Strictly Come Dancing

So it's over for another year. The Scorpion household enjoyed it again, down to our daily fixes of It Takes Two, and we're looking forward to next year. How can the BBC make Strictly Come Dancing better?

Talk of replacement has centred round Bruce Forsyth (not easy), but this household would replace Len Goodman. Goodman's main offence is not his gratuitous smuttiness on a family show, or his laughably perverse marking, but his know-all rudeness in regularly interrupting the other judges and arguing with them. Len Goodman has become a liability to Strictly Come Dancing and the BBC should replace him.

Press interest gives participants the opportunity to behave badly outside the studio and get noticed. Two of the judges, Len Goodman and Craig Revel Horwood, branded women viewers as "emotionally challenged" and claimed they were voting for male dancers on the basis of "a bit of eye candy". What sensible celebrity rubbishes their audience?

Craig Revel Horwood in particular has castigated viewers for not casting votes based on the dances. If that was what the BBC wanted, then they shouldn't have kept the phone lines open all week and encouraged viewers to "get voting" on the basis of new dances they hadn't seen yet. It would have been interesting to see this aired on It Takes Two, but the programme doesn't do meat.

It was also reported that Dominic Littlewood claimed the show was rigged, with the judges deciding their scores before the programme was even broadcast. Not only is this particularly unprofessional in someone who works for the BBC (on the One Show), the allegation seems impossible. Nonetheless, it's eye-opening to see celebs parade their stupidity, whether it's Dominic in Strictly, Vincent Simone hoping his professional partner will lose, or contestants in I'm a Celebrity without the faintest idea of what 10% of 60 is, or unable to spell "height". Yet they seem to get through life.

The final brought the right result, with votes for Matt Di Angelo (not his real name) probably not encouraged by the repeated sightings of his gum chewing yobbo brothers. We probably know more about Alesha Dixon's background than we wanted to thanks to cashing in by a rogue brother and her ex-husband, but at least they weren't on display, unlike the yobbo brothers.

But there were many pleasures through the weeks, not least Bruce himself and the bubbly Claudia. The limited Tess provided perhaps the most toe-curling moment of the series right at the end, asking Matt and Flavia if they would "continue to see each other" (what!?).

If there's one big thing the BBC needs to improve in the next series it's the camerawork. It reached its nadir during the final when the two couples danced the Viennese Waltz simultaneously. But during most dances we probably saw the footwork for no more than 70% of the time. The director seems to think we need repeated close-ups and different shots, when in our household at least we just want full length shots of the couples dancing all the time, please. This may not be very interesting for the director, but far too often the clumsy attempts to provide clever camerawork lessened our enjoyment.

Nonetheless - and with all the showbiz bromide we had to sit through - Strictly Come Dancing has been hugely enjoyable again.

What global warming?

What's going on above our heads? Global warming has stopped, says a qualified science writer in no less than the New Statesman.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001.

It's a pity, says David Whitehouse, that they didn't discuss this at Bali.

Lord Monckton gives his separate account of what he experienced there.

Oops, this is just at the moment when, reports The Guardian, ministers have been ordered to assess the climate cost of all decisions. Would that be Nil, then? If so, doctrinaire miscalculations will lead to skewed decisions, which will leave us poorer.

A case for accountable transparency

Only yesterday this blog posted on accountable transparency, and suggested that the BBC might be an interesting place to start.

(For those new to the concept, accountable transparency is the revolutionary notion that we, the people, should be able to see how state organisations are spending our money. Databases and the internet now make this practicable for any organisation with halfway decent IT. Well, okay, but the USA can do it.) Accountable transparency is the new democracy.

Today the excellent Sue Cameron reports on a BBC Bonding Day. Read and cringe.

The bonding day cost £10,000. That is how they treat our money.

This money belongs to the people.

You're in the EU now

Today the MSM started to give a clearer idea of what it is going to mean to be in the EU. A long piece on Radio 4's 6 o'clock news reported the decision over vehicle emissions, with the gloss that the German commissioner, seeking to defend Germany's car industry, had been overcome by the Greek environment commissioner. Car prices might rise by £1,000. There seemed to be no trace of the British government at all.

