Trust

Martin Kettle points out that British trust in the EU and our home grown politicians is low compared to other EU countries. Good.

There's surely a historical context to this. The British have had a more rumbustuous relationship with our political class than the more respectful continental countries, as shown for instance by the cosy electoral systems that their electorates tolerate, allowing polticians to stay in place provided they toe their party's line.

Has this changed recently? Kettle has recourse to Prince Philip blaming Rupert Murdoch. Doubtless Murdoch has contributed. But Martin is old enough to remember the BBC's "That was the week, that was", which long pre-dated Murdoch. So what was going on back then? Unquestioning respect began to crumble back in the 1960s, so we are looking at a longer term trend.

At the end of a disappointing piece, Kettle produces this limp conclusion -

To create trust in public life sets the bar very high. However, to diminish mistrust would be a more realistic and urgent goal - as well as a good new year resolution. But it has to be a collective enterprise. And it will not succeed unless politicians, the media and the citizens all recognise that we in Britain have an acute national problem for which all of us share some responsibility.

The truth is that Blair took amoral spinning and lying to new depths, so that the reasonable assumption now is to be suspicious of absolutely everything a minister says.

Are the citizens to blame for this? Not at all. Broadsheet journalists (a group whom Kettle doesn't seem to mention at all, probably because they don't fit his thesis) found themselves rolled over by the likes of Campbell and Byers too often, and their suspicion of government announcements has become part of their standard equipment.

Just what would Kettle have the media do? Trust the establishment more? After you, Martin. And as for the citizens, I say all power to our healthy, merited scepticism.

If politicians want to make a start, they could stop bestowing honours on toadies and failures.

More history - malaria this time

National Review Online picks up an AP report claiming that because global warming was “disrupting normal climate zones” in Kenya, “malaria epidemics have occurred in highland areas where cooler weather historically has kept down populations of the disease-bearing mosquitoes.”

Gore and Kofi are joining in, also blaming global warming, so maybe there's another view?

Oops, a WHO report has concluded that “malaria among highland populations is better described as a re-emerging problem rather than a new, unprecedented phenomena” (sic). It notes that malaria epidemics in highland Kenya occurred throughout the 1940s, and Nairobi experienced malaria outbreaks in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.

What brought an end to malaria in these regions for decades until it recently resurfaced? In substantial part, the spraying of DDT. “Following concerted attempts to interrupt transmission during the 1950s and 1960, … malaria risks declined significantly,” says the WHO study. And DDT was a large component of these “concerted attempts.”

Pesky stuff, history.

And, oh dear, the WHO report is also sceptical about climate playing any significant role in Kenya malaria resurgence. Measuring temperature and rainfall in Kenya’s Kericho district in the highlands, the study states that “there is no obvious effect of ‘warming’ in this area since 1967.”

It gets worse. "The malaria increases do seem to be mirrored in the reduction of DDT use." There is debate in Kenya about re-introducing DDT, we are told.

Two of the things that may be holding Kenya back from doing this, according to the online magazine Science in Africa, are the United Nations and the European Union. Although the WHO has commendably now called for DDT’s use in anti-malaria efforts, the U.N. Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants phases out DDT. It does have an exception for health reasons, but imposes expensive paperwork requirements on countries that use the substance. The European Union is also shedding crocodile tears for Kenya. “Europe is tightening its restrictions on insecticide residues on East African products,” according to the magazine, and this is discouraging DDT’s use, even though it would not be used in agriculture.

So trendy western voices are simultaneously preaching a theory which does not fit the facts, and blocking adoption of the true solution, condemning many poor people to death.

Pesky things, historical facts. Get in the way of intellectual fashion, don't ya know.

Blowing hot and cold

A useful summary in The Boston Globe (via John Ray) of some previous global scare stories.

• In 1902, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures.


• "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada," the Chicago Tribune announced in 1923


• In 1953, The New York Times announced that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat."


• "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in "The Cooling," his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union."


• "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," The Times reported in 2002.

Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again.

This time, of course, they may be right. On the other hand ....

"Wasting police time" - a worthwhile read

This is "PC David Copperfield's" book from his blog. A few things leave - ahem - a nasty taste in the mouth (would a university graduate contemplate peeing in a defence solicitor's tea?). The author has a lot to say about filing, so the proof reader should have told him that paperwork is filed in drawers, not draws; and should certainly have checked the repeated use of "peoples'", as opposed to "people's". And a book of this importance deserves an index. But overall it's a revealing read.

So who is "wasting police time"? Partly it is Copperfield's "underclass", calling in police as part of continuing low level squabbles. But mainly it is the police forces' own hierarchies, and the politicians above them.

His message is that things can be changed - in principle. Ray Mallon cut crime by 20% in his areas before the culture forced him out. The author is clear that it is not a question of police numbers, but a matter of using them with a little bit of effectiveness. Looking at US practice, he suggests some reforms.

