Accounts and Accountability (with apologies to Jane Austen)

Accountability and accounts share seven letters for a reason. Effective democratic governance makes it hard to waste public money, as a corollary, hard to colonise civil society by spreading largesse. Take, for example, an item on page 14 of Thursday's La Vanguardia (click on the clipping for a full view):

There's a bigger story here: where the item was placed in the paper and how long the story will play. Wasting €6 million in public funds isn't an amusing one-off, like a hacker pasting a picture of Mr Bean onto an official web page. The press should report it, public opinion turn against it, and reforms arise from it as a consequence. If waste has no impact on public opinion, no-one will turn off the tap. Thus the mess we are in: public education, universities and health services are under-funded but thoroughly audited and so accountable, while money channelled elsewhere--a.k.a. Fèlix Millet--paid for family outings to the Maldives. If grants make for waste, graft, corruption, and poor accountability, perhaps most of the money granted should be spent by public institutions instead of businesses and the third sector. If you turn on a sprinkler and don't tend your garden, you get weeds. What public spending is Spain needs is the equivalent of drip irrigation.