Another inadequate prison sentence

An 18 year old Preston man who attacked a 20 year old woman in a car park has been given an indefinite jail sentence - good.

He threw her down and stamped on her head before grabbing her phone. He pleaded guilty. The judge told him he would serve at least two and a half years - not enough.

Failure at Bromley should be a watershed for UKIP

So UKIP fielded Nigel Farage, its best communicator, reportedly spent £75,000, and gathered 2,347 votes (8.1%) for its trouble. The by-election was a high profile test of the present leadership's strategy. Spin it as you like, it failed.

UKIP needs to learn lessons from this. It's no good pitchforking a candidate in at the last minute - even if he is a local man who has never troubled to contest the seat before. Local presence, local issues and local persistence count for a lot.

What doesn't count for a lot as an election issue is the EU. MORI polls repeatedly report this, and the information is freely available on their site.

UKIP needs to become a party with a full range of UK policies, as the chairman announced when he was parachuted in back in January. And it needs to publicise them, so that by the time of an election campaign people know what the party stands for.

UKIP also needs to select and support its candidates well in advance, giving them time to build a local presence with a focus on local issues supported by the party's steady national publicity of its national policies.

This blog sends its condolences to Mr Farage, and to the many canvassers who pounded the streets for him believing he could win.

And now this blog is on its way back to the real world, highlighting issues which should concern the party and the country, though some may wish that more of the postings concentrated on the EU.

But we can't leave UKIP party matters without noticing that the Fruitcake Faction has put up a candidate for the party leadership who believes that

the use of computers in government and corporations should be severely curtailed by law.

The purple scorpion will be placing its leadership vote elsewhere - and not with the strategist of the by-election failure.

And the government thinks it's in control ...

Five Eritreans suspected of entering Britain illegally were given a map and told to find their own way to a holding centre because no immigration officials were available, reports The Telegraph.

The three men and two women were found in Winchester, Hants in a lorry carrying cacti from Spain.

They spent the night in a police station before officers were told that immigration officials in Southampton would not attend. Police were instructed to give them maps and tickets and tell them to catch a train to the centre in Croydon, Surrey.

One police officer said yesterday: "They were nice and polite but we have not got a clue who they are."

A Home Office spokesman would not confirm whether the group had turned up in Croydon.

Go on, guess.

No shortage of health and safety officials, though -

An auctioneer could lose his licence after officials warned him that he speaks too loudly during sales.

David Probert, who has been in the business for 40 years, received a letter from Worcester city council demanding that he explain the level of his voice at his poultry market in Hereford.

Mr Probert often has to speak over the heads of as many as 800 people. But health and safety officials said they had received a complaint about the noise and were also looking at how long staff were exposed to clucking chickens.

Mr Probert, 59, said: "I'm refusing to reply to the council. The whole thing is nonsense, a waste of time and money." The health and safety executive said it was duty bound to investigate a complaint.

How comforting to know the enforcement priorities are right. This can go down as another waste of our money.

And over in Bath, police refused to chase a moped thief because he wasn't wearing a helmet. Police officers said the force could be sued if the riders fell off during a chase and hurt themselves. The legislation that leads to such ridiculous rules needs to be hunted down and repealed. Human Rights again?

More of our money tipped away

The government continues to waste our money. The Taxpayers' Alliance highlights

• £420m on teacher sickies- "Teachers took a record number of sick days last year, costing taxpayers £420 million in supply cover. Classroom teachers missed an average of 9.3 days, compared with six days for private-sector workers. Schools lost 2.8 million teaching days to staff illness in 2005
• £3bn Sure Start scheme making things worse- "Labour's flagship project to help deprived children and families is making crime and truancy worse, not better, an alarming investigation revealed. The £3 billion Sure Start scheme is adding to the difficulties of schools and the spread of violence and stealing instead of helping to solve them.
• £5m for unworkable gun register- "The National Firearms Register promised by the Government in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre has been condemned as "fundamentally flawed and not fit for purpose".

Today The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says that the £500m+ reform of the Child Support Agency ranks "among the worst public administration scandals in modern times".

The numbers almost defy belief, but here are some of them -

• 267,000 new cases and 66,000 old cases are still waiting to be sorted out - 22 per cent of the CSA's work-load.
  
• 36,000 new cases are "stuck in the system" because of computer failures.
  
• One in four applications to the CSA received since March 2003 is waiting to be cleared. • New cases are taking 34 weeks to be sorted, having a "major impact on parents not receiving child maintenance and on fathers where the amount they owe accumulates".
  
• Over half of the maintenance assessments reviewed by the NAO contained errors.
  
• It costs the CSA 70p for every £1 it collects in maintenance.
• There is an estimated £3.5 billion of outstanding maintenance to be collected, although 60 per cent of this is considered "uncollectable".
  
• During 2004-05 "enforcement teams", or debt collectors, collected £8 million in payments - £4 million less than the cost of their fraud investigations.
  
• Reform of the CSA cost £539 million and will cost another £321 million up to April 2009.

It's been a repeated theme of this blog that we should be able to learn from other countries. The Financial Times reports the view of the National Audit Office that the government seems not to have learnt lessons from child support systems elsewhere in the world, all of which have the power to take money from the wages of non-paying parents, rather than relying on direct payments and debt collection.

The government also made familiar and basic mistakes - for instance they chose a complex, bespoke IT solution rather than standard, widely available packages, and introduced it at the same time that they restructured the CSA. They come across as a bunch of amateurs burning their way through your money and mine.

Meanwhile, the new NHS one size fits all IT system looks to be headed in the same direction.

Sir Digby Jones sets an agenda

Sir Digby gave The Guardian an interview on leaving the CBI.

Sir Digby said he had become increasingly "cynical and frustrated" about EU membership but stressed he was not calling for the UK to pull out. "If you criticise Europe, people say you are a Eurosceptic, which I am not," he said. "I am a Euro-reformist. I wouldn't suggest pulling out, but I do think serious questions need to be asked about the value added involved."