• Meaningful sentences. Prison first time around should aim to repair educational and emotional deficiencies. But for subsequent sentences, prison should be rather nasty (and, one might add, cost the public a lot less). And he quotes a US sheriff: "If you don't like it here, don't come back".


• Focus on local commanders. Judge them by their success in cutting crime (in other words, judge on performance, just as the private sector would judge its managers). "This contrasts with the UK, where the main thing is to stay out of trouble. Our police service is just a vast bureaucracy created with the sole aim of covering backs, having everything in writing, avoiding complaints and blaming other people. Officers join the bureaucracy as soon as possible to avoid the twin dangers of making mistakes and getting complained about".


• Police control behaviour. This means being out on the streets, not behind desks.


• Give beat bobbies discretion. Then they won't be driven by bureaucratic demands for more work on cases which are clearly going nowhere. (And the bureaucrats should be out on the streets - see above.) "A once trusted and popular police force that actively patrolled Britain's streets on foot is now driven to investigate the petty personal lives of the underclass" - while "vicious criminals run our council estates".

He quotes a US professor of police studies -

The traditional British approach considers New York's techniques too in-your-face, too aggressive in managerial style. I told them that it works, and that is the difference between our police and yours. But the British police are all planning and no doing: they get bogged down in procedures. What they need is ruthless command and accountability all down the line. They haven't got it.

Copperfield views the underclass in a similar way to Jeff Randall. "Pay people to be ill, and they will be ill. Pay people to get pregnant, and they will have a baby. Give them a flat, and they'll be at it like rabbits."

He quotes from Norman Brennan of the Victims of Crime Trust (sadly, their website has a neglected look).

When I joined the police in 1978, there were only 13,150 recorded robberies in England and Wales.... Last year this figure had risen to a massive 101,195 recorded robberies.... Murder is at its highest rate since the second world war.... There are parts of our cities which are, in effect, no-go areas.

He too thinks the police are hemmed in by targets and red tape.

So the core problem isn't sexy, and probably to most people isn't very interesting. It's about the truly plodding, ponderous way police forces are run, with masses and masses of administrative form filling. And the author explains "administrative detections". Trivial incidents become crimes, people admit to them, and that boosts the detection rate. Valueless. Which goes some way to explain incidents like this or this.

At least the police defeated the ludicrous proposal for large scale police force mergers. It will probably be impossible to change the culture of civil servants in the unfit for purpose Home Office. What we need is more, not less local accountability, so that local electorates can hold chief constables to account for performance and for efficiency.

(The Taxpayers' Alliance have picked this up in Northumbria, as I blogged here and here.)

For instance, are our local police good value? Our own rural Parish Council Area apparently contributes through council tax no less than £520k to the county police budget - and council tax provides 33% of the police authority's income. We have the lion's share of one community police officer (who has changed every few years). If we wanted an additional CSO, we would have to pay half the cost. Now, the authority has its overheads, and we are not their most lawless area, and we do get extra police to investigate the occasional mugging or shop burglary, but what we receive is tiny compared to what we spend. For our own community, this is certainly not value for money.

The book gives the views of one constable on the inside who offers a clear view of the changes needed. Police authorities and operational autonomy certainly seem to have failed. A lot of change is needed. The book suggests just how deeply and widely the running of the police needs to be changed. But it's not at all ponderous. A good, thought provoking read.

Wind energy is a con

Booker has already dealt with this (for instance, here, here and here), and a good letter in The Telegraph has been picked up by Richard North.

Sir – Once again the public are being misled by the wind industry. These windfarms, which are going to cover over 100 square miles of the approaches to the Thames Estuary, will never power one third of London homes.

If as suggested the installed capacity of the 400-plus turbines is 1.3 Gw (1300Mw) then even with a generous load factor of 30 per cent the average output will only be 390Mw. This would in fact be enough to provide 5Kw to 78,000 homes, about enough to power an electric kettle and a toaster. If, as there frequently is, a high pressure system is sitting over south-east England, then there will be zero output from these windfarms. The claims about carbon dioxide savings are equally dishonest. Using widely accepted data the annual, theoretical savings of CO2 for these turbines would be approximately 1.46 Mt and would reduce global levels by a farcical 0.005 per cent.

What your readers really need to know is that these windfarms will receive approximately £160 million per year in subsidies, paid for by them. This windfarm scandal has gone on long enough and needs to be exposed for what is. We are destroying our landscapes and now our seascapes for nothing more than green tokenism, and are being expected to pay for it as well.

Bob Graham, Chairman, Highlands Against Windfarms, Orton, Moray

This trivial CO2 saving takes no account of pollution generated in manufacturing and installing these unsightly things. And couldn't something better be done with £160m p.a.? There's a big opportunity cost there.

Oh, and carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant. There's science suggesting that carbon dioxide is at historically low levels.

So what are we to say of the economic illiteracy of those who claim to be worthy to govern this country? We can be sure that the economically illiterate Opposition will have no contribution to make.

