Let's explore how to increase local accountability while decreasing central direction. Ensuring that the police are accountable to the public they serve is essential in retaining confidence in the work they do. We should not be frightened of exploring new ways of doing this. We need to look at what works. Ideas like providing dedicated local phone numbers for the public to contact their neighbourhood policing teams directly, where they know who is responding to their concerns. The best are already doing this and building trust and better relationships with the communities they serve. We need to go further.This seems to duplicate 1 and aims to hand down more detailed instructions about how to work locally, so as to increase local accountability. Oh yes.
The policy, strikingly similar to police reform plans announced by David Cameron earlier this year, would allow commissioners to take charge of budgets, staffing and target-setting, while leaving operational control of forces in the hands of chief constables.This would at best give local electorates very uncertain leverage on the way their local police forces run themselves.
John Reid is the MP elected in Scotland to represent his Scottish constituents at UK level, but once away from home, has taken a job that puts him in charge of English law and english prisons and english police.If he is prepared to add his name to mediocre pap like today's article under his name, he should not be missed.
You know what's missing, Mr Reid? Democracy, that's what. You are not serving your constituents by running England's services and no one in England can vote for or against you. That includes our policemen and women. You are nothing but a dictator. Do the decent thing and stick with your remit.
Due to a historical quirk that was supposed to have been ironed out years ago, Edinburgh's devolved parliament gets £1,500 more from the public purse per head of population.The so-called Barnett formula is blamed for the inequality in public spending, says Sky News, "and even its creator has called for it to be reformed".
But political commentators say it would be a brave Westminster government that cut spending in Scotland in case it provided ammunition for those calling for independence.No doubts about where the Sky journalist's sympathies lie.
Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "When you dig below the surface even further, an estimated 17 per cent of the headline increase in nurse numbers [since 1997] is made up of double-counting existing nurses working extra shifts.Meanwhile, the union Unison claimed that
health workers' jobs are now being lost because welcome extra cash is often being sucked into an endless black hole of 'strategic' reforms, which don't appear to be linked to many meaningful front-line patient care outcomes.Sometimes managers just have to concentrate on boring day to day stuff, rather than repeated strategic reorganisations which are undone later at great cost.
Two thirds of the public do not believe this, but the Government continues to repeat it. The public are, of course, right.Andrew Green calls for a sharp reduction in immigration, in the interest of social cohesion. But of course everyone else from the EU can come here.
Nearly all the benefit of immigration goes to the immigrants themselves - which, naturally, is why they come.
The Government claims that the entire country benefits from the growth in our economy as a result of immigration, but calculations based on its own figures show that the value of this growth to each member of the indigenous community comes to less than 50p a week.
Not a lot, you may think, when you consider the added cost to the economy caused by current levels of immigration - cost in the form of the extra pressure on our public services and our infrastructure.
Indeed, the latest figures issued by the Government itself show that we shall need to build 200 houses a day, every day, for the next 20 years just to house new immigrants - not existing immigrants, but new ones. This takes no account of the illegal immigrants who must number at least half a million.
Senator Inhofe challenged celebrities to do what former Vice President Al Gore refuses to do – live up to their environmental rhetoric by reducing their home energy usage to the level of the average American household by Earth Day 2008. Global warming Hollywood activists such as Laurie David, John Travolta, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Madonna – to name a few – continue to alarm the public about fears of catastrophic global warming and demand that Americans change the way they live. The question remains however, will these same Hollywood alarmists reduce their own energy consumption by giving up their multiple houses and private jets to change the way they live? At the very least, will they pledge to reduce the energy usage at each of their multiple homes?Note this is not a pledge that Gore made - it is a pledge that Gore refused.
“It is my hope that journalists will ask these Hollywood celebrities point blank: ‘will you take the Gore Pledge to reduce your home energy usage to the level of the average American?The pledge the Senator put to Gore - and which Gore refused - was
That is hardly surprising. "I cannot recall a business case for a machinery of government change ever being done," says one recent former permanent secretary who is a veteran of several of them. But it is remarkable. No business with the Home Office's £14bn turnover and 75,000 directly employed staff would consider a merger, acquisition or disposal on this scale without a business case: one that assesses the potential costs and benefits and the opportunity costs - the things that do not get done or simply go wrong in the course of reorganisation, or as a consequence of it.The whole article is worth reading, but particularly his summary of the waste at the Department of Health.
The current reorganisation of primary care trusts has just cut their numbers from an original 400 to about 150. That, the government says, will save £250m a year. That figure, however, is itself an admission that the creation of the original 400, less than five years ago, added a similar annual sum to administrative costs. And there will be a redundancy bill from the current change that the government estimates to be £350m and is likely to be more. So unscrambling what was done in 2002 will in one year alone, let alone over the five, have cost about £650m, which is almost exactly the amount by which the National Health Service has overspent.Rearranging big organisations costs a lot of money. It is always fair to ask the government
The Association of Chief Police Officers traffic spokesman, Chief Constable Meredydd Hughes, said detection rates for all crimes was [sic] 30% and that in that context speed camera offences were being reasonably enforced.More sensibly, Kevin Delaney, former head of the Met's traffic police, said the figures were evidence of a wider problem that speed cameras can only catch people who are basically law-abiding.
Irish inflation is now above 5 per cent - the highest in Europe. And the euro's surge against the dollar is harming Ireland's high-tech exports to America. But it is the ECB's "one-size-fits-all" monetary policy that has done the most damage."Having dealt with unsuitably low rates, Ireland now has rates that are too high".