French opposition to reform of the common agricultural policy sent his "blood pressure through the roof", he said, while evidence that governments abroad were using economic patriotism as an electoral ploy made him much less hopeful about the chances of reform than he had been when he arrived to head the CBI in late 1999.

Thus Sir Digby joins the ranks of the EU-reformists, like Open Europe and the Conservative Party.

The problem with this approach is that there is no sign it will succeed any time soon - indeed, the EU is proceeding in the opposite direction, of more powers and more regulation, as Richard North's peerless blog makes clear every week.

One thing UKIP needs to do is to get into a dialogue with the reformists and ask them why they think their policy is realistic, and how many years they would allow for success.

They - and Sir Digby - should face the facts as Ruth Lea has faced the facts, and accept that the EU will never reform in the way they want.

The hard policy choice is not between Real EU and Fantasy EU. It is between Real EU and Outside the EU.

Sir Digby also attacked the Blair government. Without prolonging this post unduly, it will be worth considering how these themes are reflected in any future UKIP programme.

The Blair government had also spurned a golden opportunity for reform at home, he said. "There are big things that need to be done - reform of public services, changes to the planning system, the skilling of the nation, the transport infrastructure. Labour is now taking on everybody to get it achieved but it is not as well equipped to do it now as it was in 1999.

"When I took over, the government had been in power for less than three years. Macro-economic stability was taking root. They had an enormous majority and the goodwill of the country, and didn't have an opposition worthy of the name."

Sir Digby, 50, blamed timidity in Labour's first term and the government's close links with the trade unions for the slow progress. "The trade unions put their members first and not the country. Labour is always in thrall to the unions. People keep banging on about cash for peerages, but the unions have bunged money to the government for years."

Trade unions, he said, had become irrelevant to the CBI. "We have no formal meetings with the TUC. I have meetings with NGOs, but I don't meet the unions. They are an irrelevance. They are backward looking and not on today's agenda.

"Today's agenda in the private sector is international competitiveness. They [the unions] should be talking about skilling. People are going to have seven or eight jobs. The unions should stop fighting for the job and help equip people for a job."

Sir Digby expressed unhappiness with the deal that allows some public sector workers to retire at 60. "I have not witnessed a greater, more depressing, irritating example of craven surrender from the government to their union paymasters than when ministers said: 'If you are in the public sector you can retire at 60 but if you are in the private sector you retire at 68 so that your taxes can go to pay for those retiring early in the public sector.' Disgraceful."

The Sun confirms it opposes the euro

If you want lessons on how to get your point across, read The Sun:

What would Britain be like today if we’d joined the euro?

One thing’s for sure — we would not be enjoying our position as one of the world’s strongest economies.

We would not have low unemployment and a record 14 years of growth.

We wouldn’t have been able to set interest rates to suit British business in good times and bad.

We wouldn’t have avoided the housing crisis now confronting countries like Spain.

And we couldn’t have stopped faceless bankers and bureaucrats meddling in our fight against inflation.

Partly thanks to the robust views of Sun readers, we sensibly kept the Pound and prospered.

By contrast, the 12 EU nations who plunged into this reckless gamble are risking meltdown.

A new survey shows we lost absolutely nothing in trading terms.

Another reveals only a third of British businesses still want to scrap the Pound - the lowest ever.

We can thank our lucky stars this will now never happen.

And hope a lesson has been learned by those who still want us to sign the disastrous EU Constitution.

With opposition like this, no UK government is going to propose joining the eurozone any time soon.

Inadequate army equipment

Richard North continues to expose inadequacies in army equipment, most recently here and here. He argues that soldiers have died because of vehicles which were not fit for purpose, but the government lies that they are.

There is a European dimension to this gathering political storm. But from UKIP not a word.

Simple answers for complex problems

Who should run health and education, asks Madsen Pirie in The Business. His answer is to leave it to the professionals.

The education system could be entrusted to an appointed board of head teachers. They would determine priorities and how state schools could be improved. Their budget could be set at current levels, uprated annually for inflation, and their mandate might be a general one to ensure that schoolchildren can read and write, and are educated to a high standard. The board itself would allocate budgets to individual schools. This move would de-politicise education and be immensely popular.

Turning to the health service, he writes

A move to hand control of the NHS to a separate non-political body consisting of medical practitioners would enjoy similarly massive backing. New polls from YouGov show big majorities in favour of less control by politicians and managers, and more by professionals. A national board of appointed medical practitioners would allocate the NHS budget (again, uprated annually), determine the priorities, and allocate the resources to the various NHS institutions. There would still be priority decisions to be made, but they would not be made on political grounds, but by people who knew what they were doing.

It may be popular, but does it make sense?

The educational establishment has form. Notoriously the teaching profession adopted methods of teaching reading which simply didn't work. Standards of reading and arithmetic fell, leading directly to government intervention. Schools have also discouraged competitive team sports (I hated them but I was in a minority).

These head teachers would doubtless be judged by results, as is The Bank of England. But exam syllabuses are even more easily fudged than inflation rates.

Health provision is also too important to be left to the doctors - there are important social choices to be made, and that means democratically elected politicians.

Some six million people are on drugs for high blood pressure, reports The Telegraph - a tenth of the population. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) and the British Hypertension Society "recommend treating blood pressure at levels that embrace an estimated 40 per cent of the adult population", writes Sheena Meredith. And some argue for higher levels.

"Some experts", she says, "are beginning to worry that turning a risk factor - such as high blood pressure - into a disease also has unanticipated effects".

Should our healthcare aims, as a society, just seek to prolong life, or should we also aim to enhance its quality - or at least not reduce it to the extent of turning a majority of the population into patients?

Would our overall wellbeing be improved more by, say, reducing (or abolishing) the waiting list for hip replacements, or speeding up cataract operations, or improving treatment for children with depression?

These are deep questions deserving public debate, and certainly not the province of doctors to decide.

The idea that health and education provision could be run like The Bank of England is seductive.

But it's wrong.