Richard North remarks that, "Much of the 'green agenda' is a bubble, waiting to burst". I've posted a little about the science questioning it (click the 'climate change' label below). Sadly, though, as in the case of the EU, deadbeat thinking among those in office doesn't crumble fast.

Master Blair, for instance, announced that the Stern Report was the most important document he'd received, when its only contribution to the debate was to pick improbable and contradictory discounting rates. Master Brown had commissioned it. And he usually gets the reports he wants. So we are probably stuck with vapid greenery (and the rising star vapid Miliband) for some time yet.

P.S. Here's a site calculating the cost of windpower (thanks, John Ray). It's showing a price per watt for land based wind farms between £2.57 and £8.11.

A Mail reader writes (and gets published)

I have just read Fridays Daily Mail - headline Medical Apartheid.

When is this country going to wake up to the fact that we are being run by a bunch of Scots who only care for themselves!!!

My daughter is hoping to go to University new year - we have four children, she is the oldest, and we are currently looking at having to not only pay for her accommodation/living expenses but also the massive hike in tuition fees. We are not from a high earning family - far from it - but we just miss qualifying for any help financially. If we were Scottish or foreign however, no problem. Let them in for free. She is a fantastic girl with so much to offer this country - only by us making massive sacrifices is she going to be able to. And the worst thing is this country is then going to take a massive amount of money off her when she is earning, through taxes.

Then to add more insult to injury you report that drugs available in Scotland are being denied English patients because they are deemed too expensive!

Please people - lets vote these Scots out and get a good Englishman in charge who looks after his own!!!!!

The trouble is, there isn't one available.

Meanwhile, the Scots are apparently agonising about their nationhood. It's yours to take, guys.

Against the establishment

The Taxpayers' Alliance (TPA) picks up a poll reported in the Telegraph. The paper says

To an almost unprecedented extent, voters are evincing their dissatisfaction not merely with Labour and the Tories but with all three major parties. According to YouGov, one respondent in four, 27 per cent, would either abstain at an early election (11 per cent) or at the moment lacks any voting preference (16 per cent). Of those who do declare a voting intention, one in eight, 13 per cent, say they would back some party other than one of the big three.

Putting the same point another way, only 64 per cent of voters currently say they are disposed to vote for any of the three main parties. Fully 36 per cent — a huge proportion by post-war standards — seem disposed to turn their backs on the whole lot. Never before has the None-of-the-Above Party recruited so many adherents.

The TPA disputes the notion that you can't sell tax cuts because no one will believe the promise. This is right at the moment, it says, but it would not be right if the parties changed!

Whilst a Westminster-focused, PR-obsessed party might not be able to sell lower taxes, a party (or faction of a party) could for example sell lower taxes if it began to define itself against London and the Westminster scene. The same would be true on other issues like healthcare and education reform.

They conclude that

The TPA will continue to make the case for lower taxes as it has in 2006, focusing on anti-establishment messages. We think the polling clearly vindicates this strategy. It should be a matter of time before a major figure on the front benches of one of the main parties suddenly decides that they want to define themselves along the lines discussed here (Reid perhaps) but they've all ignored it for so long that it remains possible that they'll continue to just talk amongst themselves for the next few years whilst the "none of the above" group grows and grows...

They're thinking of a comparison with US presidential campaigns, where it's almost traditional to make an anti-Washington pitch to the (effectively) direct electorate. But the dynamic of UK politics is different. Candidates for PM need the support of MPs - those very people who are Westminster. A US presidential candidate needs the support of Congress in order to govern, but doesn't require it in order to get elected. A Prime Minister in the UK has to be elected party leader by his own MPs. They will only go for an anti-establishment candidate if they are barking themselves (Michael Foot) or desperate (Margaret Thatcher). So we - ahem - have to assume MPs' good sense.

Um, remind me. Who is the leader of the Unconservatives?

Subsidising the Labour north

Wat Tyler has picked up this comparison between Surrey and Liverpool -

According to the leader of Surrey County Council:

“On a like-for-like basis for all local government services — including county councils, districts, fire and police — each Surrey resident receives less than £250 government funding. To compare this, every Liverpool resident receives nearly £900 towards public services. If Surrey got the same funding, the average household would be paying £1,500 less council tax each year than at present."

It's that notorious Revenue Support Grant system again- one of the government's tools for robbing Tory areas down South and using the proceeds to buy loyalty up North.

PC police waste time and money

Politically correct police questioned a christian couple about their moral beliefs - after they were reported by their local council.

Quite reasonably the couple sued the police and Wyre Borough Council, claiming the incident had breached their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

The police and council say they have come to an agreement regarding the claim and that they have apologised to the couple for "the way the incident was handled".

But there should never have been an incident at all. I don't agree with the couple's views. But why shouldn't christian literature be displayed alongside gay rights literature? Why did a council employee take exception? And why did the police take any notice?

