I don't believe it

As the Major government was drawing to its close, Cecil Parkinson appeared on Question Time. He cited a statistic as showing the government's good economic performance and drew jeers from the audience. "But it's true!", he protested, missing the point. You could almost feel through the screen the audience's refusal to believe anything the government was going to tell them.

Governments come into office with a certain amount of credibility, which they then proceed to draw on to bamboozle their electors. What they don't seem to understand is that it is extremely hard to top this store up again, except through a period in opposition. Every time Gordon Brown claims that "inflation" is running at about 2% a year, people will shake their heads as they think of their supermarket bills and their energy bills, not to mention their council tax bills.

Government can never admit it's wrong. So home information packs are an aid to faster property sales, the nationalised health service and state education are improving by leaps and bounds, the army gets the equipment it needs, people are abandoning their 4x4's and walking instead, crime is falling, sentencing is proportionate, energy policy is under our control, making unwilling children stay at school until they are 18 is progressive, your personal data is safe in our hands and any isolated accidents aren't a government failure, the Olympics will be splendid value for money, state spending isn't generally wasteful, and we're wriggling out of a referendum on the EU constitution.

And off they spin into their parallel universe, followed only by a few political groupies.

They can't even convince the increasing population of polar bears that we all need to act to prevent global warming. What then about the hundreds of thousands lately stranded in China by unseasonal snow? And British polls have consistently shown that the public doesn't buy the claim that man made global warming is endangering the planet, despite the best efforts of politicians of all hues, and environment correspondents across the media, including the BBC. Unaccountably the British public considers it a tax-raising ruse, though the truth is more sinister. When Mr Miliband combines two wrongs to claim that the new role of the European Union should be to fight global warming, he probably believes it! But out here we don't.

Back in the Commons, the media are starting to look more closely at the numbers with which McStalin spatters PMQs. The Spectator's Coffee House blog regularly picks up examples of claims which he can only have taken from a dodgy dossier. The Opposition have yet to get to grips with this - not even his most fanatical supporters could claim Mr Cameron as a policy wonk with a feast of figures at his fingertips.

Meanwhile the rest of us will continue to sigh as we get these broadcasts from the parallel universe - indignation long past, saying with a resigned sigh, "I don't believe it".

Just as Cecil's audience didn't.

Local democracy and the metric martyr

For those of us who favour local election of police chiefs, an underlying assumption is that this would give local communities - who pay for them - some opportunity to influence their priorities.

Maybe the folk of Warrington would welcome the chance to influence the magistrates who kept giving Adam Swellings bail and community sentences - a truly shocking sequence of events. If this is at all typical, no wonder violent crime carried out by children and teenagers has risen by a third in three years.

Those of us who favour meaningful local influence on the police hope that this would lead them to reassess their priorities. Increasingly they seem out of touch but it doesn't matter to them - no one can touch them. They are out of control.

So is Hackney's Trading Standards unit. Booker reports that "a week earlier, Paul Smith ... faced 18 charges of selling by the bowl".

The chairman of the bench observed that when he recently saw a bowl of mushrooms being offered at his own local market, he had not remonstrated with the stallholder for breaking the law - he bought the mushrooms.

Although he refused to allow Hackney council the £2,000 costs it was claiming for having brought such an absurdly trivial case, he regretted that, under the law, he had no alternative to imposing a token fine on Mr Smith.

And now we have the prosecution of Mrs Devers from the same market. Is this the result of an indignant clamour from the people of Hackney calling for these wicked people to be made to mend their ways? There seems to be no sign of it. The magistrate declined to give the council their costs, giving the clearest possible indication that he considered the prosecution without merit, and costing local taxpayers £2,000.

That money belonged to the people.

Yet the unaccountable bureaucrats continue in their zeal. There is always a choice about which laws are the most important to enforce. Do councillors consider these offences serious - in which case they might like to explain why to their electors - or are their officials out of control?

There are serious questions for Hackney Council to answer. They deserve to have to answer them in a bright glare of publicity.

If the community cannot influence and guide local Trading Standards departments, what hope is there for local influence over the police?

Or should we just consider ourselves these people's powerless subjects?

