It is well known that government often makes decisions for purely political reasons. Such a decision might well be to support an MP in a marginal constituency. Companies may bribe government to change policy in exchange for donations to party funds - a recent alleged example being the abandonment of affordable home targets.

Gordon Brown's main motive for pushing the Private Finance Initiative as hard as he did seems to have been to increase expenditure on public services whilst not breaking his golden rule on government borrowing. However service payments on PFI contracts are no less of a committment by the public sector than servicing loans. It is all smoke and mirrors.

If (for example) NHS trusts had been allowed to raise from banks loans guaranteed by the government, and hence available at a relatively low interest rate, it would have been far more economical. It would have been no more dishonest to leave such loans off government borrowing figures than leaving off the PFI payments.

An even more pointless political decision was to administer the Single Farm Payment in England in as complicated a fashion as possible, purely to show we were adhering most strictly to the preferred route set out in an EC directive - a directive which had clearly been drafted by companies selling satellite imagery. Every other EU country including Wales and Scotland managed to make the payments on time at reasonable cost, whereas payments to English farmers were about a year late, thus further damaging a very vulnerable sector of the economy.

The scapegaot for this was the head of the Rural Payments Agency, whereas the key decision was almost certainly made by Margaret Beckett, who was promoted to the post of Foreign Secretary.