Are we to be told who wasted the time and money that we pay for? Let's not hold our breath.

Displaying the fat

There's plenty of government spending that can be cut if government slims down. The Telegraph reports on a government attempt to produce an accurate picture of childhood obesity which failed because fewer than half the children agreed to be measured or weighed.

Only 48% of children agreed to be weighed. There were also poor response rates from some primary care trusts, or PCTs, which were supposed to collect the data - one in five did not send in information.

So that destroys the scientific basis of the exercise. Surely someone could have foreseen this? Or perhaps - gasp - piloted it?

The average cost of the exercise was £5,420 per PCT. There are about 300 PCTs - so say £1.6m.

The National Obesity Forum called it a monumental cock-up. The minister involved is Caroline Flint. Should we expect contrition for throwing away more of our money? Doubtless not.

Encouraging the scroungers

Jeff Randall picks up John Hutton's speech about the "can work, won't work" brigade.

Pointing out that Gordon Brown has departed from his 1997 policy that "In place of welfare, there should be work", he notes that an experiment has been tried and has succeeded, in Wisconsin. In 12 years they cut the state's welfare roll from 98,000 to just 7,000.

In desperation, the electorate turned to Thompson, a radical who promised a complete change of direction. His subsequent welfare reforms have done more to lift people out of poverty than any amount of well-meaning charity. Thompson had a single premise: "Every fit person can do something." On this basis, Wisconsin became the first state to introduce work requirements for welfare recipients. As he said: "If Wisconsin is going to offer them a ladder, then we require them to use the ladder."

This included linking parents' welfare cheques to their children's record of attending school. Truancy resulted in benefits being cut. If a child missed half a month's schooling, that portion was deducted from the family's welfare payment. Keep the children in school and they have a better chance of breaking out of the cycle of ignorance, unemployment and despair. Simple, isn't it?

Thompson stopped incentivising teenage girls to become single mothers and started jailing those fathers who dodged child support payments. Most importantly, he brought in a requirement for welfare claimants to find a job within 24 months or lose their benefits, i.e., "welfare was not a way of life".

In order to receive a welfare cheque, Wisconsinites had to be enrolled in a jobs programme and spend a minimum of 20 hours a week looking for work, performing community service, or improving basic skills. Those who didn't go along with this, didn't get paid. If a participant did only 16 hours a week, then the welfare cheque would be cut by a quarter. No participation meant no cheque. Nothing.

To help genuine job seekers, Wisconsin provided childcare, healthcare and transportation. It removed the roadblocks to self-sufficiency.

Subsidised self help. But, says Randall, Brown would prefer that we are all clients of his nanny state. So, undoubtedly, would most Labour backbench MPs, even though it costs their employed constituents money through higher taxes. Long term dependency on the state seems to be morally acceptable. And the Conservatives show no inclination to grasp this nettle. (Or indeed any.)

So we are probably lumbered. Hence the case has to be made to the grassroots rather than to party politicians.

Europeans have different opinions - shock

And so what? Euobserver reports, "The idea of a single set of "European values" was thrown into doubt on Monday (18 December) as a fresh Eurobarometer poll exposed strongly varying attitudes towards delicate issues such as religion, homosexuality and drug use across the EU".

Right, then. So whoever thought that Cypriots and Swedes had similar attitudes on sexual matters? Or that the puritanical Swedes and the (less relaxed nowadays) Dutch would agree about policies on drugs?

Why would the Commission want to know his stuff? Imagine ....

The US leads Europe on curbing pollution?

The US has made more progress on emissions than Europe since 2000, suggests the Wall Street Journal . This isn't hard, since we know the EU set the first round of emission levels too high. The Journal suggests the next, lower round of limits - if they stick (unlikely) - will only drive highly polluting industry to India or China.

America may even have a few things to teach the Old World. The U.S. strategy has been to keep economic growth strong and provide incentives for private industry to develop cleaner technologies. For instance, the Bush Administration has granted $1 billion in tax credits for nine new coal-fired power plants that will double efficiency and reduce pollution compared with older generations. China is picking up on these tactics. This year it bought $58 million in machines from Caterpillar Inc. that trap methane in coal mines and use it to power electric generators.

If global-warming activists were as interested in lowering air temperatures as they are in expanding the role of the state, they'd understand that the key to reducing emissions lies in unleashing the private sector, not capping it. That's the real lesson from the policies -- and the results -- in Europe and the U.S.

The Daily Tellygraph

A whole page today in the Telegraph's news section about the X factor show, with a deluge of facts which suggest the press briefing pack has been given a good rifling.

Why?

Tonight's the final. One of the finalists is a pint sized crooner. He's light on his feet, but he's a one trick pony. Opposite him is the singing jukebox. She will sing you anything - exactly the same. She seems to have experienced no emotions - she sings all her songs from the outside. Oh, and she's got no star quality. With her nervous girlish wave and her rounded shoulders, she projects no personality.