Lethargy in the state sector

As I predicted yesterday, the MoD says it is treating the latest loss of data "with the utmost seriousness". Doubtless this means a "full review" by an expensive outsider to produce a list of "lessons learned". It's worth remembering that these "lessons" concern one of the absolute basics of doing business in the modern world. The government tries to pretend that there's something new or difficult or abstruse about the failings that led to the losses of personal data. There isn't. This is basic stuff, as anyone even slightly in touch with the real world would know.

If you have policies which need a large state sector to implement them, you'd better make sure that the state sector is run with at least basic competence. Ministers seem to have not the faintest interest in this, or even an understanding of why it might be important, let alone any experience to guide them in how they might go about it.

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad", and there's increasing evidence that the state sector's brain cells are becoming furred like the element of a kettle, leading to a hardening of the intellectual arteries, almost indeed like dementia.

The first example concerns internet plagiarism in pupils' coursework. More than half of teachers believe this is a serious problem among sixth-form students. The educational establishment continues to twist in the wind, calling for more safeguards against plagiarism. But, as teachers say, it's just not a good use of their time to familiarise themselves with all the possible sources on each subject they set.

So you can't police cheating effectively. And government and the educational establishment have never faced up to the inherent unfairness of coursework. It rewards diligence over excellence. And a child with educated parents can get more help with it at home. This is a bizarre policy for a government which claims it wants to give at least an equal opportunity to pupils from less educated backgrounds.

In our preparation at school for our A level history special subject, we spent four periods being shown around a topic and reading up on it. The fifth period was an essay under exam conditions, which concentrated the mind and was an incentive to do the work, and the sixth was feedback before we moved on to the next topic. It meant we knew our stuff and there was nowhere to hide. Good teaching also made it interesting and fun.

There was good, interesting, fair education before coursework. Coursework can never be fair. Yet the state provider is stuck in denial, in a lazy acceptance of received ideas which go against the evidence - much as in the scientifically futile attempt to "fight" climate change.

The criminal "justice" system also blunders on stuck in its own mindset. A killer who was released early from a trivial prison sentence for manslaughter went on to blind a woman in one eye after she refused him a cigarette. She had complained to police several times in the run up to the attack that she was being tormented by gangs.

I think they should bring the cane back in schools because there's no discipline, or put them in the Army or somewhere where they are going to get disciplined for a long time under police supervision.

I've had kids breaking my nose, making fun, trying to set fire to my house. I've had it all, so I know what I'm talking about.

On the same day we learn that a pensioner who stepped in to stop youths throwing stones at ducks on a canal was arrested by police after one of the yobs complained to police that the 73-year-old, who has a heart condition and diabetes, had hit him. He spent two hours in the cells waiting for a duty solicitor.

Nottinghamshire police are said to have apologised. Really? They say the arresting officer acted correctly. This is not an apology, it is defiance.

They then added that they would "ensure the necessary training needs are addressed".

This raises several questions. How can training inculcate basic common sense, let alone some instinct for what their community's priority might have been in such a case? And if an organisation thinks the action taken was correct, what training are they likely to consider "necessary" anyway?

In the police we have another unaccountable state organisation comfortably set in its own ways. Only real local democratic control of the police will correct this, but the police themselves would resist this tooth and nail, as indeed would the arch centraliser in Downing Street, who is confident that he knows better than anyone else.

State sector in seedy decay

More personal data missing. A laptop containing personal details of 600,000 people has been stolen from a naval officer. Evidently the data was unencrypted and the laptop was left overnight in a parked car. It included passport numbers, National Insurance numbers and bank details.

Doubtless the MoD will say they take this very seriously. If this is the standard they apply when they take something seriously, then God help our defences. What they'll mean is that they take the publicity seriously.

And hundreds of documents containing sensitive personal data have been found dumped on a roundabout in Devon. They included details of benefit claims, passport photocopies and mortgage payments, apparently courtesy of a department headed by one Mr Hain.

The government will doubtless claim it is learning lessons. But these failings are basic to the running of any organisation. And the duty to keep personal data secure is laid down by law. Does the state sector consider itself exempt? Like Mr Hain, maybe?

