Welcome to the latest installment of the Great British Theatre of the Absurd, a long-running production where the tickets are free but the cost of attendance is your soul and your life savings. This week’s performance features the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), a government entity that functions with the grace of a drunk elephant on a frozen lake, and a Select Committee of MPs who have suddenly discovered that being ‘appalled’ is a cost-effective alternative to actually governing. At the center of this pathetic whirlwind is Sir Peter Schofield, the DWP’s Permanent Secretary—a title that suggests he will outlast the heat death of the universe, or at least the next five Prime Ministers—who has been accused of serving up a ‘lot of blancmange’ in response to the department’s systematic destruction of unpaid carers.

For those of you fortunate enough to not be drowning in the DWP’s administrative bile, the scandal involves hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers—individuals who sacrifice their sanity and careers to look after relatives because the state is too cheap to do it—who have been hit with massive debt demands. The DWP, in its infinite, automated wisdom, allowed minor overpayments to balloon into life-ruining liabilities, only to swoop in years later with the predatory enthusiasm of a loan shark. And what was the response from the man at the top? According to the Work and Pensions Committee, it was ‘blancmange.’ A dessert that is essentially a sugary ghost; it has no substance, no spine, and leaves a film on the roof of your mouth that feels like regret. It is the perfect metaphor for the British civil service: wobbly, opaque, and ultimately indigestible.

Sir Peter’s performance at the hearing was a masterclass in the bureaucratic arts. To listen to him is to enter a dimension where accountability is a foreign concept and the English language is used primarily as a smokescreen. He didn't offer apologies that carried the weight of restitution; he offered explanations that felt like being patted on the head by a man wearing a sandpaper glove. The MPs, for their part, were predictably ‘furious.’ They used words like ‘absolutely unacceptable,’ a phrase that has become the white noise of Westminster. It’s the verbal equivalent of a strongly worded letter that is immediately fed into a shredder. These politicians love a scandal because it allows them to LARP as defenders of the common man, ignoring the fact that the legislative frameworks they’ve ignored for decades are the very things that allow the DWP to operate like a malicious algorithm.

Let’s look at the ‘victims’—the word the DWP probably uses to describe its ‘customers’ during internal retreats. These are people providing billions of pounds worth of free labor to the state. In any sane society, they would be given medals and a living wage. In Britain, they are given a pittance and then sued for it because they earned ten pounds over a threshold they weren’t told existed. The sheer, grinding cruelty of it is almost impressive if it weren’t so tedious. The DWP spent years watching these overpayments accrue, presumably waiting for the most inconvenient possible moment to demand them back. It isn’t an error; it’s a feature of a system designed to treat the vulnerable as accounting errors that need to be corrected.

And then there is the committee. Oh, the committee. They barked and they postured, and they lamented the ‘blancmange’ responses. But what will change? Nothing. Sir Peter will retain his title, his pension will continue to grow like a well-watered fungus, and the carers will still be choosing between heating their homes and paying back a debt they shouldn't have. The ‘outrage’ of an MP is the most fleeting substance on earth, second only to the integrity of a civil servant under oath. They will move on to the next scandal by Tuesday, leaving the stench of this one to linger in the bank accounts of the poor.

This entire episode illustrates the terminal decline of the administrative state. We are governed by people who cannot manage a spreadsheet but can manage a press release. We are overseen by people who find ‘unacceptable’ behavior acceptable enough to let it continue for years. The blancmange isn’t just coming from Sir Peter’s mouth; it is the very foundation of the building. It is soft, it is sweet, and it is rotting from the inside out. If you’re looking for justice, you’re in the wrong country. If you’re looking for a dessert-based metaphor for the collapse of civil society, you’ve come to the right place. We are a nation led by the inept, policed by the indifferent, and currently, we are all being served a very large helping of blancmange.