There's an Orwellian ring to Birmingham City Council's latest wheeze on the Business Transformation front.
A project dubbed Excellence in Information Management will create a "reliable single version of the truth", according to a report to the cabinet. Ah, if only.
Not that cabinet members were too concerned about the report's contents. Most of them admitted they couldn't follow any of the 28 pages of gobbledegook, with the exception of human resources member Alan Rudge who said he'd read and understood every single word of the report, which he thought was really very interesting indeed. (Memo to self: never spend a night out on the lash with Coun Rudge.)
Business Transformation truly has become the new snake oil of the local government world.
No one knows exactly what it is, or how it works, only that it will produce multi-million pound savings.
This is because it will introduce a "better way of doing things" which will see all council departments working together in a common cause and not behaving like fiefdoms on their own.
Excellence in Information Management will, we are asked to believe, produce savings of £51 million for expenditure of £21 million – a net gain of £30 million.
No wonder the less cerebral councillors are impressed, even if every attempt to discover exactly how the savings will be delivered is rebuffed.
The answer really is simple, as Coun Rudge must know. Savings of the type envisaged by Business Transformation can only be achieved through getting rid of staff.
Let's see, 2,000 jobs at £25,000 a head = £50 million. That'll do nicely.
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Another eminently sensible letter to The Birmingham Post this week from Mr Paul Burke of Sutton Coldfield, although it was remiss of him not to include his usual praise for city council leader Mike Whitby.
Never mind, his call for us to stand shoulder to shoulder in talking up Birmingham and batting down anything that might obstruct our economic objectives almost has a Churchillian quality to it.
Burke's denunciation of "shameful" articles by myself, Lord Jones of Birmingham and John James bears reading time and again. For my part, I have a copy of the letter pasted to my desk in order that I might do better in future. I feel sure Lord Jones and Mr James feel similarly penitent.
The question is: why cannot Mr Burke be persuaded to join the city council?
He would, I am sure, make an excellent cabinet member for regeneration – a position in which he could work closely with Coun Whitby.
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There is a rumour, and I put it no higher, that Birmingham transportation cabinet member Len Gregory is almost ready to make a decision on the future of the Tyburn Road bus lane – which has been "temporarily" suspended for more than three years.
The biggest consultation exercise in the council's history led to a demand by Gregory for more monitoring of traffic patterns in an attempt to understand whether the bus lane should be restored fully, restored in part, or scrapped entirely.
Does anyone care anymore? I am reminded of Palmerston's riposte that only three people ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question – one was dead, one had forgotten and the other was a lunatic.