Migrationwatch questions immigration numbers

Government figures claim that from mid-2005 to mid-2006 there was a fall of 17,000 to 57,000 in the numbers of East Europeans coming to the UK, amounting to only 1 in 5 of net foreign immigration of 281,000.

But in the same period approximately 210,000 East Europeans registered for work. (This does not include the self-employed, or dependants.)

‘It is simply not credible that only 57,000 stayed on,’ Migrationwatch say.

‘The explanation may lie in the fact that the passenger survey asks about intentions. There is anecdotal and survey evidence to suggest that East Europeans often come on spec and decide to stay longer.

‘This once again highlights that the Government has no real grip of immigration or any meaningful idea of the true number coming to and leaving the UK which makes planning for these large population increases extremely difficult.’

Migrationwatch say the ONS press release was also misleading in suggesting that immigration contributes only 55% of population growth. This figure only includes new arrivals, ignoring the children that they will later have. Other work by the ONS shows that immigrants and their descendants will account for about 83% of population growth (Population Trends number 118, page 11).

Finally, the net immigration figure of 189,000,remains consistent with the government’s estimate that, over the next 20 years, 1 in 3 new households will be a result of immigration.

‘It is clear from these figures that immigration is continuing unchecked and continues to break all previous records – despite the fact this is opposed by the vast majority of the public,’ Migrationwatch conclude.

Questions for those favouring a referendum

Why is the EU constitutional treaty good for Britain? We may be giving up a trifling forty or so policy vetoes - but to what end?

If the government felt they had a good political answer, be sure that we would be hearing it. But we don't. Instead, those opposed to a referendum concentrate on two other tactics.

First, they attack those calling for a referendum. For instance, today's Financial Times leader (dissected by Richard North) refers to "the motley band calling for a referendum in Britain on the European Union's constitutional treaty". When 82% of voters want a referendum, it's not surprising that they don't all have the same reasons. It's not surprising that 82% of voters don't all belong to the same organisations. It's not surprising that some of the organisations those 82% of voters belong to seem unlikely allies. But to call 82% of voters a "motley band" seems excessively élitist even by the standards of the Financial Times. The Europe Minister even labelled those calling for a referendum as "mad". Mad and motley. What a country to govern.

Second, the government insists that it is protecting its red lines. The Foreign Office insists that no matters essential to national sovereignty have been surrendered. This implies - as we have noted before - that other concessions have been made. And indeed the government has confirmed that some forty vetoes will be given up.

What do we get in exchange? The best the Financial Times can come up with is that "the treaty is a tidying-up exercise". Then why is it so important to EU leaders? And why would the UK want to surrender 40 vetoes for a "tidying up exercise"?

That is why the government needs to be pressed on why it is signing up to this treaty in the first place. Their argument that "we're not surrendering everything" doesn't begin to answer this.

So here are the questions the motley pro-referendum band should be asking.

1. What will the treaty achieve?

2. What areas do the 40 surrendered vetoes cover?

3. Why is it worth giving up those 40 policy vetoes to get this treaty?

4. Why is it worth breaking an election manifesto commitment to get this treaty?

Back in The Sun again

Yet again The Sun has a leader calling for a referendum on the EU Constitution - headed

Brown's Wrong

More abject NHS numbers

The UK lags behind most of Europe in survival rates for cancer patients and stroke victims.

In the case of stroke victims, the cost of care seems to be at least as high in the UK as it is in European countries with better outcomes. This suggests that organisational and structural problems in delivery of resources are important, says Professor Markus, the author of the BMJ study. He writes that:

Countries with better outcomes focus resources more heavily on the acute aspects of care [i.e. diagnostic and specialised interventions]. The vast majority of the cost of in-hospital stroke care in the UK is for nursing and hospital overheads, with the cost of investigations and medical care being very low.

The think tank Reform attributes these failings to the outdated priorities of central planners - "the key effect of spending since 1999 has been to inflate the traditional hospital sector. This has actually prevented improvement, by absorbing resources that could be better spent on innovation". It calls for empowerment at local level.

So the huge, centralised Nationalised Health Service continues to be inefficient - as most centralised nationalised industries have been.

But it's a great gravy train for bureaucrats. In 2002 the government set up 28 Strategic Health Authorities. But, reports the BBC:

Three years later ministers announced £250m had to be cut from red tape and four years after they were created the regional bodies were merged into 10.

Some 764 people were made redundant or took early retirement at a cost of £82.89m.

For 61 senior managers the redundancy packages cost an average of £358,355.