The Scottish monster rises again

Scotland is exercising the chattering classes. Only a few days ago we saw Alice Thomson getting it wrong in The Telegraph. Now James Blttz tackles the issue in the Financial Times:

The Scottish parliament legislates on all matters affecting health, education and transport north of the border. But 59 MPs elected in Scotland continue to sit at Westminster, voting on these matters when they apply to England but not to their own constituents. Why, some Tories argue, should this continue?

The Tories scent embarrassment without being sure how to exploit it.

Back in February, Lord Baker of Dorking, a former Tory cabinet minister, proposed that only English MPs should vote on legislation relating to England. William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, has since said "anyone who thinks we can carry on legislating for England in the same way as we did before devolution is clearly living in the past". Kenneth Clarke, former chancellor, now heads the Conservatives' Democracy Task Force with resolution of the West Lothian question high on its agenda.

Blitz turns to Vernon Bogdanor.

"Lord Baker's call . . . would break the United Kingdom and is profoundly dangerous," says Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional historian.

Professor Bogdanor says the Baker proposals would bifurcate the Commons. The lower house would have a UK majority - presumably Labour - for foreign affairs, defence and economic policy. But it would have an English majority - presumably Tory - on health and education where Scottish MPs would be excluded from voting. "This would make effective collective government impossible."

All we are seeing here is a failure of Professor Bogdanor's imagination.

Blitz tells us that the West Lothian question is not as important to the public as some Tories believe.

The Scots and Welsh voted for devolution in 1997. But opinion polls show few English people are exercised by that decision and do not want their own parliament.

But the West Lothian question is not about a separate English parliament. And the Scottish issue is interesting not mainly because of how people feel now, but because it has the potential to become a far bigger issue pretty fast once Mr Brown becomes Prime Minister.

"The UK has always functioned effectively because there has been restraint on these issues by the English", Professor Bogdanor grandly tells us. Yes, but the political map is changing. Historians can teach us about the past - but we can't stay there.

Blitz concludes that

Mr Brown has less to fear from the Scottish question than many think. If elected Labour leader, his legitimacy will derive from the fact that a majority of English Labour MPs and activists backed him. At the next election, his appeal will probably depend far more on policy and credibility than personal background.

Maybe - but what about after the election, when policy decisions are being made, and the Commons votes on them? What then? Blitz is silent on this. But that is when the big questions will start.

Instead, says Blitz

the big question is for the Tories. How do they intend to return to power? They can choose a route that is simple but dangerous - reconquering England by dissolving the ties that bind the UK. Or they can leave the constitution intact but work to get Tory MPs elected in Scotland again.

This is a false alternative. Clearly the Tories will take all the MPs they can get from anywhere in the UK.

Bogdanor and Blitz's position is that the English must accept Scottish votes on English issues for the sake of the UK - fair government would break the union.

If that was right, a bigger question would arise - would the union be worth preserving?

An opinion poll today in The Telegraph doesn't ask that question, but it does have 55% agreeing that "Scottish Westminster MPs should not be allowed to vote on matters that affect only England and Wales". What the excited reports in the Telegraph and the Scotsman don't emphasise is that the 55% is down from the figure of 67% in February 2004.

28% of English voters think an MP for a Scottish constituency should not be able to become UK prime minister.

Alice Thomson chose to focus on the Barnett formula, claiming Scots would not mind if it was abolished since they would appreciate standing on their own feet. But 74% of Scots want the Barnett formula to continue - it means government spending is now £1,400 per person per year higher in Scotland than in England. (However, 70% also agreed that "It is wrong to continue the system as the rest of the UK subsidises Scotland!)

When Mr Brown began to increase public spending in 1997, reports The Scotsman, the difference was only £875.

In 2003-4 the government spent £45.3bn in Scotland but only £34bn was generated in tax, a gap of £11.3bn.

And the paper reports that Lord Barnett is now to call for the formula to be scrapped.

So where are the two main parties on this? Labour wants the whole issue to vanish. It embarrasses Gordon Brown, and Labour may well need the votes of Scottish MPs to vote through unpopular policies for England - again. Gordon is suddenly supporting the England world cup football team; expect him at The Oval if the English do well in a home Test Series.

And the Conservatives? As usual they have no policy at all.

As we have pointed out, UKIP does have a policy on this. It is radical and fair. It will make government cheaper for the citizens. All it needs is vision and imagination. Just like leaving the EU, in fact.

To judge from the recent media pieces we've reviewed, you shouldn't hold your breath.

What's going on at Kesteven?

Admit it, you're not even sure where Kesteven is, are you. Well perhaps the title of yesterday's press release from UKIP will help:

The heavy hand of central government behind strike at Kesteven & Grantham Girls' School, claims local MEP

Talking about the strike action at the Kesteven & Grantham Girls School, Derek Clark MEP (UKIP East Midlands) said, "For teachers in a state secondary school to go on strike in the exam period, even for a few days, would seem to be highly irresponsible conduct on their part", he continued, "but this is caused not by local issues but by heavy handed central government regulation".

As the head teacher, Lynda Poole has made clear, all she is trying to do is to comply with the extra regulations poured out by the Department for Education and Skills. By attempting to comply with these guidelines, such as the Government National Agenda she has been forced to implement changes to her school's staffing structure which have undermined many of the teachers. The changes include getting rid of heads of individual subjects and replacing them with faculty heads. This has resulted in teachers at lower management levels facing pay cuts, which has left them with little option other than to take industrial action.

The Teachers Union, (NASUWT) says that the issue has been discussed with the school management, whom Mr Clark describes as 'intransigent'. Meanwhile children suffer because of a dispute caused by central Government generated red tape.

"As a former teacher myself I know that the staff will not have undertaken strike action lightly. I also know how restrained teachers have been over the years and how they have been taken for granted", said Clark.

"Whitehall should stop issuing reams of instructions and allow teaching professionals to get on with the job of educating our young people. Instead it just creates division and discord."

But if this "is caused not by local issues but by heavy handed central government regulation", why isn't it happening everywhere?

Perhaps because of the school management, "whom Mr Clark describes as 'intransigent'"? So it's a local issue after all, then?

Er ... could former teacher Mr Clark explain what he is saying and why it was UKIP's announcement of the day?