Over the past three years, as Germany has prospered, the ECB has raised borrowing costs seven times, and counting.It's hard to see Germany wanting monetary conditions relaxed.
So Ireland - and other countries in southern Europe - now face cripplingly high rates in the midst of an accelerating downturn. The euro has flipped them from boom to bust.
Mr Reid said: "Most people aren't opposed to foreigners; they're opposed to unfairness.This is wrong, of course. Wage levels fall when immigrants can replace British people in jobs, as John Denman pointed out months ago. It's irrelevant to the poorer British worker whether the immigrant is illegal or not.
"So what they worry about is people coming here illegally, people working here illegally, undermining the minimum wage, undermining the terms and conditions, safety and all of the good terms that protect workers and consumers.
"If that is being done people can see the benefits of immigration."
Civitas has warned that immigration could lead to the political break-up of Britain and that it may have reached a "tipping point" beyond which it could no longer be seen as a single nation.It adds that "Shadow home secretary David Davis called on the government to put a cap on those coming to the UK". And "The Home Office said it had already announced a tough new points system aimed at immigrants".
Its pamphlet - A Nation of Immigrants? - said the "seemingly reckless pace and scale" of immigration was bound to cause concern for people who saw the UK as a model of tolerance and freedom.
Of course [Scotland] could make its way in the world on its own. The real question was: why should it want to give up the advantages of its relationship with the rest of the UK? The Union had become a partnership of equals. If both sides could do well outside it, each does better within.Stephens naturally approves of the new Blair formulation.
The argument for the Union can be won - in England as much as in Scotland - only if voters on either side of the border recognise the mutual advantage.Mr Salmond, he says, is selling sweetened snake oil.
But this ignores two facts. The first is that all environmental phenomena fluctuate in their rate, frequency or intensity as part of the normal workings of our dynamic planet. The second, which follows, is that whether a particular short-term change over, say, the early 21st century has any human causation can only be assessed when all the causes of natural environmental change are fully understood.
However, no case yet has any climate-sensitive environmental parameter been shown to be changing at a rate that exceeds its historic natural rate of change, let alone in a way that can be unequivocally associated with human causation.
The IPCC uses computer calculations to assess the likely future course of the climate. That the IPCC relies so heavily upon complex GCM-generated scenarios as the basis for its climate alarmism is alarming in its own right; it also reflects the absence of any strong empirical evidence for human-caused climate change, as outlined earlier.
That climate change is part of our planet's normal, dynamic behaviour is not in doubt. Nor should there be any doubt about the need for governments to prepare sensible response plans for future climate change, both warmings and coolings. But reflection on recent climatic episodes like the "little Ice Ages" makes it plain that future climatic coolings will cause much greater damage to our societies than will mild warmings similar to that of the 20th century.
That 20th-century warming, the most recent of many previous warm phases of similar or greater magnitude, was dangerous or human-caused, or even that the warming has continued after 1998, both yet remain to be demonstrated.
In January, new figures obtained by Conservative MP Grant Shapps showed there had been a big increase in the number of operations cancelled due to a lack of sterile surgical instruments.This figure shouldn't exist. How much does it cost this nationalised mammoth to collect numbers like this? If they must run this unwieldy monster in their controlling top down fashion, have they never heard of light sampling?
A total of 1,765 operations were cancelled in 2005/06 - up 40% from 1,252 in 2002/03.
growing resentment about the role of Scottish MPs. Why, for example, should they have been the decisive factor in the vote to raise university tuition fees in England three years ago when the Scottish Parliament has used its slush fund to ensure Scottish universities have no up-front charges at all? In a few months’ time, there may be an even greater provocation to English sensitivities in the form of a Scottish prime minister with a Scottish constituency. Mr Brown will be the living embodiment of the infamous West Lothian question: why should Scottish MPs decide issues for England that do not affect their own constituents? There is also the small issue of the £11 billion subsidy Mr Brown already ships each year to Scotland. New analysis by The Spectator shows that this represents an annual levy of £450 from each English taxpayer.Nelson argues that
As the Conservatives won the most votes in England in the 2005 general election (a fact it mentions far too seldom) they can reasonably expect to have the most seats in England. If Messrs Brown & Campbell used their Scottish MPs to block a party with a clear mandate for England, there would be outrage south of the border, and rightly so.Yes, but the system gave them 92 fewer seats. Highlighting this must surely be part of any "English strategy". But oops, that's a number.
The comments come after ministers raised the prospect of fining parents who drive their children to school.The suggestion is that schools should give priority places to pupils whose "travel causes the least damage to the environment", effectively rejecting any child who lives more than two miles from the gates.
Ministers must realise that only a broader strategy, ensuring adequate incomes for those in work and for those unable to work, underpinned by an assault on inequality, can sustain a reduction in child poverty. If the government is serious about meeting its child poverty targets, it must address the structural causes of poverty, including Britain's dependence on poverty-pay jobs and our high levels of inequality compared with European countries with low child poverty rates.So the CPAG are calling for nothing less than a huge and idealistic revolution in the UK's economy.
Hurrah. An opinion poll in Scotland puts the SNP on 35% compared with 29% for Labour.At the last election, the Conservatives secured more votes in England than Labour.Let's hope we see more reminders of this in the run-up to the Scottish elections. What the report doesn't mention is that those fewer votes brought Labour 92 more seats than the Tories got with their slightly larger number.
If you elect an SNP government you are going to be living with them, and their commitment to independence and a referendum within the next parliament. You are going to be living with that for years. And at a cost - £5000 per household.That would be more English money Labour is giving away.
Indeed there's something clunking about Gordon Brown, but it's not his fist.
