriously quote The Sun or Star to support their arguments and I'm afraid the Mail is in the same bracket for me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Read and vote
Comment: You must read this book before you vote in the next General Election. You'll read how it's rich bureaucrats that have done best under Labour, not the poor. You'll read how taxes have shot up to be invested in incompetently run and non-delivering public services. You'll read how ineptly this country has been run since 1997, and the scale of waste, bad decisions and dishonesty.
Craig's tone is not ranty. He gives a good deal of evidence for all the statements he makes, he doesn't slide into personal attacks or wilful bias. He delivers one of the best and most well researched books of its kind in recent years. Particularly powerful are his use of quotes from the likes of Blair and Brown, as they promise one thing and then a few years later deliver the complete opposite.
Easy to read and eminently digestible, Squandered will have you weary with fury and determined to put a stop to the Labour lunacy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Squandered
Comment: David Craig assembles data that, when assessed across the total New Labour period, points not just to outrageous incompetence, but to structural problems in how the country is run that suggest that the UK government simply cannot deliver its leadership role. The book is an indictment of New Labour but it also shows how the Tories and the civil service contributed to what is now an economy in free fall.
David Craig's figures speak for themselves. The message is clear. more and more of our money is being taken from us to create a class of inexperienced, incompetent and unaccountable parasites who are not only doing nothing to advance the cause of the people but who have become ulcers, draining life from the economy and constraining the creativity of the British people. When looked at over time, as 'Squandered' does, and free from wildly unjustified claims of 'prudence', we see details of:
- lazy promotion of pseudo growth by the active encouragement of low wage immigration on a scale never experienced before
- cuts in spending on equipment for the soldiers in the field at a time when the government pursues a deeply flawed policy of invasion (that was opposed by the mass of the UK populace
- growth in administrators and 'management' far in excess of the growth in numbers of nurses, police, soldiers and teachers
- profligate government borrowing at a time when the economy was buoyant to be paid back when the business cycle is reversed
- Public Private Finance 'Initiatives' that have increased the costs of the services being provided and which have been so badly managed that the tax payer will be carrying an unpredented economic burden for decades to come
- pension policies that mean 99% of civil servants have essentially unfunded, inflation-proof, final salary based pensions, while 72% of the private work force have nothing that compares to this - yet who have ot foot the bill out of future taxes (not out of pension funds that are earning interest)
- above all, our money has been spent and our futures put in hock without achieving any compensatory benefits: failing, dirty hospitals, new and refurbished schools whose new designs are condemned as 'mediocre' by the National Audit Commitee; falling education standards and higher rates of illiteracy; more serious crimes and increaing numbers of prisoners despite large sums spent on policing
- sale of over half the nation's gold stock when the gold market was at rock bottom, handled in such an absurd way that the price was driven even lower before the gold was even sold - putting billions in the hands of a Chinese Government wise enough to buy when price was low
- creation of quangos lined with unqualified party faithful who are now also on inflation-proof final salary linked pensions and who have absolutely no accountability to the people or the government
- pumping of money needlessly into a corrupt, unaccountable and self-serving EU whose accounts have been rejected by auditors for 11 years
- increasing the number of MPs while 50 - 60% of law making is now done from Brussels
- foolhardy promotion of poorly specified, intrinsically unworkable software projects such as ID cards and natioanl databases, whose costs escalate while their benefits either recede or disappear
- billions spent irresponsibly on consultants who added little value and on projects whose budgets are invariably out of control, from NHS computers to Olympic villages.
David Craig's book covers all the major government departments. It shows that the incompetence is not isolated - it is endemic. Despite the terrifying message of 'Squandered', Mr Craig offers some constructive proposals to prevent the current situation leading to a major collapse of the economy. He himself, though, appears to have little confidence that either our elected or our unelected masters will be capable of carrying them out.
New Labour inherited a healthy economy, freed from the disastrous Exchange Rate Mechanism (which Labour had advocated as strongly as the Tories) at a time when world markets were growing rapidly. Inflation for the 5 years before and after the arrival of new Labour was about the same. But where did the resulting wealth go? Sucked into taxation and unproductive house price rises, into abortive government spending and the creation of 600,000 new jobs for civil servants. The result - inflation and recession. Where are the genuine productive new jobs that New Labour claimed to have been created? They are with low wage immigrants while the numbers of the nation's euphemistically named 'economically inactive' has doubled.
My interpretation of Mr Craig's book is that the UK's system of government has failed us and will continue to do so unless there are major changes, not just in faces but in the selection process that resutls in such incompetence.
Despite all the verbiage, 'New Labour' turned out to be 'Old Labour' disguised in spin. MR Craig's figures show how Labour has repeated its old pattern of taxing success and spending on failure. It has pandered to a financial industry thta does not invest in Britain and discouraged investment in British technologies that can reduce the costs of living and improve out living standards. It has spent billions instead on abortive projects that have brought us close to cultural and economic breakdown.
In the absence of a competent opposition, in the face of New Labour's in-fighting following the failures of Phoney Bliar and Gawdhelpyou Brown, and with a media industry that has exchanged investigative journalism for celebrity baiting, 'Squandered' is the wake-up call we have been lacking. It's a bitter read, but thank you, David Craig for pulling it altogether and pointing us (and maybe our unbeloved Leaders) towards a different future.
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