One side of the paper, please, no more than 50 words.

Regulation - the world frowns on the EU

Gunter Verheugen boasted recently that the world follows the EU in its regulations. So it's intriguing to learn that China may be going its own way in the regulatory field.

The Wall Street Journal reports that China’s regulatory projects in the automotive and other sectors are concerning companies and officials in both the EU and US, which have continuing difficulties in harmonising their own technical regulations.

“We must try to avoid China creating its own technical regulations, and the Americans share our anxieties on this score”, according to Reinhard Schulte-Braucks, the director of the EC’s automotive regulation unit. One matter of concern to European tyre producers, for example, is a Chinese plan to require an extra item of information to be moulded on tyre walls, which would necessitate manufacturers to produce new moulds, at a cost of ‘millions of euros’ for each tyre maker.

Another source of worry is the possibility that China will institute its own crash repair tests.

This is particularly interesting since it was the automobile industry that Commissioner Verheugen took as his example of the EU's leadership in setting regulatory standards for the world.

It would be amusing to contemplate the superior imperialism behind the furrowed brows if it didn't affect us. But you have to ask, why shouldn't China write its own regulations?

It does, however, rather undermine the EU's complacent assumption that its regulations will be the de facto standard.

Meanwhile, PCPRO suggests that Apple may stop European sales of several products at the end of this week in order to comply with the EU's Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS) directive.

Could this be a sign of things to come?

P.S. Thirteen of the EU's main trading partners, including several developing countries, have demanded that Brussels should modify its proposed chemicals legislation (the draft REACH Directive) to reduce its "potentially disruptive impact on international trade" and "grave consequences on developing economies".

They said that some aspects of the draft legislation, such as high registration fees, technical requirements, and the inclusion of "everyday bulk commodities," could be particularly burdensome for small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries. The countries also took aim against the 'substitution principle' in the draft legislation, which would require companies that wanted to use a chemical deemed hazardous to use another, safer chemical, if available.

Environmental group WWF said that the countries had failed to take account of revisions made to the bill after its first reading in the European Parliament -- changes, it argues, that address many of their concerns. EU officials insist that the draft regulations would not contravene WTO rules.

The draft legislation will go through its second parliamentary reading in October.

Alice Thomson wrong on Scotland

Alice Thomson makes a strange proposal for "defusing" the Scottish question in The Telegraph today. As she points out, "the Scottish Parliament has exclusive power to legislate on domestic issues, including health, the environment, home affairs, the police, sports, local government, the arts, education and transport". Already in the cabinet with Gordon Brown we have John Reid (Home Office), Alistair Darling (DTI), Des Browne (Defence) and Douglas Alexander (Defra). A Prime Minister Brown would be making policies for the English which don't affect his own constituents.

Alice Thomson's solution is to "scrap the Barnett formula that subsidises public spending north of the border by £1,400 per Scot every year". This, she says, could be sold to Scots on the basis that they were no longer being treated as second-class citizens.

Not surprisingly, she doesn't discuss whether it could be sold to the uppity English - which is rather the point. It might "defuse" the issue for a while, but Scots ministers would still be making policies affecting only the English, so the issue would still be simmering, with the Opposition doubtless exploiting it. And of course abolishing the Scottish subsidy might only draw attention to Scottish privilege.

Thomson doesn't discuss one thing Brown could do. He could ensure Scottish ministers only serve in departments which affect their own constituencies. This rules out Defra and the Home Office, and it would have ruled out Transport, where Alistair Darling was in charge until recently.

That would help. But it wouldn't solve Brown's Prime Ministerial problem, and it wouldn't address the West Lothian question in the Commons. Thomson does not mention that Scottish Nationalist MPs and the Scottish Tory MP have decided they won't vote on issues which are purely English. What about Scottish Labour MPs then?

The answer is not to ban Scottish MPs from voting on English issues. If Britain had a PM who had a majority in the Commons on defence, foreign affairs and the economy, but - without the votes of the Scottish MPs - would lose every vote on domestic policy, government would break down. Our whole system relies on the PM having a working majority in the Commons.

In fact it's wholly unclear that government would "break down" at all. Devolved functions could be run from separate civil service departments, and for part of the week Westminster could function as the English parliament.

Meanwhile, Scottish MPs could decamp to Edinburgh to run Scotland's devolved government. The UK and English parliaments would happen to operate from the same building on different days of the week. And if the English First Minister wasn't the same person as the UK's Prime Minister ... so what?

Actually this sensible scenario is UKIP policy already (though it's hard to find on the UKIP web site unless you know roughly where it is).

Good to see UKIP with a radical policy for smaller government.

Can government ever be efficient?

The question sounds stupidly apocalyptic, but bear with us.

Today we learn that in the UK the cost of a computer project for magistrates' courts has nearly tripled to almost £500m. The project was commissioned in 1998 for £194m and is now supposed to be complete by 2008. All it's doing is providing computer services to 42 magistrates' court committees.

Yes of course the government has got the private sector doing it, and yes of course it's one of the usual suspects, this time ICL. So privatisation is not the simple solution.

And it's not just the UK government. In Germany a recently introduced unemployment benefit has cost last year a mere €10bn more than expected.

On a smaller scale,"up to half" of the €1.9bn of aid given to the two Balkan states by the EU ahead of their expected entry next year has been poorly spent. For example:

A 3.1m bridge across the river Prut between Romania and Moldova was finished in 2004 but could not be used until recently because there was no road to it on the Moldovan side. Work on an international conference hall in Constanta, Romania, stopped in 2004 when the county council withdrew its construction permit for unspecified technical reasons. The €6.4m centre will probably never be built.

Another failure was the Bulgarian post-privatisation investment fund, set up by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1998. The EBRD put in €30m while the EU offered to pay an asset manager and consultants. Before it was wound up in 2002, Czech-based ECM and its advisers had been paid €4.5m while investing just €11.6m in six companies. Some €4m went to one company that went bankrupt.

So three examples become public on one day. Yet governments seem never to question their own abilities. They promise to do better next time, and then they - er - don't. But it's not even their own money they're wasting. It's ours.

