Thursday thoughts

Zac Goldsmith wants to save the planet. But he's on another planet already.

Reportedly the family company Organic Investments Limited is based in the Cayman Islands. Why would Conservative candidate Zac do this, except to avoid UK tax?

The Telegraph also reports that 'One business Zac, 33, would like to see fail is the new Sainsbury's in the constituency he is trying to woo. "The shop will have no customers within a mile and a half radius," he has claimed.'

More on Sainsbury's below. Meanwhile, how to apologise with two fingers.

Jobs for the boyos

The Telegraph prints this Lord Kinnock Clarification.

Following our article "Putin has nothing to gain from harassing the British Council" (Jan 19) we are asked to point out that Lord Kinnock receives no remuneration as the Council's chairman and undertakes significant work beyond the post's requirements; he had no involvement in the appointment of his son Stephen as director of the Council's St Petersburg office or of his daughter Rachel to Gordon Brown's political staff; criticism by another newspaper of Glenys Kinnock's attendance at a conference in Barbados was withdrawn following a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission.

Yes, that seems pretty clear.

Lord Windbag is a famous waste of space.

Government greenstanding trumps sensible policy

Justin King has gone public and attacked government plans to legislate to require retailers to charge consumers for single-use bags. He points out that the issue is complex. This policy has had only a temporary effect in Ireland. Paper bags cost more to transport and are twice as energy intensive as a plastic one. Furthermore

Last year a large number of retailers, not just supermarkets, sat down in good faith with Wrap, the government-funded body concerned with packaging and food waste, and Defra to agree a voluntary approach to cutting the environmental impact of plastic bags by 25pc by the end of 2008 - not simply the number of bags.

This target appears to have been thrown out and informed debate overturned.

So the government knew there were informed discussions going on but chose to override them with a crude headline measure which will make life more expensive for many people (standard practice, government doesn't care about that) and won't address the overall problem anyway.

Right long-term decision? I don't think so. This is not serious governing.

Unsafe in their hands

At least 13 London councils have lost data relating to members of the public in the past year.

Social workers from the borough of Kensington and Chelsea admitted to losing information on children in their care on three different occasions, according to a spokesperson, when a laptop, a paper notebook and a file were stolen on three separate occasions.

Two of these cases occurred while staff where in a pub after work, claim reports.

"Staff are required to notify the loss of any confidential information to their manager immediately, as happened in all these cases," says a council spokesperson. So that's all right then. In another case, photocopies of the birth certificates of 375 students who had applied for grants were lost by Havering Council, along with financial records of their parents.

The public sector is 'better'

The Taxpayers Alliance picks up the news that HMRC's policy on expenses receipts is more lax than the standards they require from taxpaying businesses.

Unfortunately this new outbreak of double standards is part of a broader pattern. Politicians and civil servants rarely think of their own behaviour when launching some new crackdown. Politicians are putting in place corporate manslaughter laws while the NHS they run is killing thousands through hospital infections every year. Housing for 'key workers' always seems to mean housing for those working for the Government rather than in the private sector. The Government insists that electricity companies do something about the effect of high prices on ordinary people while putting in place regulations like the Renewables Obligation that push prices up. It really is one rule for them and another for the rest of us.

The policy on receipts is probably sensible - the poor dears might well lose them.

But I shouldn't be calling it the "public sector", any more than I think of these people as "public servants". They are state employees. We pay them, with our money.