There is plenty of publicity for professional soldiers killed in warfare.

British taxpayers didn't sign up for poor quality treatment of cancer and strokes. How many civilian lives does the government's incompetence cost each year, in these two fields alone?

Politicians - stuffed with their own importance - are confident in their ability to run this huge nationalised industry well.

But what's the evidence? None of them ever have run it well. The waste of lives is likely to continue for as long as they continue to indulge their vainglory.

Maybe we also need competition among providers.

The EU constitution debate

I hope the public debate is going to move away from angels dancing on the head of a pin about the exact status of a foreign minister, and who stands up at the Security Council.

Those are the sorts of questions the government is keen to debate. Why?

1. The broad public probably doesn't give a fig.

2. It avoids discussing surrenders of powers.

So far the pro-referendum groups have mainly played the government's game, joining battle on ground of the government's own choosing.

Pro referendum groups probably have more interest in this high level constitutional debate, but I doubt if it resonates much outside the Westminster and political blog villages.

Is there an accessible list of vetoes that are being given up? Can it be translated into possible examples of areas where a UK veto exists now, but our objections could be overridden in the future?

Of course the higher levels matter, because they are the levers for the lower level changes.

But the government is very keen to keep debate at this level and not talk about individual powers that would be surrendered.

That's because the government knows that that is just where it is most vulnerable to public opinion. People will really be against these surrenders of power. Concrete examples will strengthen their opposition.

The internet heats up the global warming debate

As Philip Stott concluded in his recent letter to the Telegraph

When will our politicians, especially David Cameron, recognise that carbon claptrap, not global warming, is the danger for our economic future?

The excellent Vaclav Klaus keeps making the point that eastern Europe have just broken away from Russian control, and he doesn't want the greenies taking away their new found freedom.

Actually it's always seemed a strange issue for politicians to adopt. Go beyond extra taxes (and Gordon doesn't) and you'll inevitably start curbing people's freedom. How popular would that be?

The most hilarious contribution recently was from the Henley Forecasting Centre, who have said that the weather will stop further evidence of global warming being apparent until 2009. So until then it will be faith-based in the Northern Hemisphere, while presumably the Southern Hemisphere will continue to cool?

Enthusiasts need to distinguish two basic questions -

1. Is the earth getting warmer? (arguably not)

2. If it is, is the cause CO2 (looking less and less likely), some other human-induced reason (unspecified), or natural (e.g. sun amplified by cosmic rays, earthly weather interactions [as suggested in recent chaos theory analysis], or some combination?

Meanwhile the lustre is coming off the Stern review's analysis pretty fast, except amongst scaremongers.

All in all, anthropogenic global warming is looking increasingly like an idea whose time has come - and gone. Just as it did in the 1930s, to be succeeded in the 1970s by scares about ... er ... global cooling.

In future years there will be a great book to be written about how the political, media and bien pensant classes were captured by this idea and tried to foist it on the rest of us, strictly of course for our own good.

Richard North has commented on the role of the internet in the debate about the law concerning the thug who knifed Philip Lawrence.

The interesting thing about all this is that the whole affair is another example of the subtle shift in the hierarchy of information gathering and dissemination. In pre-internet days, the founts of all wisdom were the media and the political classes – who were closer to the seat of power and thus better informed.

But, as information has gone on-line, there is now a small but growing band of "ordinary" people – remote from the traditional "gatekeepers" – who are better informed than those who would seek to inform them.

This is even clearer in the debate about global warming, where scientists and laymen around the world can quickly - and pretty easily - become aware that there is a vibrant debate casting doubt on the theory of global warming considered settled by (for instance) Al Gore, the BBC, David Miliband, and David Cameron.

Despite the views of these luminaries, doubting Thomases can take ringside seats as the orthodoxy is dealt blow after blow - news which you would be hard pressed to find in the mainstream media.

Nor does this apply only to reactions against establishment orthodoxies. The Taxpayers' Alliance is making use of the internet to get out its distinctive message about government inefficiency and cutting taxes.

There's a definite sense of a genie having escaped from a bottle.

Asbestos rules cost taxpayers unnecessary money

Government blithely loads extra costs onto taxpayers - for instance through Home Information Packs.

The Taxpayers' Alliance outlines why UK asbestos rules are unnecessarily and expensively restrictive.

Britain's poor cancer survival rates

Britain has poor cancer survival rates compared to most EU countries. Why?

We spend over £400 million a year on cancer drugs. France spends more than £900 million.

Would EU rules allow us to go and get treatment there?

