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Shortly after the BBC Panorama report on that monumental example of State overspending — the new vehicle licensing centre at Swansea — one prominent union leader was heard to remark: “The people who make costly mistakes get by unscathed. It's the people who make small mistakes that are really taken to task.” At which point he recalled his earlier days working in the machine shop of an engineering factory which overlooked a canal. “Making a mistake at work in those days probably meant the sack. So whenever someone on a machine botched a job it was surreptitiously thrown in the canal. Which worked very well until one day a barge came along and got stuck on a submerged heap of our rejects.”