Where your money goes (continued)

Gordon Brown foolishly wants the government judged on competence.

Benefits worth £500 million were paid out in error last year alone - in a decade, £5 billion has been lost through fraud and error. Over £1 billion went in benefits to those who had jobs and were not entitled. Other substantial sums went to students and prisoners.

How is enforcement going? There were 11,403 convictions in 2000-2001, but only 8,573 in 2004-2005 - a drop in the ocean. Fraud and error in the benefits system is estimated to cost each taxpayer about £100 a year.

11,000 out of the prison population of 81,538 are from overseas. Prisoners cost us £24,000 each a year. They should be a profit centre. The government hopes to repatriate foreign non-EU prisoners to serve their sentences abroad, in what The People engagingly calls "lag swap".

The People calls Alison Goulding "the mother of all scroungers". In essence she thinks she has the right to raise her large and increasing family in comfort at the state's expense without working. She shouldn't be able to.

And in the nationalised health service, most nurses spend more than a third of their week filling in forms, while one in five said that over half of their time was tied up by NHS red tape, according to a survey.

Governments just don't give taxpayers value for money.

Yes to English votes on English issues

The Conservatives are floating a proposal of English votes for English laws. This is not even one of their taskforce proposals yet. They are floating it in the name of Sir Malcolm Rifkind to gauge reaction.

If it's unpopular, they'll obviously let it drop, despite The Observer's breathless report. So let's join The Waendel Journal in welcoming it.

Labour oppose it. At the moment the electoral arithmetic works for them - after the last general election Labour had 286 English MPs against 194 for the Tories, even though the Tories got more English votes. There are claims that Labour has sometimes had to rely on Welsh & Scottish MPs to see English measures through. But if those votes had not been available, English Labour MPs might not have rebelled.

But Labour can't rely on keeping its English majority for ever. So it has to find other excuses.

1. Legalistic objections about MPs' voting powers being indivisible

The line is that this would infringe the sovereignty of parliament. But MPs for non-English constituencies could volunteer not to vote on English issues without overturning some legal doctrine.

2. It would lead to the break-up of the union

This is never explained. Why would it be more likely with English than with Celtic devolution?

3. It would be impractical

One argument is that one party might have a majority in England, another a majority in the UK as a whole. Then there might be two sets of ministers - which would be tricky to manage. However, in effect the UK government would be a minority government for England, able to pass measures only with the consent of the Opposition. A Labour government would still hate that.

David Cairns, the Scotland Office minister, warned the plan would have dangerous consequences. He told The Observer: 'This proposal is utterly unworkable. Taken to its logical extent it would create multiple categories of MPs. Where does it end? Do the Tories think only London MPs should vote on Crossrail, only countryside MPs vote on fox hunting, only coastal MPs vote on fishing? It is utterly impracticable.

Note this is a straw man. It's not what Tories propose. Where does the "logical extent" of Mr Cairns' argument end? Does he believe in world government? We suspect not. Divisions have to be drawn somewhere.

A third argument concerns identifying what would be a purely English bill. The Tories propose that this would be a decision for the Speaker. Given that the devolution arrangements for the Celtic territories work, it shouldn't be impossible to make a similar distinction for England. But be sure the UK government would try to ensure what a measure affecting all the UK was included in every Bill which touched mainly England.

4. Minorities need protection, majorities don't

This is the line put up by Ruth Kelly on Sky this morning. Devolution was put in place to protect minorities, and majorities don't need protection. But the point of devolution was to bring government closer to the governed, and make nations masters of their own lawmaking. Why should this apply to smaller nations but not to larger ones?

=====

What the purveyors of these objections avoid like the plague is any comment on the justice of the principle.

If a politician dives immediately into the "impracticalities" of a proposal, be sure that they'd find the principle of it hard to oppose.

This non-party blog supports English votes on English issues. The Conservatives are tiptoeing cautiously towards it at last.

How government doesn't make things work

Hospitals don't work. A retired professor was so appalled by the dirty conditions she found during a stay in hospital that she wrote a dossier about it. The conditions she describes were obvious, but oddly nobody knew.

No one at all. Imagine.

All the worthies are jumping into action. The local MP belatedly wants to know what's been going on.

Jill Galvani, the nursing director, said: "I was very sorry to hear Prof Wenger's story. I know how difficult it is to manage these patients with care and dignity.

"My experience on the ward was very positive. The doctors and nurses were adhering to hand hygiene at the bedside and whilst the ward needed to be decorated, I found it to be clean."

Gren Kershaw, chief executive of the trust, said: "The trust is continually monitoring cleanliness and is not complacent about infection control.

This is either astonishingly complacent, or a barefaced lie. Professor Wenger wrote that

In most instances, I needed to clean the lavatory seat before I felt I could use it.

The seat more often than not showed evidence of urine or faeces, occasionally blood.

I did it myself because often I could not wait for someone to come and clean it for me.

There was often urine on the floor, sometimes starting to crystallise as it dried.

Often I did not ask for help because it was clear that nurses were under stress to get everything done and often there was no nurse around.

The shower cubicle I used was dirty and the door was broken.

The grouting was filthy and did not appear to have been cleaned for a long time.

No bath mats were provided. There was one dirty plastic chair.

Obviously these were long term problems, and obviously there can be no excuse at all for them.