Telegraph distorts reporting to shield Cameron

Discussion continues about the rights of murdering thug Learco Chindamo, killer of Philip Lawrence. Let us ignore the wholly valueless piece by Jan Moir and concentrate on the substance.

This is of course an EU issue, as James Naughtie pointed out in his Today interview yesterday with a highly confused Mrs Lawrence (who failed to pick it up). Those who want chapter and verse about the EU rules can find them here, in an item posted at 7.55pm yesterday - evidently too late for Telegraph reporters Christopher Hope and Caroline Gammell to take account of it in their front page lead today.

With its heading Cameron: Scrap the Human Rights Act, the paper concentrates on Cameron's mis-targeting of the (undoubtedly flawed) HRA rather than the EU legislation.

A passing reference to the EU rules does appear on the front page, where David Davis is allowed to say ambiguously

"The Government are trying to blame the courts but they signed up to the EU law in question and continue to cede the powers to deal with dangerous individuals like this to Brussels."

This was probably the clearest reference Davis could make to the EU without exposing the fact that his leader had got it badly wrong twice in one day (after the mistakes over hospitals).

Turn to the Telegraph's inside page and we do start to see some reference to the EU from Jack Straw, who is pathetically reduced to claiming he was misled about the effect of the laws his government signed up to. Straw says that

What I have been able to glean is that it is very probable that most of this issue arises not from the Human Rights Act but from European Union law.

He added that "I think we were misled by the system"(!), commenting that the Human Rights Act was a "subsidiary" factor in the tribunal's decision and he doubted whether it made "any difference at all".

Mr Straw is saying that we have his and his government's incompetence to thank for the legislative framework, while Mr Cameron had two legislative targets to choose from and picked the wrong one.

Cameron should have been saying, "This is an example of the power the EU has over us already. It should be for the UK to decide which criminals the UK will deport, not up to the EU. Yet the government now wants to sign a treaty giving the EU more power in forty areas of our lives. What we are saying is, ask the people whether they want cases like this to be governed by EU rules or British law".

Despite attempts by his outriders like Matthew d'Ancona to portray Cameron as a heavyweight policy-oriented politician, he remains superficial and focused on PR opportunities without being interested in digging below the surface of what he is being told.

The Telegraph may try to play down his mistakes, but no newspaper promoting itself as serious can cover for him indefinitely.

Flat tax in eastern Europe

Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have proposed doing away with exemptions, deductions and loopholes in favour of a flat tax, reports Deutsche Welle (in English).

But, the writer adds, economists say the flat tax trend is unlikely to spread from eastern to western Europe.

The Sun comes back to the EU referendum

The Sun has come back to the EU constitutional treaty in a short leader -

Treaty trap

EVIDENCE mounts that Gordon Brown faces a backlash from core supporters if he refuses a referendum on the EU treaty.

According to a poll, a quarter of Labour voters won’t vote for him if denied a national vote.

If Brown thinks he can bulldoze opposition to the treaty he misjudges the national mood — and the mood of many in his own party.

That's The Sun's leader. What's particularly interesting is that they hang it on a non story.

Now, call me hopeful.

But The Sun would not keep pushing for a referendum on the EU constitutional treaty if its owner did not agree.

What global warming?

Philip Stott in The Daily Telegraph -

Last week rain fell not only on the rag-bag of climate-change activists camped outside Heathrow, it also poured on the whole global-warming parade.

First, new research indicates that our climate may be only one third as sensitive to C02 as has been assumed.

Secondly, corrected temperature figures for America from Nasa indicate that the hottest year in the 20th century was 1934, not in the 1990s.

Thirdly, recent satellite figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration demonstrate no mean global warming since 1998. Indeed, the curve has flattened to below 1998 levels.

And finally, our British weather continues to contradict all predictions.

When will our politicians, especially David Cameron, recognise that carbon claptrap, not global warming, is the danger for our economic future?

Council tax protest in Barnet

Yesterday there was a council tax protest down the road from here, in Barnet.

Let's hope to see plenty more.

An article of faith

Forecasts from researchers at the Met Office's Hadley Centre claim that "natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009", but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily.

"Temperatures are set to rise over the 10-year period by 0.3C. Beyond 2014, the odds of breaking the temperature record rise even further", reports The Guardian.

That's jolly convenient. Expect no evidence for another couple of years.

Police forces - a case of state sector inefficiency

As a taxpaying civilian I read police blogs (some linked to here on the right) detailing the idiocies of police procedures with appalled fascination.

Is this a case of injelititis? - dim bureaucrats only promoting safely dimmer bureaucrats? What would it take to cut out this stuff?

