Government to create single competition authority | Reuters

(Reuters) - Britain plans to streamline its antitrust regime by merging two existing bodies into a single competition and market authority, in a move broadly welcomed by business leaders.

An official list of public bodies facing reform said the government would consult next year on a merger of the Competition Commission with the competition functions of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The proposal would transfer the OFT's consumer and enforcement functions to another body.

The CBI welcomed the move on Thursday, which it said it had advocated. The heads of the two organisations also backed the proposal.

"The planned merger would improve the efficiency of the competition regime by cutting duplication," said Matthew Fell, CBI Director of Competitive Markets.

Ad astra per aspera

Government scraps 192 quangos | Politics | guardian.co.uk

The government today delivered its promised "bonfire of the quangos", abolishing 192 government agencies, merging another 118 and substantially reforming a further 171.

Thousands of jobs will go and as many will be transferred into new departments. It amounts to the biggest shakeup of government the coalition has made to date.

Health bodies are dealt a particularly heavy blow with the Health Protection Agency being scrapped and its functions brought into the Department of Health. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the Human Genetics Commission and the Human Tissue Authority will all be scrapped.

The BBC World Service and the British Council have both won reprieves and the Equality and Human Rights Commission will be retained, though its regulatory functions will be substantially changed and its budget is expected to be dramatically reduced.

Ad astra per aspera

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Britain's austerity apostles duck the debate

What macroeconomic theory do the budget hawks have to subscribe to, to believe that taking £100bn out of the economy in the next four years will produce recovery? And what do the budget doves need to believe to claim the cutters are wrong?

David Cameron, Mr Osborne, and Nick Clegg appear to believe in something called "crowding out". This is the view that for every extra pound the government spends, the private sector spends one pound less. Jobs created by stimulus spending are jobs lost by the decline of private spending. Any stimulus to revive the economy is doubly damned: not only does it fail to stimulate, but, because government spending is less efficient than private, it reduces the economy's longer term recovery potential.
...
A refinement of this argument is "psychological crowding out". In this version it is not a shortage of saving, but a shortage of confidence in the government's creditworthiness - due to a fear of default - which causes interest rates to rise. Either way the deficit "crowds out" private investment. Net stimulus: zero.
...
Keynesians do not deny the possibility of "psychological crowding out": markets are subject to all kinds of irrational hopes and fears. But what the cutters mean by "crowding out" can normally only happen at full employment. At full employment, extra public spending obviously subtracts from private spending. But this is not the position we are in today.

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

The principal objective is to increase accountability...

Because anything that once was thought to benefit from being isolated from partisan politics is to become more accountable by either being dissolved or made part of the partisan process? Is Civil Service next?

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."