Ben - who is an entertainer - might well have won if he hadn't sung both semi-final songs clutching the mike stand. He at least seems to have some flair and originality.

Oh dear, The Tellygraph's got me doing it now. Did I mention how successful Mr Cowell is? No? Oh well, you can read about that in their article - some here and the rest here.

Who's closing the post offices?

It's not the EU's fault - despite what UKIP claims.

What's wrong with helping chickens

The British government "has added its dismay at the collapse of talks that have been taking place over several years aimed at improving the welfare of meat chickens in the EU".

The British poultry industry says it wants "all of Europe brought up to the same standards, because quite a lot of what is in that directive is a reflection of UK assurance production standards.”

At government level is this just a soft, feelgood initiative, or harder edged concern for the future of British poultry producers? Are we really in the position where we have to concern ourselves with poultry welfare standards in Poland, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania?

And if so, can we legitimately complain about restrictive initiatives from other countries? What's sauce for the chicken is ... well, you subsidiarity guys get the point.

Blood sweat and tea

Only just caught up with this excellent book of the excellent blog about the London Ambulance Service. The book's a riveting read, and only £3.99 from Amazon.

It did leave me wondering who's subsidising all those drunks without visible means of support. No it didn't, I lie, I suspect I know the answer.

We're winning the air pollution battle

The E-Team (thanks to John Ray again) reports on a study claiming that air pollution is not a growing problem or a serious threat to the public's health.

"The truth is air quality in America's cities is better than it has ever been," said Joel Schwartz, author of the study and an adjunct scholar with the NCPA. "Air pollution of all kinds has sharply declined because of cleaner cars, power plants, factories, home appliances and an array of consumer products."

Air pollution has been falling dramatically. So, "While the incidence of asthma has nearly doubled in the last 25 years, air pollution cannot be the cause, since air pollution of all kinds declined at the same time. Emergency room visits and hospitalizations for asthma are lowest during July and August, when ozone levels are at their highest."

Americans, the study concludes, harbour health fears about air pollution that are far out of proportion to minor risks posed by current air quality.

Doubtless China and India will progress in the same direction once they become wealthier.

Bloggers aren't always right

Jonathan Lowe discusses the government's decision to spend £1 billion replacing 78,000 ministerial and civil service vehicles under a programme to cut costs and reduce carbon emissions from its fleet by 15%.

He says the average car produces about 6 tons of carbon dioxide a year. So 78,000 cars and we have 468,000 tons. A 15% decrease means that the expenditure will save the world from about 70,000 tons.

In 2001, the world produced around 24,000,000,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere. This means that the 70,000 tons that the UK government is going to save will be about 1/300,000th of carbon emissions. (Actually it seems nearer 1/350,000th.)

He cites a study claiming that if we cut our emissions by 43%, world temperature would fall by only 0.07 degrees C. So the UK, in spending £1bn in changing the cars over will, he argues, reduce the world wide temperature of around 0.000000023 degrees Celsius. (Actually it seems closer to 0.000000468 degrees, but the point is made.)

Now comes his killer. According to World Vision Australia, for just AU$468, one can sponsor a child in Africa or Bangladesh. They will receive education, medicine against diseases, and fresh drinkable running water. "What we all take for granted, but is a luxury in some of these parts of the world. Essentially, the British government could have spent their AU$2.5 million [he means billion] on this, and sponsored 5.3 million people, but they obviously have other vote grabbing agendas."

So, he asks, which you would rather do? Reduce the world wide temperature by 0.000000023 degrees Celsius or give over 5 million starving malnourished children shelter, water and medicine?

Now there are some issues with this. The sums are based on The Times's superficial newspaper report, but it does claim that "the programme is expected to save departments £100 million" (over what period? oh pshaw we're The Times, we're not a paper of record). For instance, "The NHS expects to spend £420 million replacing its fleet with the new range of cars, £19.7 million less than it would have cost the department to replace its fleet with the same vehicles again."

So on the face of it, the deal is a moneysaver anyway. The government would have had to replace the vehicles anyway. It's just doing it more cheaply and at the same time making a trivial cut in emissions. Thus Jonathan's stylishly expressed argument falls.

Translating into higher expenditure

The BBC broke the story last night that the state is spending over £100m of our money on translation.

NHS trusts spend £55m on interpreting languages, the courts £31m, and local authorities £25m.For example, Peterborough Council translates details of its refuse collection service into 15 languages. They also translate residents' parking and pay and display schemes into a range of languages. Islington's NHS primary care trust is providing a Turkish woman who has lived in the UK for five years with one-to-one sessions to help her stop smoking translated into her own language.

The BBC quoted a Bangladeshi woman who has lived in the UK for 22 years.

"When you are trying to help us you are actually harming. Even before we ask, all we have to do is say hello, they are here with their interpreters. We just sit here doing nothing and we don't need to speak in English at all."