Are all police forces complacent throughout their top ranks? Is there any hope of change at all? Or do I have to resign myself to being bled for ever to pay for this inefficiency?

I am not railing at the police bloggers, by the way! I respect all of them I've read, and I wouldn't have their jobs for anything.

We can view this more broadly, looking at police forces as just one example of state sector inefficiency (if that's not too weak a word). Just in the past few weeks we have seen the distorted priorities of the smug Environment Agency, and the proliferation of organisations and senior posts among those who are supposedly delivering us a high value olympics.

The Taxpayers' Alliance regularly highlights these and other examples. The more publicity they can get, the better. We must aim to reach the point where taxpayers become sick of hearing about how their money is being wasted.

In the case of police forces, blogs regularly expose similar tales of waste across the country. The pattern is clear enough by now. So what next?

How addictive is heroin?

Fascinating discussion here, started by PC David Copperfield, who writes, "I’ve long suspected that heroin addiction may not be as bad as all that. Probably because all the heroin addicts I meet are pathetic losers who would be just as pathetic if they weren’t addicted to drugs."

When you compare the worries a heroin addict has (getting a fix, are there any more hot chocolate maxpacks in custody) to the concerns of non-addicted taxpayers (can I pay the mortgage this month, where are my kids, has the wife crashed the car, will I get the sack from work) there doesn’t seem to be any comparison.

The crime argument is even less compelling, “Heroin is so addictive, I have to mug old ladies.” Nonsense. As I look at the addicts coming into custody from the local shopping centre, I cannot believe that the absence of heroin would magically turn them into productive (or failing that, honest) people.

Much more here.

P.S. David Duff (see comments) has spotted this on the same theme.

Conservatives to consider the elderly

The Telegraph reports that the Conservatives are to switch their emphasis to a series of so called softer policies, including public services, and the elderly.

Good. Labour should be hugely vulnerable on both fronts. Pensioners are living longer and are more likely to vote than the rest of the population. And The Taxpayers' Alliance finds almost every day new examples of the state sector wasting its citizens' money.

Andy Burnham, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed that John Redwood's review amounts to a £21 billion public spending cut. Not so. Redwood is proposing that people should have less of their own money taken away from them. He is allowing for the dynamic economic effect of tax cuts such as we have seen in Ireland, though his Tory bosses are too feeble to grip the concept that high public spending is a wasteful way to run an economy.

Government doesn't choose to spend the money the way its citizens would, and then they spend the money badly.

Take the latest quango review trailed this weekend. Would you rather spend several million pounds a year on

1. drugs to treat early stage dementia patients
   
   
2. cutting taxes
   
   
3. the Milk Development Council.

There is a compelling narrative to knit together about choices and efficiency in state spending - quite independently of the amount spent. Yet the Opposition seem incapable of knitting together any sustained theme, preferring instead to jump from issue to issue.

More weasel words from the Foreign Office

Commenting on the EU constitutional treaty, a spokesman for the Foreign Office says, "There will be no transfer of power away from the UK on issues of fundamental importance to our sovereignty.”

What does this mean?

The clear implication is that there will be transfer of power away from the UK on issues that are not of "fundamental" importance to our "sovereignty".

But for some reason the FO doesn't seem keen to highlight those. Maybe that's because a poll reports that 82% of voters want a referendum.

German MEP Elmar Brok sems to be alone among EU politicians in his claim that the new draft is substantially different from the "old" constitution and that Britain has "got what it wanted". He does not seem to have explained why so many senior EU politicians claim the new treaty is almost the same.

Mr Brok has the strange view that

"It would be very unfair of the UK if, having more or less got what it wanted in the new treaty, it would then turn round and put this to a popular vote."

It's called democracy, Elmar. Damn pesky system.

Murdering yob wins

The man who knifed head teacher Philip Lawrence to death has been allowed to stay in the UK after winning an appeal against deportation. His lawyers argued that deporting him to Italy, where he was born, would breach his human rights and the move would be illegal as the murderer was from a European Union country and had already lived in the UK for 10 years by 1995.

The Asylum and Immigration Tribunal ruled in his favour. He was jailed for life in 1996 with a minimum 12-year term, so he could be released early next year if the Parole Board decides it is safe to do so.

Doubtless most of the British population will think this is unjust. Yet again "the system" flies in the face of common sense. The government is entirely to blame for the laws which led to this result.

Major New Theory Proposed to Explain Global Warming

This via John Ray.

"Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt" --Washington Post headline, November 2, 1922.