Meanwhile, Labour MPs who support Blair and Brown in giving away sovereignty to the EU - probably partly because they haven't troubled themselves to understand it - are now complaining at the possibility that the Commission's hastily hidden health directive may undermine our second rate Nationalised Health Service - this on a day when it's reported that "scores of premature babies may be dying unnecessarily across England because the NHS mismanaged a reform of neonatal units in 2003". Richard North explains the background to the EU proposal.

Countries' ability to opt out would be in the commission's gift, reports The Times.

Brussels will allow countries to refuse to fund such operations abroad if they can argue that domestic services will suffer as a result. Such opt-outs would be negotiated procedure by procedure.

Yes, that'll work in a streamlined fashion.

Comment has focused on the appalling prospect that Britons may be able to get faster treatment elsewhere in the EU and charge the government. If the UK government is concerned, imagine how Bucharest or Sofia or Budapest views the prospect that numbers of their citizens may go to other EU countries to get treated more promptly than they can at home, and at considerably greater expense - again chargeable to their government.

How long will it be before it becomes illegal under EU law for a hospital to give priority to those in the waiting list from their own country? The pressure would be felt first by national centres of excellence, such as Great Ormond Street. There will be others in other EU countries.

Of course at the outset this would be a boon to those countries with over-capacity in healthcare (did anyone mention France?), but in the medium term it would tend to lead to a levelling of healthcare provision across the EU.

As usual in EU matters, the UK government is in belated reaction mode. Our government's policy is that NICE and the NHS's unaccountable satraps should retain their dictatorial powers of life and death over the taxpaying serfs:

We are committed to ensuring that the right legislative framework is developed which ensures that, where patients choose to travel abroad, the NHS retains the ability to decide what care it will fund to meet the clinical needs of people it looks after.

Meanwhile, Keith Pollard from Treatment Abroad said on the Today programme that 10,000 Britons have gone abroad this year to receive treatment that would be available on the NHS, and it is not surprising to read that

I run Piestany Dental Clinic & Spa in Slovakia for over 2 years now and have met countless clients fed up with the UK dental situation and coming over to us for implants, veneers and crowns abroad. Dental treatment abroad is a fast growing phenomenon and with the level of expertise and care given by companies such as http://www.dentalholiday.co.uk it's hard for the NHS to compete.

One can understand the government's fear of having to sign more blank cheques (Northern Rock is scary enough). And a Health Department which can't run one over-large nationalised industry is hardly likely to be effective in supplicating to Brussels for exemptions on a treatment by treatment basis, or in budgeting effectively for the resulting extra demand.

This money belongs to the people

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers' Alliance welcomes the arrival of USASpending.gov, "where Americans can see where their money goes". This appears to be a broad brush top down approach, but it is a big step forward in accountable transparency, a concept lauded previously on this blog. Accountable transparency is the new democracy.

Mark stresses the sheer amount of information that would be available easily to the public. At present Freedom of Information requests have to be made for each item, a process which can be laborious - and one, moreover, which gives the government notice of possible areas of concern.

The Freedom of Information Act has made the situation a bit better, and has shifted the balance of power at least a bit. You only need to look at the proportion of newspaper articles that are now based on information gleaned through the Act to see that it is making an impact. Even with FoI, unearthing public expenditure data remains a time-consuming activity at best and a pot shot hunting tool at worst.

Mark describes its limitations well.

So we can welcome the progress of accountable transparency in the USA. What now?

Trying to get the whole of the UK state sector to adopt accountable transparency in one big bite seems heroic. Maybe campaigning should start by trying to pick off outfits such as quangos and the BBC.

Whenever a new quango is created, or the life of an existing one is extended, this accountable transparency should be mandatory.

And campaigners should routinely call for accountable transparency from any state sector body which they suspect may be worthless. That includes the EU!

Then the idea will begin to seep into the public's consciousness. And after a while it will start to seem odd when there is no accountable transparency.

This money belongs to the people.

A revolution in draft

What happened to Michael Gove's comment piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph? Is he a victim of crude sub-editing, or was his article really so disorganised?

Of the three columns the first is just an introduction (though stylish). We get to the meat in the second column -

The great unwritten story of the Brown Government is the intellectual exhaustion at its heart. Central to what Brown calls his vision are three things - rhetoric about aspiration linked to housing, an emphasis on education as a route to greater opportunity, and a promise to strengthen Britishness as an identity that underpins our security. Yet in the past week his Government has disappointed in each area. Because its approach, far from being genuinely visionary or far-sighted, is shaped by an outdated bureaucratic mindset.