She had to speak through an interpreter. Trevor Phillips ducked the issue by saying

"Translation is not a disincentive. It allows them to get access to services while they learn English. Translation is a way of helping people in transition into integrating into our society."

Are they in transition? Apparently, often not.

It was interesting to see the Minister on Newsnight. His thought about possible ways forward? It may be appropriate to give more resources to teaching English. The Guardian says £1bn is already being spent on teaching 1.8 million people to speak and write English. So that's an item for the debit side of the immigration debate.

How long should it take someone to gain a working knowledge of English? After that, should the state be subsidising their ignorance?

L'exception francaise

French politicians claim to want more Europe, so it's interesting to look at just one day's news.

French politicians called for more political control over the ECB (code - set interest rates to suit France and other economies which are ailing because their governments won't take the necessary decisions, rather than suiting runaway economies like Spain or Ireland). The head of the ECB will not brook political interference. He's French. The French demanded he should be put in that post.

And the Germans aren't impressed. "As a rule, we try not to talk about the ECB, but our position is clear - its independence is sacrosanct to us," a senior Berlin official said yesterday, adding that he "could not imagine any circumstances under which we would support [the French] position".

Of course it's presidential election campaign time in France, so we will doubtless hear much of this over coming months. Already an obscure candidate has called for the return of the franc.

A French economist said, "We are seeing a bidding war between politicians, fuelled by the recent rise in the euro and the slowdown in the French economy, pushing them to find a scapegoat that they can blame with relatively few consequences”. So just why is French economy performing worse than Germany's?

And ...

France has vetoed the adoption of a European “Code of good conduct” on arms sales, because the arms embargo on China has not been lifted. A blogger adds, “And after all that, France gives lessons in human rights and international law to the whole world. Did you say cynical?”

France and Italy are leading postal services anti-liberalisation efforts.

Le Figaro reported that France will receive a large fine for non-transposition of the 2001 EU Directive on GMOs. The article notes that France “is one of the EU’s worst pupils in terms of the environment”. In a display of amour propre France recently withdrew a proposed target for carbon emissions rather than submit it to the Commission and have it rejected (so now the submission is late). Yet Jacques Chirac has launched a committee to organise an international conference on the environment, which will take place in Paris on 2 and 3 February, in order to advance his idea of a global environment organisation. Be careful what you wish for, Jacques.

And the EU Commission’s call for caps on roaming rates charged by mobile phone groups was rejected by Britain ... and France.

City of London falls out of love with Brussels

This is the heading to Gideon Rachman's piece in the Financial Times. It doesn't tell us anything new - it rehearses the City's shift from enthusiasm for the euro to euroscepticism, focused by the markets in financial instruments directive (Mifid). Rachman reminds us that "Open Europe has commissioned its own study that puts the total costs of Mifid to the City as high as £6.5bn. It also places the entire regulatory cost of the EU’s financial services action plan – of which Mifid is just a part – at up to £23bn."

Rachman points to the paradox that this restrictive legislation is being introduced under Mr McCreevy, who made his reputation as Ireland’s finance minister as a tax-cutting free marketeer, who helped to turn Dublin into an important financial centre.

The excuse is that "as European commissioner he took over when much of the FSAP was already in place". So here's another politician defeated by the Commission's administrative machine. It's the Verheugen copout again. Who knows what new restrictions the invisible EU bureaucracy is planning next.

Meanwhile, as Rachman points out, the entrepreneurial and increasingly important Singapore and Shanghai don't have to contend with these rules. Overseas manufacturing has to take into account daft EU regulations like RoHS. But the Commission can't dictate to the rest of the world's service sector. And the City's business is global.

How long will the Financial Times remain pro-EU? And as arguments for EU membership get chipped away, what now remains?

Supply chain security regulation to be dropped?

Business organisations here and here have welcomed the announcement from the European Parliament requesting that the European Commission drops the controversial draft Regulation on enhancing supply chain security.

The proposal would have cost SMEs £37bn without any clear security benefits. And this from a Commission which Mr Barroso proclaims as wanting to cut back on regulation.

No wonder eurocrats want to get Verheugen out for criticising the cost of regulation. Of course he is ineffective - but hey, criticism is criticism.

PFI is poor value

Yes, PFI is poor value for money. You're amazed, aren't you.

£6.3 billion in extra capital value for £15.6 billion in extra repayments from the taxpayer. That sounds like extraordinarily bad value for money.

It gets worse. The same Treasury table shows that the total capital value of all the signed PFI deals is £54.6 billion. But as mentioned above the total repayments from the taxpayer over the next 25 years alone is estimated to be £158 billion. So the taxpayer will have to pay three times over for all the PFI projects. £158 billion over 25 years works out at an average of £6.3 billion every year, or 2p on the basic rate of income tax.

Of course it's just a tactic to make the government as a whole, and Gordon Brown in particular, look better. And we - their serfs - are paying through the nose again.