And more widely, the number pregnant woman contracting superbugs on maternity wards has risen by a third in a year.

So is the solution for the government just to do policing, and leave others to run facilities? Well, the state isn't even good at that.

It took it took the healthcare commission two years to produce the report on Maidstone & Tunbridge's hospitals which stated up to 90 patients had died from C diff while another 331 had caught the infection at the three hospitals in the trust.

And Ofsted's supervision of childminders is so ridiculous that in England the number of childminders has fallen by almost a third over the past decade, while in Scotland there is said to be an acute shortage. "Business leaders claim the problem is damaging the economy and forcing many mothers to switch to part-time hours."

Does the north deserve the south?

The Huntsman, an Umbrellablog colleague, picks up yesterday's suggestion that by 2011 the Scots may follow the Welsh lead and introduce free prescriptions - paid for by English taxpayers.

Today Unionist commentator Alan Cochrane looks at the numbers, claiming that "our streets aren't paved with English gold".

The figure most frequently trotted out is that, while the average English man, woman or child gets £7,121 per year, in Scotland the sum is £8,623. In defence of this figure, it is said to take account of the remoteness of many of Scotland's communities, which require more spent on their basic services.

However, there are great regional variations in England. The North-East gets £8,177, the North-West gets £7,798 and Yorkshire and Humberside £7,188. London gets the biggest of all "subsidies" at £8,404, while the South-East gets the lowest at £6,304. So the biggest regional variation is not between Scotland and England, but between London and the rest of the South-East.

And he points out that tax revenue from North Sea Oil goes to Westminster, not Holyrood.

All these figures are different from those in the South East study reported by (among others) the Daily Mail, whose graphic shows London, the East and the South East of England subsidising the rest of the country, with spending in Scotland only marginally ahead of their contribution, though spending per head there is the second highest after London's. Researchers also uncovered high council tax bills in the South-East.

In Surrey council tax payers are compelled to provide £8 out of every £10 their town halls spend.

In Manchester, by contrast, council tax has to meet only £3 of town hall spending. The Treasury pays the rest.

Traditionally Labour has redistributed money to its areas of support. But the electoral arithmetic shows that Labour needs to retain its South-East marginals, so scope for increasing this redistribution may be limited.

How deserved is this redistribution anyway? We can see, for instance, that teenage pregnancy is highest in the Regions with most "income deprivation", three of the five in the north. Poverty can hardly cause teenage pregnancies, and it's hard to believe that intelligence varies so much among Regions. Is it lack of personal responsibility, and an addiction to the social security culture? If so, should we be subventing it?

Alcohol related hospital stays are hugely higher in the North East and North West than elsewhere. Binge drinking is higher in the three northern Regions than elsewhere. The North East has the highest proportion of adults who smoke (by a considerable margin) and the lowest proportion of 5 a day eaters.

Individually these numbers can be picked apart at the margins, but an overall pattern emerges. Cigarette health warnings aren't printed in smaller type in the north, we all see the same propaganda about healthy eating, and the mass media are similar across the country.

One set of numbers may lead us to ask what levels of state spending the constituents of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have compared to those in South East England (and this before we consider the West Lothian question, which asks why Scottish MPs should be able to vote on purely English issues).

In Belgium, Flanders is reluctant to go on bankrolling Wallonia. Southern England may wonder how deserving northern England is. They have remedies in their hands. They could even move a couple of hundred miles and get a job. Poles travel much farther.

But then they'd be taking responsibility and working for a living.

A modest proposal for a referendum demonstration

Most people want a referendum on the EU constitutional treaty, even if they don't understand why.

Most people will never understand most of the constitutional arguments. So the case against the treaty has to be put in terms that most people will grasp, and in terms that they will consider important.

So far the research has been excellent. The enthusiasts have burrowed away and produced chapter and verse to show that about 95% of the previous version of the constitution is in this rerun.

But the presentation of the case has been inept.

The Business usefully reminds us that

The treaty will introduce majority voting in 60 new areas, covering everything from energy policy to employment law for the self-employed, a clear loss of national sovereignty in favour of Brussels; it involves a 30% cut in Britain’s power to block legislation it deems to be against its national interest; in addition to the de facto EU Foreign Minister, it includes an EU Diplomatic Service plus substantial moves towards a common defence; it creates a powerful EU President; and gives Brussels new powers over public services, including health, education, public spending and transport.

As we saw last week, the government doesn't want to talk about what changes the treaty aims to introduce - it just keeps claiming that we would be protected from the worst of them.

If there is going to be a march or a demonstration, get 60 pairs of sandwich boards. On the front of each, put a large number from 1 to 60. On the back, put a maximum of six words identifying the veto to be surrendered.

That should be eye-catching, and get people asking questions. They should also make great pictures.

It's time for examples, examples, examples.

Our nationalised education system fails its tests

Sometimes, rather than immersing readers in a persiflage of elegant prose, it's worth driving home some basic numbers - much as a traditional teacher would do, perhaps.

Education spending has doubled in the past decade.

Secondary education is failing children.

• Fewer than half of 16-year-olds this year achieved five A*-C grade GCSEs including English and maths;
• Only a quarter achieved five A*-C grade GCSEs including English, maths, science and a foreign language;
• One in five teenagers failed to get a single A*-C grade GCSE - for boys, the figure was one in four.