If there was any doubt that fear-mongering has long been cherished by the media, the above headline should put the question to bed. But that 80-year old news story also illustrates two of the great problems for the global warming theory -- its inability to explain sudden climate shifts in the Earth's past, and to explain why the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are so unequally affected by warming.

A team of mathematicians have come forth with a startling new theory that solves both these problems. Led by Dr. Anastasios Tsonis, their model says the known cycles of the Earth's oceans -- the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino (Southern Oscillation) and the North Pacific Oscillation -- all tend to try to synchronize with each other.

The theory is based on a branch of mathematics known as Sychronized Chaos. The math predicts the degree of coupling to increase over time, causing the solution to "bifurcate," or split. Then, the synchronization vanishes. The result is a climate shift.

Eventually the cycles begin to sync up again, causing a repeating pattern of warming and cooling, along with sudden changes in the frequency and strength of El Nino events.

Better yet, their theory has predictive power. The model predicts past shifts in the year 1913 (explaining the strong warming of the 20s and 30s), 1942 (resolving the post-WW2 cooling trend) and 1978 (covering our current warming). The model predicts another shift to occur around the year 2033. Most shocking of all is their prediction for the year 2100 to be slightly cooler than present day, despite the assumption of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Eye-popping indeed.

Is carbon-dioxide really so ineffective at warming? A new study by Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute seems to think so. Its conclusion is that, while CO2 does have some effect, that "it can never play the decisive role attributed to it" in global warming, and that its effects have been grossly overstated.

It gets worse at the BBC

Hear Kinnock exploding on air (but the BBC suppressed it at the time and Naughtie basically scripted him for the re-recording (scroll down to the grey strip).

To introduce their coverage on Sunday of John Redwood's deregulation proposals, the BBC used the very old footage of him not knowing the words of the Welsh anthem. The Sun rightly has a go at the BBC.

Anti Auntie

THE BBC’s coverage of Tory plans for £14bn cuts in red tape and bureaucracy was a mockery of impartial journalism.

Instead of examining John Redwood’s arguments, it made a joke of them by unearthing his garbled version of the Welsh anthem from a decade ago.

The caustic bulletins could have been scripted by Labour ministers.

Mr Redwood may be a colourful character. But few can match his understanding of the way Labour and the EU have tied our economy in knots with pointless regulation.

Certainly not the BBC — a bastion of smug, self-satisfied bureaucracy which rightly stands accused by its own watchdogs of being “institutionally biased”.

Helen Boaden, BBC Director of News, writes that

In retrospect we weren't right to use that footage again, which came from a long time ago.

In any slightly competent professional news organisation that would have been entirely obvious at the time. If Helen Boaden thinks that would only have been obvious in retrospect, the standards she is setting her staff are far too low.

Actually, what she's doing is making the smallest retraction she thinks she can get away with. But she is not there to shield her staff, she is paid - by taxpayers - to ensure that the BBC delivers news that is unbiased.

Meanwhile, BBC computers have been the source of many changes to Wikipedia articles, such as changing "George Walker Bush" (his real name) to "George Wanker Bush". The BBC's own coverage concentrates on changes to Wikipedia made by the CIA.

We await Helen's line that it was a misjudgement, in retrospect.

Helen, your news organisation is looking pretty rotten at the moment. But you are a captive of your organisation, so you probably think everything's pretty fine.

Sauce for the goose

Deutsche Welle has a feature on the dissatisfaction among postal workers in Germany over the liberalisation of the German postal sector under EU law. Deutsche Post, it is noted, is primarily objecting to what it is calling an “uneven playing field”, with it being legally obliged to provide universal service, including to rural areas, whereas competitors can focus on the more lucrative, big-city markets.

Just like the UK, then.

Early elections in Poland?

According to Welt, meeting yesterday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the leader of the liberal opposition Donald Tusk agreed that the Polish Parliament should be dissolved in September with elections following in the autumn.

Open Europe comments that "the opposition Social Democrats have promised a referendum on the revised EU Constitution, so it’ll be interesting to see whether this becomes an election issue in Poland".

But if the opposition promises a referendum, can the governing parties afford not to?

Passport control at Britain's third world airports

There's a good editorial in The Business about the state of Heathrow. Also see the comment there by Mike Moloney describing conditions at Stansted, including passport control, which is the government's responsibility.

Home information packs again

Oh dear, the National Audit Office has decided that in introducing home information packs

• The Department employed consultants with a clear conflict of interest.
  