Expensive sentences

Here's a magistrate suggesting that suspended sentence orders are expensive, and predicting they won't be available by the end of 2007. The Treasury prefers fines (wonder why?). But where will most petty criminals get the money from?

Where the money goes

Reportedly, 70% of young offenders come from lone-parent families. The cost of family breakdown is £20 billion a year. Children from a broken home are twice as likely to have behavioural problems, 70 per cent more likely to be a drug addict.

And the legacy of children leaving primary school unable to read is said to cost the country more than £2 billion a year in education, health and crime bills and unemployment benefits.

The research, by the KPMG Foundation, has calculated the cost to the public purse of the 40,000 pupils in England and Wales with very low literacy skills.

It estimated that between £44,797 and £53,098 a head is spent during half a lifetime in areas such as special needs provision, truancy, exclusion from school, reduced job opportunities, social costs of teenage pregnancy and drug use, increased health risks and costs associated with an increased risk of ending up in the criminal justice system. The annual bill is between £1.73 billion and £2.05 billion, depending on the level of special needs intervention and the seriousness of crime levels.

Jo Clunie, the director of the foundation, which supports a £10 million reading recovery programme called Every Child A Reader, said that every £1 invested in helping children learn to read saved an estimated £15 later on. "Primary schools need targeted top-up funding for early intervention," she said.

Let's see - the system's broke so we give it more of our money? That's the easy headline solution. Maybe the bad reading is a symptom of a deeper problem - bad parenting, maybe, or perhaps bad teaching.

Money is an easy headline answer, but it's often a lazy one. Why are things going wrong, and why will more money make a significant difference? Why do they think taking more money from the rest of us is the best answer? Don't they want to change anything else?

No way to run a health service

The NHS is forcing GPs to refer patients to private centres for fast-track treatment while imposing longer waiting times on local hospitals - for example in Basingstoke - purely for budgetary reasons.

And millions of patients could be denied NHS dental treatment in the coming months as funding runs out at up to half of all practices.

Rising numbers of dentists are meeting treatment targets ahead of schedule, and will not be paid to provide any further NHS treatment before the next financial year, the Dental Practitioners' Association is warning.

The result will be that even children, pregnant women and those on benefits, who are all entitled to free NHS treatment, will have to pay, or wait.

A new dentists' contract, launched with great fanfare by the Department of Health earlier this year, was supposed to make it easier for people to access NHS dentistry.

However, the system included quotas for NHS work. Once a practice has carried out a preset number of treatments, no further funding is available.

Couldn't run a whelk stall. And they're certainly inadequate to run one of the world's biggest employers.

The irrelevance of Kyoto

It's worth keeping in mind the assessments of the Kyoto treaty obligations by Bjorn Lomborg

As a matter of fact we can see that the effect of the Kyoto Protocol will be marginal – even if we assume that the Kyoto emission ceilings will be kept in place indefinitely, an issue which has not been addressed by the protocol. Several models have calculated that the consequence of Kyoto will be a temperature increase by 2100 of around 0.15°C less than if nothing had been done...Equivalently, the permanent Kyoto curbs on carbon emissions would result in a sea level rise in 2100 which will be just 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) less.

- and Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who says that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by the current signatories, it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100.

REACH directive in its final shape

So the final shape of the REACH directive is becoming clear. Good? No, says Richard North.

Based on the idea of "prior approval" it means that, once it is up and running, no chemical can be sold unless its producers have complied with a bureaucratic procedure which will attest as to its "safety".

The trouble is that, beyond acute toxicity, predictive modelling is a very poor indicator of safety, an issue we explored in detail last June and in November last year. Thus, approvals based on this process merely insulate producers from their responsibilities to their customers, crating a system where it is the regulator and not the consumer who must be satisfied before a product is marketed.

More greenery

A tornado struck Kensal Rise in north London. And BBC News asked, was this caused by global warming?

Well actually no, as their meteorologist confirmed in the next few words. Britain gets a few tornadoes every year, the number's not rising, and this one was in a town rather than in the countryside. There's more about extreme weather in British history here. It's nothing new.

Quite unconnected is this observation from an Australian paleoclimate researcher (hat tip to John Ray again).

If you look at the ice core records, you will discover that yes, changes in carbon dioxide are accompanied by changes in temperature, but you will also discover that the change in temperature precedes the change in carbon dioxide by several hundred years to a thousand or so years. Reflect on that. And reflect on when you last heard somebody say that they thought lung cancer caused smoking. Because that is what you are arguing if you argue on the glacial time scale that changes in carbon dioxide cause temperature changes. It is the other way around."

What are the police up to?

So the Metropolitan Police are spending £69m pa on "Officers' time for refreshments"- up 19% since last year. Oh please.