Elsewhere, a corrupt civil servant behind one of the biggest frauds in Whitehall history has managed to avoid paying anything towards a £1.5m confiscation order because the Crown Prosecution Service delayed enforcing it for 11 years. That money belonged to the people.

One day in the life of the state sector - which we pay for.

The Taxpayers' Alliance (TPA) has calculated that if the Nationalised Health Service achieved the same level of “mortality amenable to healthcare” as the average of the other European countries it studied, there would have been 17,157 fewer deaths in 2004 (the most recent year for which data is available).

To put this in context, the TPA say this is equivalent to over five times the total number of deaths in road accidents and over two and a half times the number of deaths related to alcohol that year. As this blog has said before, ministers and the nationalised health service are killing people.

Increasingly the state sector looks expensive and incompetent. The bigger it is, the dearer it is, and the more there is to go wrong.

So what? All this is obvious, you'll say. Yes, but the state sector is not like the sun and the stars. It can be made smaller. We could keep more of our own money to spend on ourselves ... the way we want to.

The vain in Hain is really quite a pain

The Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) seems to be morphing into the Department of Weak Protestations.

The Conservatives' proposal to force people who have claimed unemployment benefit for more than two years to do some community work has an 82% approval rating in a Telegraph poll today.

The only objection to this politically well judged proposal that the Department seem able to come up with is that they are already doing something less tough. This amounts to Not Invented Here, and is scarcely a convincing rebuttal.

Following their proposal on Inheritance Tax, this is a second Conservative policy to strike a chord.

Meanwhile, Mr Hain's outriders mount the defence that breaking the law isn't serious if you're busy. Tell that to the Inland Revenue and the police.

This is the arrogant view that laws are for little people and shouldn't apply to the special ones. If you're too busy being important for you to be able to observe a law ... well that's utterly forgivable. This moral corruption is a sign of what Matthew d'Ancona calls a failing oligarchy.

Why would transparency and openness MacCavity Brown be prepared to sully his feet with this moral sludge? He doesn't care about Hain. He could make a point about his politics of change by dumping him. The consensus is that he's protecting Wendy Alexander and Harriet Harman.

He cares even less about Harman than he does about Hain - he positively despises her. So it comes down to Wendy Alexander.

Thus we owe Hain's continuance in the cabinet to Brown's fretfulness about Labour's position in Scotland. Scottish votes prop up his government against the will of England. Brown's constituency voters are Scottish, of course, but if the Labour government doesn't win the next election it won't matter how big MacCavity's own majority is.

Peter Hain is a small obstacle against Labour's slide - and probably a temporary one. Plans are doubtless in place to manage his departure should that view change. That is how tenuous Peter Hain's hold is. It depends on abstruse calculations in the Downing Street bunker.

For Mr Brown the vain in Hain is really quite a pain.

And to think Mr Hain finished second from last in the race for the party's deputy leadership. He brought it all upon himself in his vanity - a vanity which he preferred others to finance. With repayment demanded of the £25,000 loan made through the still unexplained embryo PPF think tank, Mr Hain announced that he would repay it from his own money.

Why then did the vain one not put his money where his vanity is at the outset?

To reform incapacity benefit, there have to be losers

Last May 504,000 people below the age of 35 were claiming incapacity benefit or severe disablement allowance. This includes more than 300,000 claiming for “mental and behavioural disorders”, which are among the hardest to check.

We can't afford to support all these people through their working lives. It might be a nice, touchy feely thing to do if we could give the state unlimited amounts of our money. But we can't.

Choices have to be made. If the state is to spend all of this money, perhaps improved cancer care or proper flood defences would be better choices.

Eager immigrants coming to England have taken most of the extra jobs. People on incapacity benefit are in competition with motivated people from other EU countries. The UK government can't stop them coming.

Labour's policy has two main thrusts. First, they want to coach people back into work one by one. This is expensive and slow, but probably the most cost-effective route is to pay private companies by results.

Their other new policy is tougher assessment of new applicants for incapacity benefit. But this does nothing to deal with the huge lump of people already enjoying the benefit.

Chris Grayling sketches the Tory approach.

