13-02-2025
I'm no fan of James Watt, but 'Ellon Musk' might have a point on government spending
This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.
North East IPA magnate turned TV personality James Watt wants to save the taxpayer some cash.
Taking to LinkedIn, the Brewdog co-founder said he was 'sick of talking about how broken our government is.'
It's time, he added, to 'actually do something.'
I'm sick of talking about how broken our government is. And I'm sure you're sick of hearing about it 😅. It's time to actually do something. So, I am introducing Shadow Doge. You can think of it as the unofficial, underground cousin of America's Department Of Government…
— James B Watt MBE (@JamesBWatt) February 13, 2025
That 'something' is to copy Donald Trump and Elon Musk's controversial Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Watt's Shadow DOGE will use 'extensive Freedom of Information requests' to find out how 'carelessly our tax money is being spent' and create an 'anonymous hotline' to allow workers to blow the whistle on profligate public sector bosses.
Any civil servant looking to grass up their boss can go to the Shadow Doge website where they will be asked to detail the 'quantum of misspent funds.'
Watt's not the first copycat.
Michael Gove has launched the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding (SPAFF). There's also the Waste Files, set up by former Tory special adviser Jason Brown, and another DOGE project for the Guido Fawkes website.
Journalist Charlotte Gill's been leading the way on this for some time now with her Woke Waste.
As much as James Watt — or Ellon Musk as one of my colleagues called him — might be a publicity hungry bore, whose main motivation here is in getting maximum publicity for James Watt, he's got a point.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics on Thursday, had gross domestic product up by 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2024. That'll be a relief to Rachel Reeves after zero growth in the previous three months, but the Chancellor still faces difficult choices ahead.
On Wednesday, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research warned that she was all out of headroom and there is 'no space for extra expenditure in response to a shock or the need for higher public investment to get growth going for as long as the self-imposed constraints on tax remain.'
Basically, if she's not going to hike taxes again, she needs to make cuts.
This Chancellor knows this.
Read more from the Unspun newsletter:
Does Robert the Bruce's Abbey deserve to crumble?
AI isn't the problem in an MSP's use of Holyrood questions
A short history of SNP promises to reform council tax
Is it time for the SNP to drop their opposition to nuclear power?
Reeves has already tasked government departments with identifying 5% "efficiency savings" in their budgets, including PR.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, last year's Budget included £30m set aside for Invest to Save, a new drive for public service reform, that has already identified savings in excess of "£280m over a two-year period by the end of 2024-25.'
That's all through what John Swinney described as 'the redesign of services' and 'the redeployment of organisational resource".
In the US, Musk's DOGE has cut some departments out of existence and some of the consequences, particularly around the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Education, could be grim.
There's no political appetite for cuts that deep here, but there are clearly savings to be made.
