Thread by @uk_domain_names

Lots of things annoy me about the state of politics, but top of the list is the way politicians use funding as the sole scorecard of success for most issues.

"Look at us. We've tackled XYZ because we put £30 million into it." Cue mutual back-patting.

But if Chris Grayling has any utility whatsoever, it is to illustrate that money can be spent in almost infinitely unproductive ways. So it's a metric, for sure, but a terribly flawed one.

Money is important. Of course it is. But the answer to the charge "XYZ problem went up 20% last year" cannot be "that's not correct because we put more money into the issue."

Both statements can be true at the same time. Extra money doesn't falsify the fact the problem worsened.

Politicians have to stop inventing a false equivalence that doesn't exist.

Consider knife crime. An extra £100 million has been allocated to fight it. But if in a year's time the crime stats haven't gone down, that additional money shouldn't be a shield to hide behind.

Take responsibility. If something genuinely improves, take the credit - you've earned it. But if your only achievement is to pour money into a problem only for it to vanish as if it passed the event horizon of a black hole, that's not success. That's failure.

For whatever reason (poor allocation of resources, misidentification of the root cause of the problem, wasted initiatives etc.) that money didn't produce a good ROI when measured by the real yardstick that matters: how much things improved. Own your failure, learn from it.
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