David Leigh and Rob Evans (Extracted from "Fast cars, cocktails and tropical beaches -- life in the DTI fast lane", The Guardian, 29 October 2005)

"A 'culture of excess' at the Department of Trade and Industry is laid bare in a confidential report leaked to The Guardian which shows officials spending nights in expensive hotels, hiring BMW cars, having unrestricted use of government mobile phones and consuming large quantities of cocktails at taxpayers' expense.

When accountants Ernst & Young questioned an official about her study of British export prospects in Barbados, their report says 'She admitted that they had not conducted market research, but had, in fact, spent the afternoon on the beach.' "

[Ed None of this is surprising these days. The same is happening in other UK civil service departments no doubt. The same is happening among politicians. The same is happening in the civil services and political parties in all advanced nation-states. The reason is that the young intelligentsia don't enter politics or the civil services these days because they know intuitively that nation-states are dying. All human institutions rise and then exhibit the same sorts of symptoms as they fall, and present-day nation-states are no exceptions. New forms of governance will no doubt emerge in due course from the various trans-world networks that are now arising in business, the environment and science but, as always in history, it will take several generations for the existing institutions to finally expire and the new ones to emerge in workable form.]