Did you know we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis? No, it has nothing to do with MPs’ expenses or the Lisbon Treaty. It is over the appointment of the Children’s Commissioner. Yes, that was my reaction, too. The what?

Ed Balls has appointed Maggie Atkinson, Gateshead council’s director of children’s services, to the post. The Commons Education Select Committee isn’t happy, because it doesn’t think she has “the independence of mind to stand up to a secretary of state who likes to get his own way . . . a bit of a bully”, as Barry Sheerman, the committee’s chairman, put it yesterday.

The rest of us, meanwhile, stand back in amazement at the fact that two sentient beings can be bothered to have so fierce an argument over an appointment to a job no one has ever heard of, no one cares about and no one wants. Except, that is, for those with their snouts in this latest public-sector trough.

Human life has existed for more than half a million years. Since all of us were once children, we must wonder how our forebears coped until the advent of a Labour government that was able, in the Children Act 2004, to establish the post of Children’s Commissioner “to promote the views of children and young people from birth to 18”.

But thank heavens, those half a million years of childhood iniquity are over, as Sir Al Aynsley-Green demonstrated in May last year when, at the height of the furore over teenage knife crime, he warned that allowing police to search children for knives might antagonise them. What a wonderful investment his £130,000 salary proved to be. How awful if a potential murderer were to be upset by having his pockets checked.

The very notion of a Children’s Commissioner is risible. How about a Ginger’s Commissioner, for the rights of us redheads? What about a Wii Commissioner, for those who want access to computer games? Bung in a few more £130,000 salaries.

Not that it’s just a matter of paying the commissioner. Add the salaries of support staff, press officers, bureaucrats, assistants and lobbyists, and you arrive at the department’s annual budget of £3 million.

And that’s just for England. There are also commissioners for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, costing £1.2 million, £1.8 million and £1.9 million respectively.

Such figures might be small fry when set against the net borrowing forecast of £175 billion for 2009/10, but nothing more clearly indicates the culture behind grabbing ever greater amounts of taxpayers’ money, and frittering it away on rubbish.

Stephen Pollard is editor of the Jewish Chronicle

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