Primary education is failing children. One in five go to secondary school unable to read properly. The Telegraph previews a television series showing how children's reading improved when they were taught the traditional way - that is, knowing the sounds of letters and then working out words. (This is not, as the Telegraph calls it, a "new solution".)

This simple activity has acquired an academic terminology. They call it "synthetic phonics", and putting the letters together is termed "blending". It works -

Researchers in the Scottish county of Clackmannanshire found that children of primary school age who had been taught using synthetic phonics were three years and six months above their chronological age in word and reading ability, and nearly two years above it in their ability to spell correctly.

So the measures of reading ages and spelling ages have been set too low, to allow politicians to demonstrate success even while teachers have been using bad teaching methods.

"I have never seen results like this in 30 years of teaching," was one teacher's reaction to the Clackmannanshire evidence.

Well, you should have done. You're fired.

Results from West Dunbartonshire support the superiority of synthetic phonics. A decade ago, 28 per cent of its 11-year-olds were functionally illiterate. Synthetic phonics was introduced and, 10 years on, although the area is one of the most disadvantaged in Scotland, illiteracy among 11-year-olds has been reduced almost to zero.

But, the Telegraph says, some educational "professionals" still oppose it.

Cathy Nutbrown, a professor of education at Sheffield University, sums up their concerns when she says that, if synthetic phonics is taught to children at the age of four, "there are lots of things that early years professionals can do that could be squeezed out, such as reading to children or singing nursery rhymes".

But there is no more important educational achievement for a child than learning to read. For instance, two thirds of people in prison are functionally illiterate. A child cannot emerge "rounded" from education if they can't read. We the people are paying Cathy Nutcase to defend bad teaching methods.

What lessons can we draw from this shabby tale?

1. Professionals aren't always to be trusted. Some people want to treat practitioners as wise, disinterested philosopher kings who can be trusted to make the right decisions about how their service should be provided. It's not true in education, any more than it is in medicine. They need to be steered from outside. Priorities are for society to set, not the practitioners.

2. What a mess politicians have made of education. Well, and health, and the army, and flood control, and foot and mouth, and policing, and ... well any almost any area of government activity you care to name. They look underpowered and tired.

Michael Gove, for the Tories, has his own ideas for more traditional education, but more importantly this Scotsman wants to bring competition to english education.

"In Sweden in the 1990s, they opened up the state system and a significant number of parents, charities and businesses set up schools. As a result standards improved and it wasn't only the new schools that pioneered better ways of providing education but the state schools raised their game so it was a virtuous circle. Once you have real choice in the state system, private schools are not much of an issue."

Bad nationalised schools would have to up their game or face falling rolls and falling finance.

Nationalised medicine is failing, nationalised schooling is failing. Time indeed to try something new and keep a beady eye on the results. But not faith schools, please.

More inadequate sentences

Would you like to meet Ernest Norton? He looks a nice, cheerful bloke.

Well, you can't. Back in February 2006 he collapsed with a heart attack after five boys pelted him with stones and rocks, and died.

What was he doing? Was he robbing an old lady, perhaps, or even drunk and disorderly? No. He was playing cricket with his son at a leisure centre. As the BBC reports it

The pair came under a hail of missiles and two stones hit Mr Norton's head.

The boys who did that are now aged between 12 and 14. They were convicted of manslaughter and violent disorder back in August, and the system has just got round to pronouncing sentence on them.

Before you read further, pause for a moment and think what sentence they deserve. They surely knew what they were doing.

I would have given them ten years, partly as a signal that society doesn't tolerate behaviour like that.

Have you decided?

They have been sentenced to two years' detention.

That's for manslaughter.

The mistaken pro-referendum campaign

Richard North picks up this morning's Financial Times piece about voters' preference for a referendum on the treaty in four large EU countries. He homes in on the important point that the poll revealed

"widespread ignorance" about the treaty, with 61 percent saying they are "not at all familiar" with it, 34 percent claiming they are "somewhat familiar", three percent describing themselves as "very familiar" and one percent "extremely familiar".

This is why the treaty is deliberately obscure.

Tellingly, Mark Mardell reports on his blog that -

... the Prime Minister's spokesman ... said the treaty was necessary to make Europe work efficiently.

He declined to give detailed examples.

Those two quotes sum up exactly the mistakes the pro-referendum campaigners are making.

Most people couldn't tell you the difference between a reform treaty and a constitutional treaty. If they knew, they wouldn't care much.

This subject of course fascinates the pro-referendum campaigners, and because the public doesn't care, ministers are happy to bore voters into compliance by joining in the dance on the head of the pin.

What does making the EU (not Europe!) work more efficiently mean? It involves giving the EU more power over countries' affairs. In our case by surrendering over 50 vetoes.

You can bet the government doesn't want to give examples. But sadly the pro-referendum campaigners don't seem much interested either.

Just as it is no good campaigners joining the dance on the head of the pin, so it is no good them repeatedly moaning that the government is riding roughshod over opposition. Of course it is!

Campaigners should take the initiative and open up a second front. How better to do that, than to discuss a subject which the Prime Minister's spokesman doesn't want to talk about?

Give examples, give examples, and give examples.

P.S. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has made a start in his Telegraph piece on the 19th. And blood-curdling it is.

Send them vainglorious

What makes ministers tick? Probably a combination of vanity and ignorance.