His housing critique is strange. He criticises Brown for not "reforming the planning system to allow local communities to promote house-building". This fits his thesis of Local Good, Central Bad. But Brown's aim is to build more homes, especially in the South East, the country's economic powerhouse. Gove writes as if local authorities were keen as mustard to throw up more developments, while central government was holding them back. The opposite is true. What local authority in the South East got elected because of a promise to build on more green belt land?

His paragraph on education makes more sense, and so it should as he is shadow education secretary. Then he moves to his third theme, Britishness....

Well, actually, no he doesn't. The EU makes a surprise guest appearance, while Britishness is never mentioned again. His general thrust, though, is surely sound, that

Dominance of the future rests with those who understand that excellence comes not from state diktat or ministerial fiat but the creation of a virtuous dynamic with open, competitive systems that empower individuals and reward innovation.

Hence, he says,

British Conservatives are learning from the best examples of how other countries have generated improvement in public services and we propose that, as in Sweden, all parents should have the right, which currently only the rich have in Britain, to take their child out of a failing school and be able to choose a good school place instead.

The economy, and science and technology, appear in his conclusion, but the final point of interest is what is not there.

The NHS - with its underperformance and its democratic deficit - gets no mention at all. Commentators such as The Business are keen to see the Opposition move to a new strategy for the Nationalised Health Service. But there are two political reasons why silence is golden. First, the performance of the unreformed NHS regularly brings Labour bad headlines and they have no strategy for reversing this trend. So the Conservatives can follow the lead of Robin Cook when he was shadow health spokesman, keep quiet about health and accept the political dividend of the government's ineptitude.

Secondly, if the Conservatives did start to spell out a radical strategy for the NHS, Labour would surely use it to scare off voters. So the Tories are right to keep silent about the NHS.

Meanwhile, it might be interesting to read what the scots Mr Gove has to say on the subject of Britishness if his sub-editor permits, whether that sub-editor is an anonymous Telegraph employee or Andy Coulson.

Equal second class citizens

We've already looked at the suggestion that funding for a prostate cancer treatment may be withdrawn. It's that shadowy NICE - skulking in a democratic deficit.

The life of a former nurse is now being threatened by another unaccountable group of NHS satraps. These are South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust.

Colette Mills has been told that if she attempts to top up her treatment privately, she will have to foot the entire £10,000 bill for her drugs and care, reports The Times.

The bizarre threat stems from the refusal by the government to let patients pay for additional drugs that are not prescribed on the NHS.

She is prepared to pay the Trust for the drug and the cost of its administration, which would amount to at least £4,000 a month. But she doesn't think she should have to pay for the rest of her treatment.

The government's position is clear. They oppose the so-called “co-payments” on the ground that patients in the same NHS ward would be receiving different drugs based solely on their ability to pay.

But doctors say this already happens where private and NHS patients are treated at the same NHS unit.

What this amounts to is that the government would prefer all of us to get the second-class healthcare available on the NHS. Rather than some receiving the best drugs, it's better that no NHS patients should receive them at all. Equality is all.

The unelected, unaccountable Trust says

If a patient chooses to go private for certain drugs they elect to become a private patient for the course of their treatment for that condition. That is the trust policy.

The government's priority is clear.

The Department of Health said: “Co-payments would risk creating a two-tier health service and be in direct contravention with the principles and values of the NHS.

Labour prefer us to languish and perhaps die in the grey mediocre uniformity of their Nationalised Health Service, under the heels of their politically correct satraps.

Priorities

"What's asylum?" asked the 11-year-old, when he saw the headline in The Telegraph

Asylum seekers' £4,000 'bribe' row

It claims that 23,000 people have been paid £36m to return home.

The most striking quote in a strange but only too predictable story is the justification.

Ministers say that paying failed asylum seekers to leave is cheaper than forcibly deporting them, saving money for taxpayers.

It's ministers' system, they should sort it out rather than bribing people with more of our money.

"And", said the 11-year-old, "they want our money for the Olympics".

If they got a grip of costs, maybe then we would not have to read a bad news story about lack of funding for treating prostate cancer.

A life-saving treatment will be denied to tens of thousands of victims of Britain's most common male cancer after a U-turn by the NHS rationing body.

Again it's the invisible National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which absolves ministers from having to take responsibility, and makes accountability shadowy at best.