And they're spending more and more of it.

In the UK, the Centre for Policy Studies calculates that

the tax burden per household was £13,896 when Labour came to power in 1997 and has now risen to £20,078 in real terms - an increase of more than £6,000. The figure was reached by calculating the total tax burden and dividing it by the total number of households.

By the time of the next election - due in 2009 - the tax burden per household is expected to have reached £22,048, which is £8,153 more than the figure Labour inherited nine years ago.

UKIP is unique among British mainstream political parties in believing that governments should spend less, not more. Three stories in just one day show how inefficient governments often are.

Let people keep more of their own money. In Bromley and elsewhere, it's UKIP for smaller government.

UKIP, pathfinder for Europe?

I've never understood why the single issue wing of UKIP thinks it's a good election strategy to invite people to vote for us solely on the basis of an issue (the EU) which hardly anyone out there considers to be one of the most important. (Mori polls typically put the number citing the EU as one of the most important issues at around 3-4%.)

Withdrawal won't be instantaneous, and the single issue wing fail to say what else UKIP would do during the 2 or 3 years while the UK's withdrawal was being arranged. Nothing?

They also don't seem to think it's important to set out a vision of what UKIP would be aiming for in its post withdrawal policies.

Ruth Lea reminds us today that we are in a changing world.

In 1980 the EU 25 accounted for 26pc of world output. The US's share was 20pc, Japan's was 7pc while India and China contributed 3pc each. By 2015 the Treasury expects that the EU 25's share will have fallen to 17pc, less than the US (19pc) and China (also 19pc).

India's share will have increased to 8pc, while Japan's will have slipped to 5pc.

As she says, it is no surprise that mature economies lose share as rapidly developing and populous economies grow. "The issue is whether EU member states will be able to adapt to this rapidly changing world economy in order to thrive."

Then she starts to get really interesting.

There is little doubt that many of the EU's economies (including the UK's) will have to sharpen their competitiveness as the 21st century progresses if they are not to risk economic sclerosis and, in the case of the eurozone's "big three" economies, persistently malfunctioning labour markets.

They will have to be flexible. But EU-imposed regulation is a hindrance to flexibility - and is likely to get worse. Of course, some member states may prefer to live with economic sclerosis rather than reform.

That is their choice. Others, however, will want to reform and will find the regulatory burdens and costs imposed on them by their EU membership a real hindrance.

She highlights the importance of deregulation for countries favouring a more flexible economy.

As the EU is unlikely to reform "in the foreseeable future", another model for Europe must be developed to free forward-looking, reform-minded European countries.

The obvious model is an à la carte Europe in which all countries decide what is right for them. Norway and Switzerland have close links with the EU but are outside the EU's political union. The UK is an obvious candidate for a similar relationship.

Uncontroversially, she says the UK, with its unique global connections, should opt for free trade and negotiated bilateral agreements with the EU but withdraw from the EU's political institutions and free itself from its regulatory shackles (which is why this blog thinks UKIP's new deregulation initiative is important).

In the fast-moving 21st century, she says, this is the obvious - and only - place to be. Then, she adds

If the UK took this route then it is highly possible that other EU member states would follow. The UK should take the lead in developing a model for Europe appropriate for the 21st century.

It's such a problem when first class economic and political intellects like Ruth Lea take up the case for withdrawal.

They offer new perspectives, new challenges, new opportunities.

UKIP, pathfinder for Europe?

It's that man Cash again

Does this blog's fascination with manoevrings by Bill Cash and John Redwood qualify it for the higher realms of political nerdism? A worrying thought.

Last month we commented on Bill Cash's amendment to a government bill. In outline, his amendment proposed that the Commons in considering deregulation should be able to override the European Communities Act 1972.

He claimed that "the Conservative party as a whole" supported him. We asked what this phrase meant and whether they were aware of the implications of his amendment.

A piece in The Business today throws more light on this. Headed grandiloquently "Cameron faces new mutiny over Europe opt-out", it says that Mr Cameron is facing calls from eurosceptics to recognise the vote as party policy. The Business reports that

The issue appears to have taken the Tory leadership by surprise, with suggestions that Cameron may have authorised Tory whips to perform a fundamental u-turn on EU policy without fully realising the implications of the policy.

Now, we already know that "foreign policy" is not Mr Cameron's strong point. (What is it, please?)

John Redwood spoke to The Business

“The significance of this amendment is that, for the first time the opposition party stated we should be able to amend and choose which parts of European law to obey. In the past, we have done this by prior agreement and opt out,” he said. It also means a Tory government is not committed to Blair’s 1997 decision to sign the EU social chapter, Redwood added.

Mr Redwood certainly understood exactly what Mr Cash's amendment meant. As The Business comments, with some understatement, "Unilateral withdrawal from an EU Treaty would trigger a crisis in Brussels; no member state has yet attempted such a move". Surely even the Vulcan's facial features twitched when

He added he was confident this is now Conservative policy and said he does not see any conflict. “I have not discussed this with Cameron’s people because I had no need to. My whip was telling me to vote for it.”

This is witty, but perhaps not advisable, since it might suggest that some Tory MPs who voted for the amendment were following whips' orders blindly. (Surely not?)

So is this Conservative policy?

The Conservative party was unable to say whether or not the 15 May amendment is party policy. It instead issued a statement from William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, which hinted that no decision has been taken.

“We set out our objectives in my speech to Open Europe last week,” Hague said. “The mechanisms for achieving these goals are for discussion over the period of our policy review” – referring to the process due to end in Christmas 2007.

Cash said it was unthinkable the party would seek to disown what it instructed its MPs to vote for a month ago. “We don’t vote for something and say it does not change policy. That would take cynicism in politics to new levels,” he said.

Game on. But where was Mr Hague when all this happened?

By a breathtaking coincidence, The Business runs a long leader about proposals to revive the EU constitution by the end of 2008, highlighting the technical position about legal precedence.