  
• The department did not take sufficiently timely action to investigate the continued concerns raised by the correspondent [the RICS]. Departmental staff relied on assurances from the consultants themselves that a conflict did not exist. They should have taken more robust action when first informed to collect independent information to verify what they were told.
  
  
• At least three letters to the Department from RICS did not receive a written response. Good governance would see full replies being sent out within 10 days, or if that is not possible, at least holding responses.

And oh dear there's more.

• In designing the certification schemes, CLG did not follow many of the better regulation principles. Initial standards as developed by the Department on advice of the steering group, facilitated by PIR were overly prescriptive. Many aspects of the later consultation did not provide a full 12 week period for response as suggested by Government guidance.
  
  
• Whilst the application for approval to run a certification scheme did not involve a competitive bidding process, there were clear advantages for the bodies in being approved first.
  
  
• RICS came to a perception that the process was unfair in part because of their belief that the department had responded inadequately on its concerns about the conflict of interest and in part because the Department did not make it sufficiently clear that the draft standards of which applicants were informally notified on 26th September were the basis for a formal application.
  
  
• CLG fell far short of appropriate practice in developing and publishing transparent standards for the lighter touch certification scheme and the associated approval process including the scoring criteria for considering applications.
  
  
• Communication with all the applicants was not as equal or open as it should have been.

So the introduction was a shambles. There have also been several instances where the energy certificate has been far from accurate. Appeal procedures aren't uniform and there's no way to get the database amended, which surely breaches data protection regulations.

The National Audit Office intend to report to Parliament in 2008-09 on the overall effectiveness of the arrangements put in place by the Department to introduce Home Information Packs and to ensure sufficient qualified inspectors were available to implement the scheme.

The report will also provide an early assessment of the impact of the packs and whether they are meeting the objectives of making home buying and selling a quicker, more certain and less daunting experience.

This blog will look forward to more news about this pointless burden on home sellers foisted on the country by the arrogant and incompetent Yvette Cooper.

"These dollars belong to the people of our state"

Accountable transparency is the new democracy. This is the heading to a very important piece in the Financial Times. Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, discusses what he calls "accountable transparency" - making state budgets, contracts and individual expenditures available to the public on the internet.

For example (more details here) -

• The governor of Texas has put his own governor's office expenses on the web in a searchable form.
  
  
• Also in Texas, any school district that cannot prove that it is spending at least 65% of its education budget in the classroom must publish its payments - every single expenditure item - online for citizens to inspect.
  
  
• Indiana's governor put his state's contracts on the internet on the day he took office.
  
  
• Five states have passed laws mandating various levels of transparency. Legislation was introduced or debated in a dozen others and, says Norquist, is set to pass next spring.

Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri has put up the Missouri Accountability Portal ("Map Your Taxes") website, which posts a wide range of government expenditures.

As Norquist explains, you can look up the actual expense records of your favourite politician and bureaucrat. A linked website provides access to the actual contracts let by the state. There are other plans, including the posting of state employee salaries.

The Governor says:

One of my goals has been to transform state government by using technology to improve efficiency and enhance transparency. The old-way bureaucrats like the paper-based system, which empowers them and is less accountable to taxpayers. Few Missourians can take the time to root through mounds of paperwork in some department to find out where their taxes are going. Missourians deserve openness in state spending.

And - in words which everyone paid by the state should have visible to them all day - he adds:

These dollars belong to the people of our state

The Map Your Taxes website has received more than 600,000 hits in its first few weeks.

Norquist points out that accountable transparency is working up from the more local levels to the national level, and that it is popular with the media. Most of the information in most states is already legally public information. And it needn't be expensive. Governor Blunt "put the entire state finances online without a single additional appropriation - just using existing staff and resources".

Here we have something extremely unusual - a simple idea which is powerful enough to bring about a huge increase in democracy at minimal cost.

Its time seems to be coming in the USA. How long will it be before it starts to cross the Atlantic?

One can foresee determined rearguard actions being fought by politicians and officials in the UK. (To take a trivial example, MPs' expenses, anyone?) But "these pounds belong to the people of our country".

One of the jobs of the Taxpayers' Alliance is to unfurl this banner and bring the issue into our political discourse.

Will an MP make a start by introducing accountable transparency for his own office?

And what of the EU? Who will take up the long fight to make accountable transparency mandatory for all EU expenditure?

"These euros belong to the peoples of the EU."

More olympic costs

The Taxpayers' Alliance have calculated that the 2012 olympics will add almost £4 billion to construction inflation in London and the South East between now and the start of the Games.