And -

Derbyshire police assigned only one detective to investigate the brutal beating and robbery of riding instructor Tania Moore, 26, in June 2003. She was attacked by a pair of thugs wielding baseball bats who had been recruited by her former boyfriend Mark Dyche. He went on to shoot her dead nine months later. By contrast, the force deployed up to 40 officers, including an undercover team disguised as painters and decorators, to investigate the theft of chickens by staff from a poultry processing plant owned by a prominent businessman and former councillor, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Is this what these local communities want? Shouldn't they be able to have their say?

Wasting more of our money

The Taxpayers' Alliance has more examples of waste, including -

• £210,000 Labour party tax dodge on property sale
  
  
• Worcester City Council spending £24,000 (so far) on a new logo - "The exact cost of the re-branding exercise has yet to be determined." No sensible private sector business would work like this
  
  
• £350,000 for overseas trips for Muslims to boost Britain's image
  
  
• £270,000 subsidy for the Church of Scientology.

But hey, it's only our money - mine and yours.

Bad marks for Brown so far

Good to see the Chancellor's economic record being shown up in contrast to the prise showered upon him by Mr Blair (who probably doesn't understand much economics).

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has pointed out that public spending in the first seven months of this year is running too fast to hit the Treasury's full year forecast

And the always excellent Liam Halligan, for instance, reminds us of New Labour's 1997 election manifesto pledge to "save and invest, not tax and spend". But

Since 2000, real annual public spending growth has averaged 5 per cent, compared with 2 per cent during the previous 30 years. As a share of GDP, such spending has rocketed from 37.4 per cent in 1997 to 44.9 per cent today. Over the same period, government receipts have risen from 37.0 to 42.1 per cent – despite that manifesto pledge. This seemingly small percentage gap between public spending and revenue amounts to tens of billions of pounds. And every year, as part of his on-going bid to spend his way to popularity, Brown plugs that hole with borrowing.

And that's a bill for future taxpayers.

In his budget five years ago, the Chancellor said he would borrow a total of £28bn between 2001 and 2006. He has, so far, taken on debts of £129bn during that period. His prediction was a jaw-dropping £100bn astray. Since 2002, borrowing has exceeded £30bn – more than Brown's five-year total – every single year....

Last week we learnt that the Chancellor intends to borrow another £182bn on our behalf between now and 2012. So he will be taking on extra debts annually, amounting to one and a half times the UK's total council tax receipts. And, on past form, even this vast amount could be an underestimate.

And he keeps redefining the economic cycle to make it seem that his "golden rule" isn't being breached. "The cycle is lengthening and shortening like a yo-yo," says the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The Item Club says the rule is now "simply a farce".

Since the 2005 election Brown has, when measures buried in this latest PBR are taken into account, raised taxes by £6bn a year. That has added £200 per annum to the average family's tax bill.

Halligan attributes this to Brown's bullheaded ambition.

After years of high borrowing, this Chancellor simply lacks the political grit and judgment to exercise restraint. So he will be forced to raise tax even more. Brown has already raised the tax burden sharply since 1997, while our competitors have been moving in the opposite direction. He claims his PBR "drives forward the great economic mission of our time – to meet the global challenge". Really?

It seems to me his legacy is one of high and rising taxes and unreformed public services. Thanks to his borrowing binge, we face more than a decade of high government deficits. Even his central boast, that the UK is "a uniquely high-growth economy", is nonsense. We have just fallen to 22nd out of 25 in the EU growth league – hardly world-class.

Oh, and in passing he wrecked the country's pension system.

The government is desperate to claim spending as a sign of virtue. It isn't. The aim is to get good outputs. If you can improve the nation's health by spending £10bn, that may be worth considering. If you can achieve the same result for £10, so much the better. So value for money is what counts - sadly for the country, the area which Labour has not gripped.

Another deregulation initiative

The Telegraph reports 17 "simplicity plans" are to be unveiled, stipulating that hundreds of regulations are to be removed or streamlined. "Since New Labour came to power nearly 10 years ago, seven different deregulation bodies have been set up in Whitehall. Over the past six years, the Treasury alone has launched 159 reviews concerning new or existing regulations."

The latest updating from the London Business School claims that the total annual burden of regulation on businesses is over £50bn a year – more than three times the official £15bn burden claimed by the Government.

• Regulations from the Department of Trade & Industry alone cost business £27.3bn a year in lost working time and other expenses
• Regulations from the Department of Transport set the economy back by £9.2bn a year
• Regulations from the Department for Work & Pensions, the Health & Safety Executive, HM Revenue and Customs and the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, each cost business between £2.4bn and £3bn.

The article then goes off the rails by suggesting, "the fact that there will be a whopping 17 simplification plans is symptomatic of a Government that excels at devising complex and cumbersome new regulations".

No. The deregulation effort - if this one is real - has to be broken down into manageable chunks which the public has some hope of tracking. However -

Several businessmen who have seen the "simplification plans" say that they appear to focus on the administrative impact of red tape – form filling, etc – rather than the actual policies."This is more of a streamlining of existing stuff rather than a hatchet job," says one prominent business figure close to the Be