They have thrown huge amounts of our money at nationalised schooling. But despite dumbing down, results haven't improved in proportion.

They have thrown huge amounts of our money at the nationalised health service. Yet we have plague hospitals run by managers who reject unfavourable information. The media report today that a quarter of hospital trusts in England are failing to meet new standards on infection control.

The state takes citizens' money and uses it to disempower us. The staff at Maidstone could not raise their voices about what was going on at their hospital, and it's hard to see how local people could have brought any pressure to bear.

Yet the Stalinist vanity of ministers knows no bounds. They also think they should tax us and hector us about global warming. That is even though

• It hasn't been happening lately. For example, the southern hemisphere had a cold winter.
• Even if the earth is warming, it's not clear it's caused by humanity.

Now Philip Stott has picked up a piece in The Times headed

China’s drive for wealth means end of our low-carbon dreams

Stott summarises the argument thus. China aims to make every citizen twice as rich by 2020. So it will need ever more raw materials, especially coal.

What does this mean? Put bluntly, it means that the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions is dead and so is any prospect of persuading Beijing to bind itself to other curbs on carbon emissions.

Our politicians' attempts to convert to a low carbon economy are

1. Pointless - "the UK accounts for only 2 per cent of world energy demand, a figure that will fall to around 1.4 per cent by 2020".
2. Threatening our future prosperity. China and other developing countries will need ever more oil, gas and coal, forcing their prices up. But we have no economic substitutes. "If the West weakens its investment in oil and gas, and fails to adopt a new generation of nuclear power, it will be in grave economic danger", or as the writer in The Times puts it, “The feeble intellectual response of Europe and America to this energy challenge is becoming a matter not of concern but alarm”.

The army, the schools, the hospitals, the floods, foot and mouth, drinking hours, road pricing - it's hard to think of something this lot has got right. But they still preen themselves that they can preach on green morality.

And their opponents are just as bad. There seems to be a politicians' mindset. Vainglory all round.

Bring me your sad and your fat

What does it mean to be officially disabled?

There's a lot of it, about according to The Times - 10% of people aged 16 to 24 are disabled, and one third of people aged 50 to 65.

We are also told that

There are 6.9 million disabled people of working age in Britain – one in five of the working population.

Ill health must be sweeping the nation. Why is this epidemic not headline news every day?

Some 50.4% of disabled people are employed compared with 80.2% of nondisabled people.

So maybe official disability isn't always as bad as we first thought. Ah ha, the World Health Organisation predicts that depression will be the leading cause of disability by 2020. Why should this be? Is the future really going to be so sad?

Here's another strange thing.

There are regional variations in the prevalence of disability. Northeast England and Wales have the highest number of disabled people, with one quarter of the working age population in these regions disabled. London, the South East and the East of England have lower than average proportions of disabled people at 17 per cent.

It couldn't be, could it, that they are skiving out there in Wales?

The common complaints among the disabled of depression and back pain are among the hardest to be sure about. Sure enough, when we look more closely -

In February there were 2.43 million people claiming incapacity benefit in Britain – 41 per cent were claiming for mental and behavioural disorders (my italics).

What will be the next - ahem - big thing? More of us are going to get too fat to work. But no need to worry, reports the BBC -

Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity and government must act to stop Britain "sleepwalking" into a crisis, a report has concluded.

The 250 experts said excess weight was now the norm in our "obesogenic" society. The government, of course, pledged to draw up a strategy to address the issue, though the report's authors admitted proof that any anti-obesity policy worked "was scant".

So there we are. We'll be a nation of depressed fatties - doubtless with bad backs too - unable to work, bailed out by the taxes paid by immigrants.

We saw disability has regional variations. And lo! when we look at obesity -

By 2050, as many as 70 per cent of men aged 20 to 60 living in Yorkshire and Humberside, the West Midlands and the North East are likely to be obese, according to the report.

About 65 per cent of women in Yorkshire and Humberside could be obese by then.

In contrast, obesity is declining among women in the South West, with seven per cent expected to be obese by 2050 – far below the present level of 17 per cent.

About 38 per cent of men and women are predicted to be obese in the London region.

Looks like the south will be subsidising the north even more than it is now.

That is, unless the nannies can save the day. The head of nutrition and health research at the Medical Research Council said: "We need to take responsibility as a society [whatever that means] for our unhealthy lifestyle."

The minister responsible will be Dawn Primarolo, she who couldn't get tax credits right, so what hope does she have of making us thinner? "We as ministers", she said, "have to balance encouraging people to engage with information without looking like we are being dictatorial" (my italics, though I don't think there's anything sinister in the phrasing, I think she's just rather thick).

In future, will suppliants for tax credits have to send her quarterly weight charts?

The charity Weight Concern, however, differ. They say the Government will indeed have to take some unpopular decisions ... such as restricting fast food outlets (eh?) and tackling food manufacturers. But "this is not something the Government can solve on its own", they added - I'll say that again - "and people do have to exercise personal responsibility".

Exercising personal responsibility was a Perth shoplifter who stole £7000-worth of clothes because he was an alcoholic and his incapacity benefit wasn't enough to buy as much drink as he wanted. Pretty able-bodied if he could carry that many clothes. And disposing of them showed initiative too.

And a Cambridge man on incapacity benefit was well enough to fulfil a supervisory role as a favour sometimes in a restaurant, as well as driving home after he had been disqualified for drink-driving.

