Are we doomed to support this state waste?

Today I'd like to talk about examples of the expensive timidity, waste and padding which percolate our state services. I say "our" state services - but too often they exist in their own smug vacuum, behaving and spending other people's (taxpayers') money in ways that no private sector business would.

Thus the head teacher at the smug academy which suspended Katharine Birbalsingh turns out to be a blairite. Having no regard to the freedom of speech of the teaching profession, the school claims that:

Teachers will always have opinions about the ways in which schools should be run.... Generalisations about teachers and schools can be seen as insulting to many teachers who have worked hard to make a difference.

This is not just patronisingly wimpy, it is hugely illiberal. Generalisations about teaching and schooling are to be off limits. Who do they think they are to stop professionals debating the quality of the expensive education service we pay for?

And how the cushioned state sector loves its bureaucracy. The 59 armed officers who attended the Saunders siege had to take account of at least six protocols running to more than 300 pages covering the use of firearms. This doesn't work on the ground. No organisation can run effectively like this, but the pampered police seem content with this state of affairs. Never mind that it wastes our money and makes them less effective. While chief constables bleat about their operational independence - an independence which they seem less and less to deserve, we must wait to see what inroads elected local commissioners can make into this complacent, featherbedded wastefulness.

Did you know there's an organisation called "Play England"? There is actually a report out - issued jointly (two organisations are better than one) by the Health and Safety Executive and Play England - saying that organisations designing play areas should allow for a “few grazed knees or bruised elbows” if children gain from the experience, for example learning how to ride a bike on rough ground or use a climbing frame. Seventeen thousand of these guides - yes, seventeen thousand - have "already" been ordered by local authorities and schools hoping to build modern play areas.

The BBC has sent more people to cover the Chilean mine rescue than all our other broadcasting services combined. Channel 4 News has sent three, ITV six, Sky News (which of course provides rolling news) a team of nine. But the BBC requires 25. The BBC says smugly:

BBC News has devoted appropriate resources to ensuring that we have been able to report the story in depth to our UK and global audiences on television, radio and online.

That's disproportinately more than Sky need.

Finally today to Brighton, where the council apparently has a growing reputation for its training courses. A recent "Leading on Diversity" course asked staff to imagine they were a seven-year-old child called Sarah Hardy, the daughter of English economic migrants who had moved to the fictitious region of Sindia. They were also told that "while asleep one night they have slipped through a wormhole in space" and woken up in a parallel world where it is "normal to be lesbian or gay". They were asked about this self-indulgence.

The council, which is being forced to make £45 million savings in the next three years, refused to reveal how much the training courses cost.

Come again? Refused? Who are they, to refuse us who are their paymasters? This seems especially foolish in the light of Porker Pickles' reforms, which will require them to publish detailed breakdowns of spending.

Are we doomed to finance this featherbedding for ever?

Why should we?

But who will kill it?