Which should be our priority? Bribes for failed asylum seekers? The Olympics? Or treating British citizens' prostate cancer?

Belgians stage big protest rally

This is the claim of the BBC website, which tells us that

Thousands of trade union members have protested in Brussels against rising prices and the failure of Belgium's politicians to form a new government.

Now, the demonstration was organised by the three main trade unions, "which represent some three million of Belgium's population of nearly 11 million".

So how many turned out? "At least 18,000". Not earth-shattering.

It will have been crucial to have good representation from all the main Belgian communities. But the BBC report has nothing to say about this. Instead, we are told that

Many protesters also said they wanted to keep Belgium's social security united, rejecting demands by Flemish parties in the richer Dutch-speaking regions to split it.

This is the firm view of the poorer Walloon area - but judging by the votes for the Flemish parties it is not what Flanders wants.

"People are fed up with the discussions between the political parties. This is a very serious warning to the parties to take care of the people," Bernard Noel, one of the leaders of the CGSLB trade union, told Reuters.

But that doesn't seem to be the majority view in Flanders either.

The demonstration begins to look less and less significant.

Overrating Brown's influence

Tory attack dog Chris Grayling has been attacking the government over the suggestion that foreign workers could account for 80% of the increase in employment since 1997.

This finally destroys any claim the government has to be able to talk about British jobs for British workers.

It also destroys any confidence about the government's claims on their record on jobs. Gordon Brown's welfare to work policies have clearly been an abject failure and all he's done is create British jobs for foreign workers.

In politics, of course, all failures are "abject".

Gordon Brown is responsible for there being more state employees. But in the private sector? Mr Grayling should not overrate politicians' influence on the economy. Especially as he is supposed to be a Tory!

How very cosy in the state sector (1)

When long term policies go wrong, you divert attention from them by announcing new policies. The social mobility of children from poor families is no better than it was in the 1970s. So let’s have some new reviews.

In principle, though, the way forward is clear – increase the influence of education in the lives of poor children as against the often low aspirations of their families. The children need an educational environment where ambition and attainment are considered normal. And bright children need to be stretched. The national curriculum taught in state schools doesn’t stretch them enough, so they are not stimulated and excited.

Of course this is cosy for unambitious schools.

Some in education oppose a well overdue proposal that there should be surprise Ofsted inspections.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, says, “No-notice inspections would be more punitive and create additional stress, as heads keep a constant watch on the school gate for the arrival of the inspectors”.

Does he know what “punitive” means? The point of inspections is to check on how schools are doing their job. Giving schools notice obviously makes that less effective. It does make it much more cosy for everyone in the system, though.

Why should it be cushy in the state sector?

How very cosy in the state sector (2)

Gordon Brown said several times in PMQs yesterday that governing is about taking the long term decisions for the good of the country. Translation: my short term decisions are in trouble.

There are at least two political advantages in concentrating on long term decisions. First, you can make good headlines out of them now, but you can’t be judged on their success for several years. Second, there are relatively few long term decisions to be taken – good news if you find decision-taking difficult.

But if governing is only about long term decisions, who’s responsible for making them work? This blog has argued that ministers are in charge of huge organisations but have no experience of how to make them work.

Geoffrey Robinson put the same case last night about NHS changes. Those at the top concentrate on policies, he said. They think you can just announce a policy and it will get implemented. But, he said, it’s not so. And Robinson persuasively argued that the NHS needs fewer new policies and more space for managers to get the best out of their organisations.

Rotherham provided a fascinating case study. Only two miles from the hospital the NHS is building a community health centre (or some such) at a cost of £12m. This will provide walk in facilities run by nurses for people feeling a bit under the weather. It will also provide easier parking than the hospital, and other nurse led facilities duplicating what the hospital does. The man in charge of the project was strikingly unable to articulate any coherent case for the facility at all. It will severely undermine the hospital's economics.

Do local people really want their taxes spent on this? And if not, how can they stop it? They can't, of course.

But there goes £12m of our money.

Democracy Scottish style

Martin Ford, the man who used his casting vote as chairman of a council committee to stop Donald Trump’s proposed golfing and holiday facility in Aberdeenshire, has been removed from his post.

Astonishingly, the council could not overrule its committee. Belatedly it has now decided that future planning applications of regional or national significance will go to the full council for a final decision.