What a system - corrupting of individuals, unaffordably expensive.

If so many people are "disabled", then the definition of "disabled" is wrong. We need to move the goalposts, so that fewer people are subsidised.

And if I am fat, that is my fault. Not the supermarket's, not the restaurant's, not even Dawn's and Gordon's. And certainly not society's.

Throw away the key

Say hello to Mark Campbell, who lives near Chichester, in Sussex, which is a nice part of the world. He's 38 and he's a welder.

He's just been convicted of four counts of indecent assault, three counts of rape, two counts of false imprisonment, one count of attempted indecent assault, one count of sexual assault and two counts of burglary. One of his victims was a girl aged 12, who was falsely imprisoned as she walked home from school.

Now, the police fouled up by - amazingly - not sending his DNA for analysis when he was arrested over a suspected "peeping Tom" offence in 2002. But that's not the point of this post.

He's been jailed for life - good. But -

Campbell was told he would have to serve at least 10 years before he would become eligible for parole.

Now, this man knew just what he was doing.

The girl who was 12 at the time of the attack told how she appealed in vain to Campbell's conscience, saying: "I'm only 12, why are you doing this?"

So after 10 years this man can ask to be released. If he is denied, he can appeal.

This is the wrong message. He will only be 48 by then and his urges will still be strong.

Is the sentence in line with the sentencing guidance? If it is, I don't much care for the sentencing guidance. Men like Campbell should go away for a very long time, stay away for a long time, and have to work if they want to be able to afford more than basic rations.

Maybe this is a redneck post. There is no subtle juxtaposition of differing viewpoints, no teasing out of policy implications.

A sentence like this is just plain wrong.

Politicians can't run hospitals

It is good to see a debate about the structure of the NHS. Dr James Lefanu rather sweetly calls for a return to the 1970's when disinterested professionals ruled the NHS. This for an employer of 1.5m people costing huge amounts of taxpayers' money, with major conflicting claims on its cash pot.

Charles Moore does a bit better in claiming that the health service cannot put the sick first because its client is the government. He suggests emulating the French system, under which hospitals compete. This would be attractive if all hospitals offered the same services. But they don't. All illnesses have to be treated - maybe more of them in specialist units. It's not clear how hospitals would compete simply.

(And competition doesn't always work as the central planners think it will - Richard North explains here why he thinks out-sourcing hospital cleaning on a price basis will never work.)

Nonetheless, the French system is an interesting comparator. This blog knows of a French hospital which for one illness is a world centre of excellence, and it is still as clean as a new pin. The French system may be unaffordable. But that may not be because its hospitals are clean!

If you separate the purchaser (the state) from the provider, at least you avoid the culture of NHS management who paid Rose Gibb £250,000 of taxpayers' money to go away when they knew she was about to be criticised yet again. This is contemptuous of patients and contemptuous of taxpayers. It has been claimed this is a private matter between Ms Gibb and her employer. It isn't. If Tesco gave a big severance payment to a manager who had been responsible for killing nearly 100 of their customers, the shareholders would be up in arms. In the case of a nationalised industry we are all shareholders.

As well as the complacency of insulated management, there is another lesson to be drawn. Local criticism of the unspeakable Ms Gibb carried no weight at all. She had been running dirty hospitals for years, but no local pressure could improve things under this serial killer.

At her trust, staff tried in vain for three years to get hospital bosses to tackle C-diff with more nurses and cleaners. Campaigner Geoff Martin said: "Staff reported a culture of bullying. If you spoke out you were told shut up or lose your job. Managers refused to listen."

(Incidentally, her partner also had a bad record running Barking, Havering and Redbridge Hospitals NHS Trust. )

Looking back through this blog, it's striking how many recent posts have highlighted poor performance of the labour-intensive nationalised industry that is the NHS - for instance on deep cleaning and poor treatment of the elderly, or the decline in NHS efficiency since 1997, or poor survival rates for cancer patients and stroke victims.

As we have argued before -

Medics sometimes call for "Tesco management" of the NHS. No Tesco manager would take this on. The Nationalised Health Service is too big and too complicated for anyone to manage effectively, even if they were freed from interventions by politicians (and medics?).

There is a stark choice: break up this nationalised monolith, or continue to pour taxpayers' money down the drain.

Meanwhile, people die because politicians are so puffed up that they think they can run hospitals. They can't.

The patients who died are martyrs to the vanity of politicians.

No surprise in the referendum debate

Richard North picks up the Guardian piece saying, "Ministers believe there is no real appetite for a referendum on the treaty. Despite a fierce press campaign, they say petitions demanding a referendum are attracting little support."

He writes a good analysis of the position which the pro-referendum campaigners have allowed themselves to be boxed into.

Most of the public wouldn't be able to explain to you the difference between a treaty and a constitution. And they never will, despite the popularising efforts of The Sun.

This makes it a good battleground for the government. Many pro-referendum campaigners are fascinated by the debate, but most people will find their eyes glazing over after 10 seconds.

That is why the government have astutely chosen this battleground. Note that they have never said how the treaty will change things. They have never said why the treaty will actually be good for Britain - just that it won't be particularly harmful (the red lines debate).

As this blog has argued before, the answer is to turn the debate into a series of examples. Arguably the treaty is a device to make bad EU regulation easier.