This is because the huge demand for construction of olympic facilities will have knock-on effects in the wider construction industry. Capacity will be stretched, so prices will rise.

And doesn't Brown want to build more houses too?

More from the benefits maze

The Nottingham Evening Post carries a piece about a woman whose allowances have stopped when she reached age 60, but her pension payment has not started, so she is without income.

A spokeswoman for the DWP said: "We cannot comment on individual cases."

Who says?

This easy smokescreen is comfortable for the state employees, but disempowers the suppliant citizen, since the power of publicity is forced to grind to a halt.

If the citizen wants the press to air their problem and says so suitably in writing, what right does a taxpayers' employee have to say, "We cannot comment on individual cases"?

=========

Now to someone who cheated the system, rather than being cheated by it. The account from the Runcorn Weekly News shows just how mindbogglingly complex is the benefits system, which is there to cater for the poorest and most vulnerable.

She falsely claimed more than £2,500 of tax payers' money and was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £100 for failing to declare the receipt of child maintenance payments. Again no mention of repayment.

Look at the complication. She had been receiving housing benefit and Council Tax benefit since April 2001 when she declared her income was income support and disability living allowance.

In May 2004, she completed another claim form stating her income was now incapacity benefit, disability living allowance, child tax credit and child benefit.

In December 2005, she completed a review and stated that her income was still the same.

But in October 2006, the council's benefit investigation unit received a tip-off that she was receiving child maintenance payments and had failed to declare them. In February 2007 - five months later - the Child Support Agency - a government body - confirmed that she had in fact begun receiving maintenance payments in August 2005.

First, contemplate the complexity of this woman's finances. By May 2004 she was receiving four state benefits, plus two further benefits from the local council.

Second, her fraud didn't come to light through liaison between government bodies. It came from a tip-off.

And it then took five months to ascertain that she was indeed receiving child benefit.

It's a shambles. And these are the parts of the state that are responsible for giving taxpayers' money away.

Fiddling social security

A Bromsgrove woman fiddled income support and council tax benefit of more than £25,000 over three and a half years on the basis that she was sick and unable to work. But she was working.

How did the fraud come about? Because she failed to declare that she was working for the Lawns Residential Home and she did not satisfy the entitlement condition for benefit.

In other words, she was on her honour to tell the truth and forego what for her is doubtless a considerable sum of money.

Presumably the residential home where she was working didn't pay her in cash outside the PAYE system! But it took all that time for the system to put two and two together.

She has been given a two year supervision order and ordered to do 200 hours community service within the first 12 months.

The report does not mention repayment.

If the checks are so lax, how much more taxpayers' money is being stolen?

Ladder lunacy

FLASHING speed signs are being delayed from going up on Lancashire roads because of health and safety rules, reports the Lancashire Telegraph. When there were only a few signs, the police looked after them. Now that there are more, parish councils will be responsible.

But council workers will need extra training to climb ladders to do the job, even though they will only need to be about three or four feet above the ground. And the police say

"Our officers who deal with the signs at the moment have had that training, but they are not able to train others."

You can read more of the gruesome procedural detail here.

It would be funny, but for one thing. Taxpayers of Lancashire, you are paying for these feeble jobsworths.

Can you afford them? Should you have to?

And by the way, who puts up all the local road signs?

Now we're getting somewhere

Booker has lightly rewritten his Sunday Telegraph piece for the Daily Mail, and the more people it reaches the better.

Happily, the debate is starting to move on, with the government setting out in a Parliamentary Written Answer 50 different areas where member states will lose their veto if the treaty is agreed, including transport, energy, tourism, civil protection, space, research and common commercial policy.

Gisela Stuart continues to concentrate on the new duty of the European Council members to act for the good of the EU rather than their own individual countries.

But John Redwood - who asked the PMQ - is grasping the political point that the case against lies in the EU's new powers, saying that the EU is grasping the power to force the sharing of North Sea oil and gas in the event of a crisis in energy supply. "It's easy to envisage circumstances of scarcity when the rest of the EU says this ought to be a common resource," he said to the Daily Mail.

The Sun also picks up the PMQ in its usual spare fashion.

BRITAIN will lose its veto in 50 areas under the new EU treaty, Europe Minister Jim Murphy has told MPs.

He said 13 of those will be protected under a special deal.

But the remaining 37 involve critical areas.

They include the loss of the veto over transport policy, energy, tourism, civil protection, space research, and commercial policy.

European leaders admit the treaty is almost the same as the old Constitution which was supposedly ditched.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is refusing to give people a vote on the treaty — despite Labour promising a referendum at the last election.