As we argued during the Constitution’s first push, the most important reason to oppose it is because it attempts for the first time to give EU law primacy over British law. This is not the case at present, contrary to what many believe. The British Parliament has delegated certain powers to the EU and its courts – such as the right to make policy and pass laws on agriculture or the single market – by joining the EU and passing the European Communities Act 1972, since amended by all the new EU treaties. But the terms and duration of this delegation are defined by the British Parliament and courts, not the EU or European Court of Justice. EU law is not superior to national constitutional law; day-to-day EU law usually trumps domestic law – but only because Parliament allows it to do so. The British Parliament could choose to repeal the European Community Act in whole (and leave the EU altogether); or in part (and cease to delegate certain powers to the EU) – as long as it did so explicitly. The British courts would immediately give effect to it.

This fundamental plank of British constitutional law was reasserted as recently as 2002 by Lord Justice Laws in the Metric Martyrs Case. Parliament cannot give away its ultimate authority to any foreign jurisdiction even if it wished to and even if it passed an explicit act to such an effect; if it attempted to do that (thereby binding future Parliaments), the courts would reject it as anti-constitutional. Needless, to say, the ECJ does not agree with this analysis; but it is powerless to do anything about it, something which it hopes the Constitution will change. Article I-6 states that “the Constitution, and law adopted by the Union’s institutions in exercising competences conferred on it, shall have primacy over the law of the Member States”. An explanatory note states: “The conference notes that the provisions of Article I-6 reflect existing Court of Justice case law”; in other words, the ECJ’s view that EU laws trumps even British constitutional law would prevail.

This is an extraordinary development. The European Court thinks that EU law is superior to national constitutional law, a position explicitly rejected by the High Court in London; the reference to “existing Court of Justice case law” therefore means that the British Government is asserting its support for the ECJ’s position and repudiating that of the British courts, which would trigger an almighty crisis in Britain and pit courts against government.

"Given what is at stake", the paper concludes, "the British Government’s despicable suggestion last week that there will be no need for a referendum after all, given the supposedly minor nature of the changes to be included in the new treaty, is a lie". The leader than focuses on what the "robust ... response" needed from the Conservatives.

In fact Mr Cameron has decided what response is best for his party. None.

Sadly, The Business sees no occasion to mention UKIP. This is an issue where UKIP must speak loudly and clearly.

Hurrah, more eurozone problems

Not that this blog has anything against the Spanish, the Portuguese or Greeks apart from their subsidies, their subsidies and their subsidies. (Oh, and their tariff protection.) But it's good to learn, from The Business, that "Spain and Greece are poised to join Portugal and Italy in the “euro trap”, a vicious circle of ever-weaker growth and greater budget deficits".

As the Deutsche Bank report points out, southern european countries have no history of reducing their costs of production. Historically they have preferred devaluations of their currencies, but of course in the €urozone they no longer have that choice. Rising budget deficits should lead to cuts in government spending, but (this blog's view, not Deutsche Bank's) they will probably choose to prolong the problem by cooking the books, an aspect of economic management where some of them at least do have a proven track record - though of course the new governments in Greece and Italy solemnly swear they won't follow their predecessors' bad ways.

Deutsche warns that the possbility of a euro zone break-up could trigger a crisis in European financial markets. We've heard this before and economists are surprised it isn't happening already.

We'll probably see the southern european bloc lobbying for more subsidies, and more protective tariffs. Bras ... shoes ... what next?

The problems of the euro zone make fascinating watching for economists. But through the subsidies and tariffs UK citizens are already paying for being too close.

And we're not even in the euro zone.

Why scots nats & welsh nats aren't prospering

Fraser Nelson in The Business suggests scots nats and welsh nats aren't prospering because their nations aren't.

Scotland's budget, he points out, amounts to 132% of the tax it raises.

The English subsidy amounted to £2,220 per Scottish head in 2003-04, the last year for which figures were available, and North Sea tax revenues do not make up so much as half the difference. While figures are not broken out for Wales, the same dynamics apply....

A decade ago, Scotland generated 8.7% of wealth in Britain but today this figure is 7.9% and falling. In Wales, the rate of decline is faster – from 4.2% to 3.8%. London and its environs pull further and further away from the rest of Britain, whose regions are increasingly dependent on the financial union.

"Financial union" is a good phrase. Nelson also reminds us how dependent these areas are on taxpayers. "In Cynon Valley in Wales, 71% of the electorate is working for the government or dependent on its welfare. Similarly depressing figures exist for East Glasgow (67%)". For "government" read taxpayers.

UKIP has already provided its money-saving answer to the West Lothian question.

The party has no need for a policy to keep the United Kingdom united - there's no call to make life easier for Gordon Brown.

How Blair is killing our soldiers

This is the title of a long post this morning on Richard North's blog which is well worth reading right through.

We aren't going to rehash the argument here because we have nothing to add.

One does just wonder, however, why UKIP has had so little to say about defence.

Police profligacy not Kate's fault

Kate Moss won't be charged with drug abuse because prosecutors can't be sure which drug she was using when she was filmed on a mobile phone. Fiona Phillips comments in the Mirror -

The case cost up to £250,000, which no doubt we'll pick up in taxes. Thanks a bunch, Kate. So glad to hear you're earning thousands a day while we have to stump up for your misdemeanours.

Probably it won't mean higher taxes, but other alleged crimes will have gone uninvestigated. How could an experienced drug squad spend anything like that amount when the problem of evidence should have been obvious to them at the outset?

It's the police who wasted our money, not Kate Moss. A bit more democratic say over their priorities wouldn't come amiss.

And the Met is the largest force in the country. The whole basis of the government's proposals to merge forces is that larger forces are more professional.

This carefree profligacy makes that assumption look rocky.

Is Hazel Blears asking for money?

Many politicians are merely vastly over-promoted, like Jack Straw. But there are a select few who make the flesh creep.

One such is Hazel Blears, that robot of correct New Labour speak - today there is an attempt to convince us that she is human; this blog leaves readers to form their own views.

But Ms Blears has her uses. When she speaks, you can be sure it's bang on message. And here she is talking about how to defeat the BNP. "We need to rebuild our local democratic institutions", the BBC reports her saying, "so there can be no democratic vacuums". And, she adds, "We need well-funded political parties".