The campaign should give examples of what the surrender of over 50 vetoes could let other EU countries make us do. Forget issues like the UN Security Council seat - this blog doesn't care much, and most people don't care at all - even if they know what the Security Council is.

The examples should be issues which could affect people's daily lives.

The proposition is simple. The EU has already forced us to do A, B, and C. Under the new treaty, the EU could also force us to do D, E, F and G, which at the moment our own government decides.

And work up a few examples - like daytime headlights - showing how ordinary opposition and demonstration is almost impossible.

The important thing is to paint the picture.

The government has chosen their battlefield for a reason. It's not because they can win the intellectual argument. They know they can't. It's because they know the public at large won't mind very much.

But if the public know how much power the treaty will hand over to Brussels? They are likely to care a lot more.

Is there a shortage of webspace?

The BBC reports the Judge's verdict in the case about whether Gore's propaganda film could be shown in schools.

The government's guidance to teachers was changed after the legal challenge to distributing the film was launched. The Judge said -

I conclude that the claimant substantially won this case by virtue of my finding that, but for the new guidance note, the film would have been distributed in breach of sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Education Act.

So the government distributed a propaganda film to schools at taxpayers' expense without providing balanced guidance.

The government can still send the film to schools, provided that it's accompanied by guidance giving the other side of the argument. "The judge said nine statements in the film were not supported by current mainstream scientific consensus." But hang on, there's such a demand for webspace these days that the BBC can only find room to report three. I wonder why?

The nine errors stated by the judge included:

• Mr Gore's assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future". The judge said this was "distinctly alarmist" and it was common ground that if Greenland's ice melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia".
  
  
• Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.
  
  
• Mr Gore's reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned "swimming long distances - up to 60 miles - to find the ice". The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm."

Well done, Stewart Dimmock, for stopping the government force-feeding our children with propaganda. He is up there with Peter Roberts, who set-up the e-petition against road pricing. Heroes indeed.

P.S. Stewart Dimmock's own summary is (as you might expect) more forthright.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The inaccuracies are:

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.

* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.

* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

* The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

* The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

The parliamentary noose tightens

In Foreign Office questions, David Miliband and Europe Minister Jim Murphy tried to play down the significance of the European Scrutiny Committee report, say Open Europe, claiming that it referred to an earlier draft of the treaty. However -

When pressed by Labour MP (and former European Convention member) Gisela Stuart on whether the latest draft of the treaty was materially any different from the previous draft, Murphy was unable to name any differences.

Open Europe pick up a report from The Mail that Downing Street admitted last night that the new EU treaty was 'substantially' the same as the scrapped constitution, but maintained the line that the UK’s safeguards meant that Britain effectively has its own treaty.

In Prime Minister's Questions today, Gordon Brown claimed that the annexes, appendices etc made the treaty substantially different.

There are two problems with this.

1. He gave no examples at all
   
   
2. His credibility is in tatters after the fiasco of the election that never was and his obviously false excuses.

Still no one will ask the government and its outriders

• What is the treaty for?
  
  
• How does it benefit Britain?
  
  
• Why is it good for the country to surrender over 50 vetoes?

There is a good reason why the government are not trumpeting the benefits of the treaty - the treaty has no benefits that the government believes it can sell.

So the government puts up the most boring case it can - that it is no longer a constitution - in order to send the country to sleep. And the opponents of the treaty fall for it.

The battle now is moving to the question of whether the red lines will hold. Another peripheral argument which the government can tie up in tedious complexities while the big central questions lie untouched.

The Spectator's Coffee House blog reports that during an appearance in front of the Foreign Affairs select committee today, David Miliband promised to produce a letter setting out precisely where Britain’s red lines are protected. This, they say, "will set off a row over whether these protections are worth the paper they’re written on and highlight just how similar the new treaty is to the old constitution".

Expect Miliband's letter to be very long and tediously detailed.

The tipping point?

Jim Callaghan remarked that every so often there is a sea change in politics, and if you're caught on the wrong side of it there's nothing much you can do.

Are we witness to this now? Mr Brown was scuttling towards an election for his own benefit, the poster sites were booked, Mr Suit and Mr Tie had been dropping teaser hints. There's no doubt that Brown was orchestrating it all, and no doubt that he lied about why he chickened out. All this even though the electoral arithmetic never worked.

This teasing united the Tories and they had to pull together. Comment has focused on Cameron's relatively vacuous memorised Conference speech, and George Osborne's pledge on Inheritance Tax.

Labour questions whether the tax cut is funded. Jeff Randall gives three reasons why it doesn't matter whether it is or not.

1. Gordon Brown's promises at the Labour conference were unfunded
2. £3bn is a pimple when state spending is over £600bn
3. Even if the sums are wrong, huge amounts can be saved elsewhere. For instance, welfare payments cost £161bn and "other expenditure" is £59bn.

If Labour pursue accountant-like claims that it can't be afforded, they'll look grey and niggardly, out of touch with the concerns of voters in those southern England marginals.

Let's not forget there was more to the Conservative conference than that. Iain Duncan Smith is to lead a task force to find ways to cut the soaring welfare benefits bill (see above). The Business commented that -

Mr Cameron stressed that people on benefits who were found jobs but refused to take them would have their benefits stopped. The importance of this is that it means the Tories are finally sold on moving the welfare state from being a passive donor of benefits to a transition mechanism for work; they also agree that those who refuse to play by the rules need to be penalised.