Our initial aim will be to offer most people a place on a structured programme of support to find them a job. We know that as many as a million people claiming incapacity benefit say that they hope to get back into the workplace. We will offer them the help they need to achieve that.

Those who don't want to accept that offer will be expected to undergo a full medical check to confirm what they can and can't do now, and what they might, with the right support, be able to do in the future. It will be done by someone independent, so the relationship with a family doctor doesn't affect the outcome.

Those found to be perfectly capable of working will lose their entitlement to incapacity benefit immediately. Many have been abusing the system. They will be transferred into the normal process for Jobseekers and will be expected to start looking for work straight away. Based on the experience of other countries, we expect at least 200,000 people to be affected.

This is accompanied by warm words about helping people out of the poverty trap. But many people don't aspire to more money, just an easy life on benefits.

The carrot is going to become less and less effective, as employers can choose between keen, English speaking immigrants or natives with a poor work history. We will need to see more of the stick too. Almost every claimant can contribute something, unless they are physically housebound.

Regular and more rigorous assessments, and in the vast majority of cases you have to give something back or it's no benefit for you.

Starving NHS patients

The Telegraph reports that around 140,000 patients were discharged after being inadequately fed on NHS wards last year.

Were these shocking figures announced by the government? No, they were obtained by the Conservatives. Presumably the government knew about them, but chose in its lordly way not to trouble its subjects.

The vast majority arrived in hospital suffering from these conditions. But the Department of Health figures also show the nutritional condition of at least 8,500 patients actually worsened while they were in hospital in the last year.

That doesn't make it all right. A health facility should treat malnutrition in patients, not just discharge them in the same state.

Imagine if privately run hospitals behaved like this. Imagine the indignation. But we the paymasters shouldn't expect to know how badly the nationalised health industry we pay for is mistreating our fellow citizens.

Health nationalisation is killing people. Vain ignorant politicians who think they can turn this huge undertaking round are killing people.

Wrong numbers

What is happening to our schoolchildren? According to The Telegraph, "children with learning difficulties, behavioural problems or physical disabilities" make up "just 20 per cent of pupils in England".

What? One fifth of all English schoolchildren fall into these categories? So The Bow Group says.

The concern centres round the claim that

A total of 9,000 children were expelled from mainstream primary and secondary schools in 2005/6 - and almost 6,000 had behavioural or learning problems.

This 6,000 is supposedly a high number. Nonsense. How many expelled children don't have behavioural problems?

The logic of The Bow Group's position is that 20% of children have "special needs".

This tripe is unaffordable touchy feely politics taken beyond the extreme. The picture shows a suitable place for the report's thinking.

Drowning, not waving

Why trust governments with big questions when they can't get smaller things right?

If somebody wanted to replace the 46 fire control centres in England with nine regional sites, at a cost to taxpayers of £100m, with the first one due to open in autumn 2006, you'd maybe accept a little slippage.

None of them has opened, reports the Telegraph (in a piece which hasn't made the website) but you can't call that seriously late yet. And the cost? The Fire Brigades Union says it has risen. What are we looking at? A 15% rise (to £115m) maybe?

Not according to the union. Has it perhaps doubled, then, to £200m?

No. The new figure is a stonking £1.4bn. How does the government justify this?

The £100million figure was an early estimate. The project will bring many benefits which are currently not available.

Is it good value at the latest number of £1.4bn? Then it must have been astonishing value at a trifling £100m.

Of course there's a serious point here, and it's a big one. If an organisation can be so wildly out with a discrete project, would you trust it to calculate the many consequences of (say) large scale immigration? The effects on schools? Health provision? Housing? Hm, thought not.

If they did calculate it and didn't like the answers, do you think they would even tell you?

Yet this is the core of the case for big government - competence and openness. The government fails both these basic tests.

Also failing the competence test are local councils who face an equal pay bill of £2.8bn. Imagine the obloquy that would descend on the heads of a Tesco who found themselves in such a position. Yet if Tesco can get it right, why can't local councils? And if councils are so incompetent, do we want to buy our local services from them?

We are not starting from a doctrinaire philosophical position here. If government gets the smaller and easier things so badly wrong, can we reasonably support policies which require government to get harder and more complex issues right?

If they're so bad at it, there has to be a better way.