Is this a signal that the state should fund established political parties as a bulwark against the BNP? That our taxes should be used to tell us what to think?

There is no respectable argument for state funding of political parties. The red herring of the BNP doesn't change that.

UKIP starts focus on deregulation

Is business over-regulated? UKIP believes it is. The chairman of the Better Regulation Task Force estimated that regulation costs businesses up to £100bn every year. That's about 10% of GDP.

There are 63 national regulators and 468 local authority regulatory bodies with a combined budget of around £4bn. Nearly 12,000 officials work nationally on inspection and enforcement. A further 5,000 officials work in the localities.

And over recent years, 50% of new rules and laws affecting businesses and charities had their origin with the EU. According to the latest Burdens Barometer, three quarters of costs imposed on business by new regulations since 1998 are European in origin. Commissioner Mandelson has said Europe's productivity would grow by 2 to 6 per cent if European regulation merely matched best practice.

UKIP is the only party advocating withdrawal from the EU, and so we are the only party which can promise to repeal every unnecessary or damaging regulation. That would bring a huge boost to business.

UKIP wants to draw on the experiences of its members to reach out to British businesses - especially to SMEs - through a Business Forum.

We want to improve the competitiveness of British business, and free it to generate more jobs.

Except for regulators!

"About Britain, not just Europe"

This is one of the strap lines on Nigel Farage's Bromley by-election site.

Let's hope this is more than a slogan for the life of the by-election, and that UKIP puts in some solid infrastructure in its UK organisation to make it work. At the very least this means a UK-based spokesperson for each policy theme, encouraged to issue releases and develop policy themes.

Experience shows channelling everything through MEPs once the by-election is over will lead to stagnation again.

The breadline is always with us

How the Victorians would laugh if they saw us wringing our hands about people on the breadline. How mystified African fisherman and farmers desprived of livelihoods by EU policies would be.

The BBC devotes a whole "in-depth" feature to "breadline Britain". The government claims it wants to eliminate poverty, but then poverty turns out to mean raising the living standards of the poorest x%. So the breadline keeps rising.

Today we are told that people who work and claim benefits do so often because they are in dire financial trouble.

Many claimants took illegal cash-in-hand jobs to pay for food and heating or to make debt repayments.

The study's author says they are "hard-working, ordinary people trying to survive day by day".

So that's all right then. Never mind that equally hard-working ordinary people who actually pay their taxes are being defrauded.

So who wrote this study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation? It turns out he is policy development manager for an organisation called the Community Links project, which offers those in deprived areas education and childcare provision as well as help and advice.

No surprise over the tone of the report, then.

Meanwhile, the Taxpayers Alliance picks up a report in the Scotsman showing how the state is pushing more pensioners down towards the breadline.

According to the paper: "soaring council tax bills have helped drag up to 1.3 million pensioners into the benefits system since Labour came to power, official figures have revealed. Pensioners' groups and opposition parties seized on the numbers as further proof that council tax is an increasingly unfair burden on those who are living on fixed incomes in retirement. Data from the Department of Work and Pensions show that, in 1997, the number of pensioners entitled to council tax benefit was between 3.2 million and 3.8 million. By 2004, it was between four million and 4.5 million." A spokesman for Help the Aged in Scotland said, "The overriding factor here is that council tax has been going up much faster than pensioners' incomes have been going up, leaving more and more pensioners in council tax poverty, paying out more than 10 per cent of their incomes on council tax."

Thus does the expensive state oppress the law-abiding poor. As the TPA comments

Too many politicians in Britain still seem to think that they can't make the case for lower taxes because they'll seem out of touch. But as we have repeatedly pointed out, tax rises are really starting to affect people's lives and tax cuts can be sold as part of a package which stresses the need to help ordinary people and particularly the most vulnerable people in society.

Let's have some sympathy for the law-abiding for a change.

Stuck in the past, wasting our money in the present

The European Parliament abandoned an attempt to scrap its costly commute to Strasbourg after EU leaders made clear they would not consider basing the assembly only in Brussels, reports Reuters.

Under a 1992 treaty arrangement, the assembly must hold at least 12 four-day plenary sessions a year in Strasbourg. The assembly also holds shorter plenary sessions and most committee meetings in Brussels, spending more than €200m of taxpayers' money on commuting each year. Bizarrely, this commuting is actually supported by one French Green MEP.

Parliament President Josep Borrell told reporters he had asked EU presidency in writing whether EU leaders would be prepared to discuss giving parliament a single seat. Over 500,000 people (including this blogger) have signed a petition calling for the waste to stop. The Austrian presidency's reply was that there was no appetite for changing the treaty, since Strasbourg was a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation.

Reuters reminds us that a parliamentary committee is investigating allegations that Strasbourg city council overcharged the EU assembly for years for rent on its buildings.

Quizzed by reporters about the failure to even have the matter discussed by EU leaders, Borrell actually played down the importance of the question - "If you look at the issues faced by the European Union and the world we live in ... I think Strasbourg would be relatively low down on the list".

Are we seriously asked to believe that we are being asked to pay €200m every year for some symbolism of history between just two of the EU countries? Or is it rather that EU cowards (otherwise known as "leaders") would rather continue to throw away our money - yours and mine - than disturb the French peacock's feathers?

Whichever it was, the figleaf of history between two countries was the best justification they could come up with - and one they feel is adequate for their subjects.

Obviously either is unacceptable.

UKIP needs to get its campaigning act together

The Eastern Daily Press reports Norfolk business leaders are unhappy after the plug was pulled on the county's business support agency - to make way for a new service based in Hertfordshire and Essex.

The East of England Development Agency (Eeda) yesterday confirmed it was scrapping the Business Link for Norfolk - which offers advice and support to thousands of small and medium-sized businesses across the county - and replacing it with a new regional service.

The new service, which will have a budget of £45m over three years, is set to be operated by Business Links in Essex and Hertfordshire.

They were selected by Eeda as preferred bidder ahead of a rival consortium led by Business Links in Norfolk and Suffolk.