Most important of all, it shows the Tories finally understand that Britain must follow America’s lead on welfare; the famous reform bill that Mr Clinton signed into law in 1996, ending the automatic entitlement to hand-outs, helped slash the welfare rolls from 12.2m to 4.5m in a few years. By the end of the Clinton administration, child poverty was as its lowest level since 1979 and the poverty rate for children of single mothers the lowest since records began.

It does actually need to go beyond that since so few Britons on benefits get offered jobs in the first place - 54% of new jobs in Britain were taken by foreigners between 1997 and 2006. Sainsbury's, for instance, say that immigrant workers have a "superior" work ethic to British employees. Soft options won't deliver the goods.

Michael Gove announced an education policy which would finally break the stranglehold of Local Education Authorities, allowing charities (hurrah), voluntary groups (hurrah), and faith groups (boo) to set up their own state-funded schools with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle.

Money will follow pupils; each child in these new privately managed schools will be funded to the tune of £5,263 per head, the average spending per pupil in state schools, with a significant extra top-up for the poorest children. Although its not quite a voucher system, Milton Friedman and FA Hayek would have been proud of Mr Gove; this is the most radical yet practical educational proposal ever endorsed by the Tories.

So is this the tipping point? Brown has fundamentally damaged his image very early in his premiership. It's conventional wisdom that southern England marginals will be hugely important in the electoral arithmetic. Just one proposed tax cut has played stunningly well there in a way that won't be forgotten, and this may intensify as the reduction in households' free disposable income keeps biting (it's at its lowest level for a decade). And the Taxpayers' Alliance keeps pegging away the truth that government is hugely incompetent in the way it wastes taxpayers' money.

Perhaps there is a sea change against more tax and more spend. It's too soon to know. But just maybe historians will say this was a tipping point.

A treaty to make bad EU regulation easier

This blog has long argued that people favouring a referendum on the EU constitutional treaty should stop dancing with David Miliband on the head of a pin swapping chants claiming the treaty is or is not a constitution.

This battlefield suits him well. People may say they would like a referendum on an EU document, but whether it is or it isn't a constitution won't rank very high in their concerns, and they would be hard pressed to explain exactly what the distinction was.

Miliband has yet to face simple but much harder questions - such as

• What is the treaty for?
  
  
• How does it benefit Britain?

Let's keep this broadbrush. One aim of the treaty is to make it easier for the EU to make rules. So it's reasonable to ask, Do our foreign rulemakers make a good job of regulating our lives?

For instance, there are the Directives on the Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) which Booker demolished over a year ago and Richard North has returned to today. Appliances are failing because they are now banned from using lead - which wasn't dangerous in the first place anyway.

And it seems the rule banning standby mode in appliances may be aimed at the wrong target, as this blog mentioned the other day.

How do EU rules like this get made? Blair seems to have been casually bounced into the rule phasing out conventional lightbulbs, an execrable example of his sofa government lite. Booker reminds us today that

The supposed "low energy" bulbs the EU wants to make compulsory simply cannot work in many enclosed light fittings without overheating, and to replace those fittings would in Britain alone cost billions of pounds.

And a Telegraph reader writes that "the cost and energy required to make low energy bulbs are higher than any that might be saved by their use".

They do things differently in the States. A global warming bill sponsored by two US senators has been analysed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Its proposals would cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion in its first 10 years. The EPA estimates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will be 718 parts per million by 2095 - and if the bill is passed, CO2 levels would be 695 ppm, a reduction of 23 ppm. This is out in the public domain for people to consider, and they can calculate that this expenditure of trillions of dollars might reduce average global temperature by as much as 0.18 degrees Celsius.

But what are the costs and benefits of the EU lightbulb policy?

In terms of the referendum campaign and the constitutional treaty, it's important to keep in mind that the argument isn't that we need to leave the EU. That's what opponents of a referendum claim the argument is.

The case against the treaty is different. It would make it easier for the EU to bring in new rules. Even if they were all good rules, there would be implications for civil liberties and democracy. But in fact some of the regulation is spectacularly bad. So the onus is on supporters of the treaty to explain why it would be good for the UK to make EU regulation easier.

One more example of EU regulation. Last year I blogged an EU proposal that drivers in the EU should have to keep their headlights on in daytime, and asked, "should this be an issue for the EU in the first place? Whatever happened to subsidiarity?"

Matthew Engel has picked up the issue in the Financial Times, under the heading "Brussels' glaring stupidity". He concentrates on how such rules come about.

There has been discussion of this issue for some years now, but this is discussion of a very EU-ish kind, ie hardly anyone has heard about it. There has been consultation involving (Gawd, how I hate this word) “stakeholders”, usually meaning groups that can afford lobbyists. And there was a two-month period in 2006 when individuals could respond. Population of the EU: 495 million. Number of respondents: 117.

He questions the projected reduction in accident figures: fatalities are falling anyway, and the law will increase dazzle and glare. Oh, and cars’ carbon dioxide usage will go up by between 0.3% and 1.5%.

The main concern, he says, is democracy. "Yes, there is debate, but it is so removed from the ordinary voter that 99 per cent of the population are likely to hear nothing until the law is passed – and maybe not even then." The 117 respondents were overwhelmingly against the change. The British government opposes the headlights plan, he says, but "is fatalistic about being forced to agree.