Tory MP John Redwood said: “The case for a referendum on this wide ranging give away of powers is overwhelming.

“Labour promised one.”

What the debate now needs is more examples of policies which could be imposed on us, together with examples of prices we've already had to pay for EU policies which don't suit us.

Expenditure on water quality, for instance, has cost us huge amounts. It's stopped us spending money on better sewerage, which would have reduced the effects of the flooding. Each of these expensive policy mistakes needs to be encapsulated in one, or at the most two, short sentences. If this seems a tall order, get someone from The Sun to moonlight.

So what other bad policies might we have to pay for in the future, if we give away these vetoes? Again, we need to come up with examples which can be explained briefly.

Let's take transport. Maybe the EU would decide it would be in the interests of the EU as a whole if all countries drove on the same side of the road. It's far from impossible. And it would be no good protesting in Parliament Square, because the decision would be taken in Brussels. Voting out the UK government would change nothing. There would be no effective way for voters to protest.

Does that seem far fetched? Let's take another example. Lord Kinnock proposed a while back that UK road signs should be rewritten in kilometers. Forget it, said Mr Darling, then Transport Secretary, who unlike Lord Kinnock had glanced at how much it might cost.

Now, Lord Kinnock's judgement and abilities would fit him to be mayor of a small welsh town, and his opinions on issues beyond that compass are of no intrinsic interest at all. What makes them worth recalling, however, is that he had recently returned from Brussels after a term as a Commissioner (though a spineless one). Since Lord Kinnock does not have original ideas, we may take it that this proposal was typical of the thinking in Brussels. It could easily be voted through under the new arrangements. We would be powerless to stop it without assembling a blocking coalition.

Now, maybe this could be done. Doubtless that nice M. Sarkozy might be persuaded to agree to deferring implementation for a few years - in return, naturellement, for supporting a generous new round of the Common Agricultural Policy. And when our road signs came up for consideration again a few years later, be sure that M. Sarkozy would have his next shopping list ready. And he would not be alone.

The decoders of the constitutional treaty are deservedly proud of their detective work. They deserve applause.

But now the debate needs to move beyond constitutional theory to examples of specific issues. These are what will hit home in voters' minds. The direct thrust will not be to call for a referendum. The aim will be to stir voters up against the constitutional treaty, with the referendum just a stepping stone on the way to rejection.

The more importance voters give to the constitutional treaty, the more worried the government will become.

The Sun has shown it is eager to run pieces about the constitutional treaty. John Redwood has started the ball rolling by talking about North Sea oil in the Mail. Now we need different politicians or interest groups or think tanks to give other examples of similar issues - one at a time, to maximise coverage.

For instance, we will be giving up our veto over common commercial policy. What does "common commercial policy" actually mean? The government's parliamentary answer was deliberately as bland as possible. These grey generalities need to be changed into colourful specifics.

The examples need to be soundbites, together with soundbites about other costly and inappropriate policies that we are already paying for.

We need a steady drip of these over the holiday period, when there is traditionally a lack of news (though that may be less true this year). Some of these examples will strike a chord, others won't.

They will build the basis for a public opposition to the constitutional treaty that is deep and strongly held, rather than shallow and ephemeral.

Booker paints the EU picture

It's been easy for discussions of the EU constitutional treaty among the anoraks to get bogged down in discussions of which constitutional provisions reappear in what disguise in what Articles.

Time to move on. As I suggested last week, we need examples of things the EU will be able to do in the future which it can't do now.

Happily Booker provides one picture this week, and a chilling one. If the EU wishes to take any powers not specifically authorised by the treaty, he writes, it will be able to do so under a new version of Article 308. "Until now this applied only to measures needed to promote the 'common market', but its new wording amounts to a blank cheque. It will be allowed new powers over anything it wants, in accordance with those all-embracing "objectives of the union'".

One of the biggest potential bombshells is hidden away in Article 262, which says that, by decision of the European Council, the EU "may establish new categories of own resources". In other words, it will have the power to levy its own taxes.

What this amounts to, says Booker, is that the EU finally wishes to set itself up as the supreme government of Britain and 26 other countries, with unlimited powers over every aspect of our lives: "a government we cannot dismiss and which is unaccountable". It is, he says, nothing less than "a complete coup d'état" [can a coup d'état ever be incomplete?].

And Gordon Brown wishes to see this imposed on us without allowing us a referendum, in direct breach of a promise on which he was elected, and now on the basis of the transparent lie that it has no bearing on our constitutional rights. It should be enough to blow the minds of everyone in Britain.