Nice money for some.

Gordon Brown was trumpeting a £3 billion cut in government spending yesterday.

Reuters.

Brown outlined an extra 3 billion pounds in savings over four years through cutting advisory budgets and embracing new technologies such as the internet -- on top of 9 billion pounds of planned efficiencies announced earlier.

A drop in the ocean really as government spending is around about £622 billion and they continue to spend far more than they actually get in, which is why they continue to print money to cover it. This was done by throwing out a 165-year old law that obliged the Bank of England to publish a weekly account of its balance sheet, a move that will allowed it to embark  on quantitative easing.
Yet today it emerged that the government is to spend £3 billion on transport and hospitality for ministers and civil servants.

Telegraph.

The Prime Minister warned yesterday that there is a “culture of excess” in the public sector and promised to curb the salaries paid to civil servants, quango chiefs, council leaders and BBC executives.

He announced that the Government had identified new savings which could be made in Whitehall costs worth £3 billion over the next four years.

However, it has now emerged that the Government has recently begun tendering for a new £3 billion travel and hospitality contract.

Official documents disclose that ministers expect to spend between £2 billion and £3 billion over the next four years for hospitality and travel for themselves and civil servants – spending the same amount as will be saved by the efficiency drive.

A separate contract is also being offered worth about £70 million to fly mandarins around Britain and the world. The contract covers those working for central Government excluding the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office.

Why do I have the feeling that this will all be first class travel, staying in 5 star hotels and covering substantive expenses on meals and entertainment? I might be wrong of course, but the odds are that I'm not.
Public servants and that is what parliamentarians and senior civil servants are, have lost sight of the fact that we're in a recession (actually with their pay and perks they may not have noticed) To them it's just words and as long as it doesn't interfere with the gravy train well that's all right. I don't think that they're even trying to hide the excess anymore, they just don't care how it looks as they feel safe and secure in their jobs and come the next government it will be business as usual, different faces, same perks and a nice index linked pension on retirement. It's rumoured that ministers don't even really run their departments anymore, it's just too complex, by the time they have a handle on things they're moved on to something else.
This is why the country needs a libertarian style government, to remove the complexity of government, simplify things, move control of peoples lives back to the people. Let the people have control as scary as that might be for some and remove the over-control and wastage of the current system.
Don't expect it any time soon though, but it will come or the system will like the Soviet one collapse under its own weight.