"Even the European Commission admits the idea is far less appropriate in the south than the north – so why pass a blanket law?"

He concludes that -

Britain may be wrong. This much is certain: as inappropriate, barely debated new regulations cover the continent, so alienation from the European project increases.

In such little ways, Europe sows the seeds of its own eventual collapse.

And this is the process which the constitutional treaty would make easier.

The Sun complains of BBC bias

The Sun is starting to look pretty serious about the EU Constitutional Treaty, and now about immigration too.

Today they attack Radio 4 for bias.

Biased Beeb

THE BBC has learned nothing from its own confession that it is institutionally biased in favour of Brussels.

A new study shows Radio Four’s Today programme gave FOUR times as much air-time to the commercial Glastonbury pop festival than to the crucial EU Constitution.

The BBC has virtually ignored the debate raging about the new Treaty — despite uproar in all parties and on both sides of the argument.

The same self-censorship is applied to immigration — another enormous issue not to be discussed in front of the licence-payers.

It is not just because many of its editors and producers are lefties — though many are.

It is an arrogant, lazy assumption that they know best — and ignorant audiences should not be disturbed by matters beyond their ken.

Certainly The Sun as part of Murdoch's empire has an axe to grind against the BBC. But this is straight, striking language, complaining in effect that the BBC hasn't been serious enough!

It doesn't look as if this is going to go away soon.

Don't stand by your regulations

The Financial Times reports that the need for consumers to turn appliances off rather than leave them in standby mode may be rendered obsolete by technology.

Scientists have calculated the differences in energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions between leaving the most advanced computer monitors and television sets on standby and turning them off - and found only marginal savings.

Oops. The team say that concentrating on standby mode is diverting attention from the real objective: improving the overall efficiency of electronic devices.

They argue that a EU directive aimed at outlawing standby mode is wrong-headed and could stop manufacturers improving the energy efficiency of products.

In their view, the important issue is to phase out old, energy-intensive components.

An old cathode ray tube computer monitor uses 75W, compared with 25W for a modern TFT screen. The difference between standby and off mode for a TFT screen, however, is only 1W.

Attempting to regulate the off mode is the most expensive option, they say, which saves the least amount of energy when it comes to producing more environmentally friendly electrical devices.

States run by a detailed central bureaucracy had a greater chance of prospering in the 18th and 19th centuries than now: science and society were changing more slowly; and back then most other ways of governing were less efficient.

But now a regulation can quickly become outdated - even if based on sound science when it is made (unlike the RoHS directive and the fashion for green nonsense).

Central planners like Macstalin make a similar mistake. No longer are the toiling masses powerless peasants in an unchanging society who will respond like automata to what they are told. People learn to think for themselves. Even in Stalin mk 1's command structure people falsified the numbers. And nowadays sanctions for non-compliance scarcely exist. Senior officials hardly ever get sacked (though whole departments can find themselves banished to internal exile in Wales or north-east England). And what other deterrence is there? Civil servants' bonuses are usually fudged, and this government can't even manage to run a cut down version of the Gulag.

Society changes, science changes. Changing science changes society. Advances in medical science may make it sensible to have fewer hospitals and push more medical procedures out to first level treatment centres. But the bills for PFI hospitals - entered into on the assumption that big changes in the infrastructure of medical care were unlikely - will still have to be met.

Generals may fight the last war, but at least some of them understood it. Ministers supposedly learn during their (usually brief) time on the job - and sometimes they're not up to learning very much.

Detailed central regulation is likely to prove flat-footed. When governments must regulate, they should regulate for ends, not means. Especially as the process of keeping the regulations updated can be so cumbersome and expensive.

The standby regulations could cost us money and energy. Like PFI hospitals.

Fixed term elections

On Question Time last night Ming Campbell suggested fixed term elections.

There's a problem, said George Osborne. What if the government doesn't get a stable majority - it would have to be able to go to the country early. (He referred to Wilson.)

How patronising! Representative democracy is based on the idea that the electorate - ignorant as it may be, uninterested as it may be - has the right to choose governments. When you add up the Commons seats, by convention the result is the will of the people, even though hardly any individuals may have wanted the outcome that happens.

Yet Mr high falutin' Osborne thinks it's fine to tell the electorate to go think again. Is this not exactly the criticism that's made of the EU when insubordinate countries have to rerun referenda in order to get the right answer?

If the electorate has chosen a government with a large majority, so be it. If the electorate has chosen a weak government, that is something a democrat should work with. If a small third party gains too much influence for one term by forming a coalition, it risks annihilation at the next election at a time not of its own choosing.

There may well be a democratic case against fixed terms. But it's not the case Mr Osborne put forward.

Hurrah, Peter Fincham resigns

Finally.

This is the man who told the press that a documentary trailer showed the Queen walking out "in a huff".

Good riddance.

England decides?

The election guff in the press assumes Labour's national lead will translate into Commons seats. But will it?

Sue Cameron reminds us in the Financial Times that boundary changes could lose Labour at least 12 seats, cutting the majority to around 45.

And are all Labour's Scottish seats safe? Losing say five there to the SNP brings the majority down to 35.

She suggests that the Conservatives might make gains in southern England.

There were nearly 40 s