Fourteen Scottish environmental organisations expressed “profound concerns” about that what they labelled “interference in the planning process”. One said, “To depose someone for following such clear guidelines and his conscience on such an important issue is of huge concern and questions the integrity of the new planning regime”.

No, it’s called democracy.

Mr Ford doesn’t seem to favour democracy either. His take is that “we need to be able to deal with planning applications without wondering what the consequences are of a decision that is not universally popular”.

How very grand.

Tippecanoe

We all know from current news coverage how dangerous canoeing can be. Which prompts the thought - who would you like to give a canoe to for Christmas?

One person on this blog's Christmas canoe list would be Peter Fincham, a thought prompted by last night's BBC documentary about the Queen. Nobody is perfect, but she continues to endure what must be acres of boredom for the good of her country.

Wholly against the thrust of the series so far, Mr Fincham it was who gloried in telling the press that a documentary trailer showed the Queen walking out "in a huff".

(The heading is a bad pun on the name of the place and the battle, perpetrated among others by the unforgettable Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in which enthralled my student generation.)

Public services keep failing

The Taxpayers Alliance has a piece under this heading pointing out that

Despite countless billions in extra spending within both the education system and the health service we are slipping down the international rankings for educational attainment and primary healthcare service standards are declining.

It identifies three issues - centralisation, political management, and monopolies.

It's true that direction is centralised. But the beauty of the system for a national politician is that decisions which are unpopular locally can be blamed on NICE or the local PCT, as my umbrella blog colleague Cllr Tony Sharp points out. Nothing to do with us, guv, we're not responsible for the NHS. But it's not all "top down". The local satraps make decisions affecting the health of people in their province with no accountability to them at all - an extraordinary political model.

Maybe the monopoly status is fraying at the edges. In education and in healthcare, international comparisons have been painting an increasingly poor picture of the standards of British provision. Patients are starting to seek healthcare abroad, and step by step the EU is suggesting that people's entitlement to healthcare should not be limited to their own country.

The model of autocratic provision from the centre - sustainable under Stalinism, but a pretty odd model in an increasingly informed democracy - is gradually coming under threat.

Good. But the Taxpayers' Alliance sells the pass in its heading. In what sense are these "public" and "services"?

Actually they are nationalised industries.

There is STATE education (not "public" schools, of course), and the NHS, the Nationalised Health Service. Describing them as "public services" concedes half the argument before it's even started.

Being centrally and unaccountably financed with taxpayers' money gives them no moral high ground at all, whereas the phrase "public services" has overtones of altruism ... though goodness knows why. We saw recently that these attitudes survive in teacher training colleges where some student teachers are being told that they risk "selling their souls" by working in independent schools.

These are NOT "public services". They are nationalised industries. Look at them in that light, and the lack of responsiveness to their - paying - customers is astonishing.

Wendy Alexander in donorgate trouble?

According to The Sunday Herald Wendy Alexander's campaign team played fast and loose with the rules on donations. The piece spells out detailed circumstantial evidence, but makes a lot of a Word document which may or may not be a clincher. (If the paper's been set up, the writer's in big trouble.)

However, there's a nasty smell around the team's practices on donations whether the document is genuine or not.

The bizarre "donor switching" is just one part of the campaign team's questionable fund-raising practices. Alexander's allies solicited donations that fell £5 under the level for public declaration, and made sure money was sent to the Campaign, not the MSP, to allow her to avoid registration at Holyrood.

As well as an Electoral Commission probe, Alexander could face a police inquiry after her team admitted to flouting the law.

People are said to be asking whether the daily drip of revelations will make her Labour's shortest-serving leader.

During her leadership contest, Alexander spoke of her Labour "values" and called on colleagues to re-connect with voters. It is difficult to match her words with the deeds of taking cash from a tax exile, switching donors, and soliciting donations to avoid public disclosure.

Geoff Hoon said that Wendy Alexander had to explain the £950 donation she received from a businessman based in the Channel Islands who's not eligible to vote.

Wendy Alexander has said this afternoon that she intends to carry on as Scottish Labour leader.

What is this government for?

Journalists delight in picking away at Labour to reveal the cynical dishonesty underneath, while the party's leader oddly claims that his party's fund-raising is nothing to do with him and seeks to finesse the argument that corruption and incompetence make the case for even greater state funding of activities which the public in any event despises.