But politicians and business leaders attacked the decision to create a “distant” regional service - claiming it was yet another example of power being shifted away from Norfolk. It follows the controversial plans to merge the region's police forces and the decision to scrap the Learning Skills Council for Norfolk in favour of a regional body.

Eeda will now be working with the new consortium, called EEIDB, to finalise details of the contract which will begin next April. The chief executive designate of EEIDB, said: “We relish the opportunity of working with a wide range of partners to turn our vision of supporting the economic growth of the region into a reality.”

This is not good for Norfolk but there is a point to be made about UKIP. We're all opposed to regionalisation, but UKIP's campaigning on it has been spasmodic and it's not recorded or co-ordinated anywhere.

The leadership should have someone concentrating on this and energising the party. This doesn't mean banners every day, it doesn't mean telling members what to do, it means having one person in each region who follows the issue, knows it, and encourages branches and MEPs to say things which might get in the press, write letters to the press, and write letters to people who may be able to influence the outcomes.

This doesn't feel hard. The party needs one person in each region, and one "central" person to pull things together. And they could start to make things happen.

It just needs a little strategic imagination.

Stephens' blind spot about Europe

Yes, it's this blog's friend Philip Stephens again in the Financial Times. He interprets Cameron's policy on the EU (if "policy" is the right word) in terms of positioning the Conservatives' political image.

An obsessive hostility to the European Union, Mr Cameron seemed to have understood, positioned the Tories as allies of Ukip's stripy-blazered xenophobes.

Indeed, as Stephens says, "Mr Cameron has said nothing much about Europe since becoming leader six months ago".

Stephens is content with this (though he does note that foreign policy is not Mr Cameron's strong suit). "Instead of making ... promises to be nasty to foreigners", he writes, in a travesty of UKIP's position, "... his pitch has been to the socially concerned middle classes, to women, to the green vote, and, most recently, to public servants". One can criticise the political strategy, but at least the Conservatives have one and are executing it.

Stephens rehashes the arguments about withdrawing from the EPP - he thinks it would be a mistake, mainly because

The prospect of a European superstate exists now only in the recurring nightmares of the europhobes. The task for serious European politicians during the next five or 10 years will be to forge a new concordat between nation states, the Union and globalisation.

This is to swallow the Tory sticking-plaster "policy" wholesale. Where is the credible body of politicians on mainland Europe calling for the EU to embrace globalisation, curb the power of the European Court of Justice, and free business from expensive measures such as the Working Time Directive, or the Directive on Restriction on Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment?

This is not even the old honest British delusion that "they" will come round to our way of thinking. It is wilful refusal to acknowledge facts because they are inconvenient for his party. Stephens headlines his piece "Cameron's blind spot about Europe". Rather, Cameron is turning a blind eye to the EU.

Another inadequate child sex sentence

We attacked the inadequate sentence on the Hatfield baby rapist. Today we have another inadequate sentence on a child sex offender.

Craig Sweeney abducted a three-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her, and then drove her on a 100 mph car chase. He had been released early from a three-year sentence for indecently assaulting a girl aged six.

Guidelines on guilty pleas mean he could be out in five years. The BBC reports

Chris Woolley, the chief crown prosecutor for south Wales, said Judge John Griffith Williams QC was acting in accordance with guidelines in sentencing Sweeney at Cardiff Crown Court.

"The judge has to determine first of all the notional sentence, which in this case was 18 years," he said.

"Then that is cut by half to reach the actual sentence. Then the judge is obliged to cut a third off in view of the guilty plea."

Then, as the Home Secretary has said, the system is wrong. This man should clearly be locked up for life without parole.

"The unspoken case for lower taxes"

This is the title of today's leader in The Business. The paper says (rightly) that no UK political party is arguing the case for a policy of lower taxes, and then proceeds to rehearse it at some length. It concludes that

Until Mr Cameron grasps the importance of rolling back the state and finds a new language to sell such a vision to the country – by showing how lower taxes would help ordinary people, including the most vulnerable, would not damage schools and hospitals but would allow Britain to compete with the emerging economic giants of the Far East – it will matter little whether Mr Cameron or Mr Brown is in 10 Downing Street after the next election. No wonder there is once again the palpable smell of decline in the British atmosphere.

UKIP can grasp the nettle of becoming a party with a broad range of UK policies (as the chairman promised when he was appointed) or continue just concentrating occasional ragged fire on the EU, and remain marginal to the UK political process.

If UKIP wants to grasp the nettle there will be plenty of think tanks and policymakers ready with advice. But the party has to find the confidence to reach out and embrace the process.

Whitehall dismayed for the wrong reasons

Sue Cameron has been talking to the high & mighty of Whitehall for the Financial Times ahead of a pamphlet arguing that civil servants should be more accountable for policy delivery.

But where does "policy" end and "delivery" begin? One insider told Sue Cameron

Ministers think their job is to define the promised land - and ours is to deliver it, no matter how unrealistic that may be.

Mr Blair is said to be one of the chief cuplrits. For instance, he told Lord Falconer that he should

implement legal aid reforms which ensure an effective, fair system that gives the taxpayer value for money and provides access to justice for all.

This, sneers Sue Cameron (or her source), is "policymaking by magic wand". This is certainly wrong. If it's policymaking, it's policymaking by manifesto or policymaking by soundbite. But clearly this is not policy at all. Blair is telling the department to design and implement a policy to achieve these aims. Do Sue Cameron's snide sources expect the PM to write policies for all his departments?

The Head of the Civil Service is apparently telling Mr Blair that "Whitehall officials are not prepared to shoulder all the blame for failures of government policy".

It is true that Blair and most of his ministers had never run any organisation before becoming ministers and thought it would be easy. Prescott seemed to think he had only to enuciate targets and the machine would ensure they were hit a few years later.

But if the government has thrown taxpayers' money at a succession of wasteful schemes, Whitehall has a poor record on implementation, whether it is (for instance) the Home Office, the NHS, or IT projects everywhere.

Just this week we have

"The right to roam over almost two million acres of English countryside has cost the taxpayer £41 million