Donorgate shows up good and bad aspects of journalism. The good aspect is nothing to do with the qualities of individual journalists, but shows the spur which competition can provide even to moderate talents. The journalists themselves are now increasingly repeating the same questions, some of which any layman with a moderate interest in politics already knows the answer to. Journalists show little signs of digesting each other's output (perhaps on the assumption that it is as reliable as their own). Margaret Jay's account of how she came to know about the donations conduit has been public for several days, but journalists persist in asking how she knew. More to the point, why does she seem to have told hardly anyone? Harriet Harman is pilloried for relying on the Labour party's database of donors. We know now that this was sheer folly, but it seems illogical to pillory Harman for what at the time was a reasonable assumption even though she is unlikeable and thick.

Meanwhile, HMRC are revealed to be passing around ever more of our personal data in ways which no private sector company could survive. In a sign of their confidence, police are now searching rubbish tips for some CDs, while goodness knows what other crime goes uninvestigated at who knows what expense. Does anyone think that banks post customers' private data to consultants to work at on their computer at home? Imagine the haemorrhage of funds if CDs with (say) NatWest customer details went missing in the post, not to mention the large number of senior executive posts that would immediately become vacant. If a bank needs you to work on confidential data, you do that at its premises, under secure conditions. This is not obscure IT technical knowledge. Tens of thousands of people know this, and the government was told over two years ago in a report, but apparently this basic awareness of how to operate in the modern world has yet to get through to anyone in Whitehall or HMRC. Nor do they even consider the issue important enough for the (junior) data protection minister to be told when a major leak becomes known.

It's nothing new to know that politicians live in their own cocoon, and at our expense (David Cameron's chauffeur costs us £4,000 a month). But we need to lift our noses from the newsprint and ask whether this may be a price worth paying for good government.

Most nationalised industries have been returned to the private sector because the state couldn't run them effectively. Odd, then, that the government has kept hold of two of the largest - education, and the nationalised health service, or NHS.

And their performance is abysmal. Cancer survival rates are low - only partly because it's a matter of luck how much your unaccountable health trust chooses to spend on cancer treatment - hospital infections are high, GPs are scandalously overpaid, and now new research suggests that one in 10 patients is harmed while in hospital.

In education, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, English primary school pupils have slumped in the international league table of reading skills. The authoritative study of 40 countries showed them falling from third place in 2001 to 14th place in 2006.

Labour's £1.5 billion reform of secondary schools in England may be failing to boost standards in the classroom, according to Ofsted, who raised "serious concerns" over the Government’s specialist schools programme, saying that it made little difference to teaching in some secondaries.

And in the same week it was reported that

Britain has tumbled down another education league table - this time in science. In six years, the UK has slumped from fourth to 14th place in a table of 15-year-olds' performance in science tests...it is the second slide down an international education league in as many days.

And in an international league table comparing children's fear of theft, bullying and assault, English children were ranked 37th out of 45.

The government don't want you to start seeing this as a pattern - which it is. Once you can see the pattern, then what is the point of big government, and hence of this government?

We know the national curriculum was introduced to grab education back from politically correct teachers, showing attitudes still alive at teacher training colleges, where some student teachers enrolled on state-funded training courses are being told that they risk "selling their souls" by working in independent schools - as if it were morally better to be paid by taxpayers rather than by schools which the pupils' parents have actively chosen.

Bright pupils in state schools have been known to petition for lessons more demanding than the national curriculum prescribes. A child we know in the top maths set in his first year at a comprehensive school is being taught things he learned at his state primary school, and a 13-year-old at a £25m "super school" in Essex found he was doing the same sort of work as when he was nine or ten.

No wonder the government effectively stops state schools offering the International GCSE (IGCSE) increasingly favoured by independent schools. One government is unable to subvert the international standards, so its results are open to scrutiny against performance in other countries. Then, having under-educated children in state schools, government expects universities to skew their admissions and make up the educational backlog.

Where are the government's successes which might encourage us to re-elect them? True, they're not led by someone who was an advisor to the abysmal Norman Lamont - how many years ago? They introduced the minimum wage - how many years ago?

But ministers in their hubris are effectively killing thousands of people a year in the nationalised health service, and forcing on most people a sub-standard educational service for their children.

The time comes when it's reasonable to think that things are getting so much worse that it must be time to try something new. Given the effect that competition can have on journalists, just perhaps we should have it in education and health.