The good and the trivial

Two articles today, one good and one trivial. Some interest from political commentators (for instance here and here) surrounds a piece in Prospect by Philip Collins. This is because James Purnell was said to have engaged Mr Collins as a speechwriter with a view to raising his profile ahead of a possible leadership challenge. (Yes I know, but do try to stay awake at the back.) When Collins co-wrote this piece including disobliging remarks about Mr Brown and Mr Balls, Mr Purnell was forced to dispense with his services.

The commentators are interested in this because Collins used to do work for Tony Blair and was admired for his phrase-making. The implication is that Blair had more liberal tendencies which Collins was comfortable with.

The professional bloggers' interest has probably doubled the readership of Collins' piece, which does indeed include some nice phrases, but is hardly original. He speaks dismissively of Mr Balls, saying that he "wants a national play strategy". Well it seems I have news for Mr Collins. The idea of a national play strategy isn't new. In You play, we pay I traced it back to at least 2002. And who was in power then? Why Mr Blair, the Mr Blair whom Mr Collins was content to work for, the actor who could empathise with everyone.

All that's happened is that Messrs Brown and Balls are less good at being all things to all men, so that Mr Collins is less willing to be their useful idiot.

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Richard North is right to complain about UK political blogging (including this post so far). The Collins piece is for political enthusiasts.

On the other hand, Martin Wolf explaining why Britain is better off outside the Euro should be required reading for all politicians - even the majority who seem to understand nothing of economics at all.

Thursday thoughts

"This is a shocking tragedy", said Superintendent Paul Morris, after 17-year-old Sharmaarke Hassan died of a gunshot wound.

It's a sad waste, but it's not a shocking tragedy. He was an outlaw. Last month he was found guilty of possessing cannabis and offering to supply it, for which he was given a one-year Community Punishment Order and 40 hours of community service.

Sharmaarke was also convicted of breaching the terms of his Anti-Social Behaviour Order at Thames Youth Court late last year.

The Asbo was imposed on November 2 and ordered the teenager to stay away from Buck Street in Camden - less than half a mile from where he was shot. He broke it the following day.

Sky News also tell us that "he is believed to have been a member of the north-west London gang The Money Squad, one of a number of Somali gangs in the area". So it is a sad waste but it is not a shocking tragedy. Can we have a sense of proportion, please?

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Looking out at the rain, it's hard to believe the strawberry picking season is upon us. Radio 4's PM programme has just carried an item from a strawberry farmer saying he can't get enough labour because the government is limiting employment of temporary labour from Bulgaria. Temporary Polish workers don't come any more because the Pound has fallen against the Zloty, so UK earnings convert into considerably less Polish money than last year. And local English people aren't interested. So a proportion of the crop will rot in the fields.

As a taxpayer, why should I pay unemployment benefit to fit people within reach of this work who refuse to take it? But the politically correct BBC concentrated on the awful restrictions on immigration.

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And if this isn't unkind enough, let me now invite you to show no sympathy for members of Labour's NEC. Remember the Labour Party's loans? It still owes millions of pounds and The Guardian's report suggests it is an unincorporated association. So officers would be liable if the party couldn't pay its debts.

Of course it's unlikely to come to this, but such are the loans building up for repayment that it's certainly not inconceivable. Remarkably, however, this multimillion pound organisation seems never to have considered it. Did high flying whizz treasurer Jack Dromey never ask the question? Evidently not. David Pitt-Watson did, and that's why he declined the post of general secretary, reportedly after a furious row with Gordon Brown. And it's evidently acceptable for the GMB union to indemnify what The Guardian calls "its two members on the NEC".

NEC member Janet Anderson MP is clearly a woman of the world.

I am very concerned and we should look into the situation immediately. If this is the case, I can't see how anyone, unless they are very wealthy or are indemnified, like in the case of the GMB, can serve on the NEC. I can't see who would want to be general secretary following this advice.

Where has Janet been all this time? How many years have Mr Brown and Mr Blair served between them on the NEC? And Mr Blair's previous job was ... wait, it's coming to me ... ah yes, he was a lawyer.

Clearly the people running the Labour Party are fit to run the country.

But we wouldn't believe them

Steve Richards has a piece in The Independent about electoral reform. He argues that landslide government is unacceptably undemocratic (oh yes?), and claims that

Most cabinet ministers and former cabinet ministers have for a long time been in favour of a switch to the Alternative Vote, a system that retains the MPs' relationship with constituencies but would be a little fairer than the current preposterous arrangements.

Isn't that the system they used in the London mayoral election?

To help Labour become more acceptable to Lib Dems, Richards hilariously proposes that Brown "could pledge a referendum on electoral reform immediately after the next election and promise that he would campaign in favour of change".

Who does he think would believe a word? After reneging on Labour's last referendum pledge he'd be laughed out of town, and rightly so.

It's the Tories who should be thinking seriously about electoral reform. In England they were hugely disadvantaged at the last election compared to Labour. With a few more votes than Labour they won 193 seats to Labour's 286.

Scratching my head over the EU

This blog doesn't post much about the EU. Between Richard North's scholarly mini-essays and Open Europe's blogs of media coverage there is very little for the ordinary blogger to add.

This doesn't mean I acquiesce in the EU. But government carefully denies us the chance to vote against the Lisbon treaty, merely because Herr Brownmeister is sure we will reject it. Nor will the country will ever vote in numbers for the inadequate clowns who have a stranglehold on UKIP. But that doesn't mean voters want more integration with the EU and the government knows it.

Armageddon Ambrose-Pritchard has another of his excoriating pieces in the Telegraph today. It includes numbers, so it's in the business section, and on the inside pages at that. He is stressing the undemocratic nature of the Lisbon process, explaining that Ireland is sleep-walking into economic trouble it will be helpless to prevent, and most importantly explaining the fundamental changes to which we are being exposed -

Our shared Anglo-Celtic culture has long been a well-spring of free enterprise (with Dutch, Swedish, and Hanseatic help in fighting European absolutism along the way), and that is what is so threatened by the Lisbon Treaty, the treaty to end all EU treaties.

The text strikes the words "free and undistorted competition" from the core objectives of the Union. Corporatist aims will enjoy a higher legal status at the European Court (ECJ) and must prevail if the two clash. The Rhineland Model has locked in a permanent advantage.

Euro-creep is already eviscerating the Common Law that underpins the British and Irish way of doing business. Lisbon quickens the pace. It upgrades the ECJ to a de facto supreme court, with broader jurisdiction. It will have the last say on a raft of new economic and social rights. Who can stop them imposing a Colbertist agenda by court rulings, if they so choose? The ECJ is beyond appeal.

Euro-judges will decide how and when to enforce the Charter of Fundamental Rights, now made legally-binding. Article 52 allows the "limitation" of all liberties in the "general interest" of the Union. This is the old Reich clause. Such justifications for state coercion have been illegal in Europe for 60 years. Now they return, by the back door.

For instance, German leaders are to propose a worldwide ban on oil trading by speculators. And the perpetual Jean-Claude Juncker, leader of Luxembourg since 1995 with a population of 467,000, wants an upper limit on salaries.

And he concludes that "a British prime minister slinks away to a private room to commit Britain to an arrangement that alienates the powers of Parliament - in perpetuity and perhaps illegally - knowing that his people would vote 'no' by crushing margins if given a chance".

Now, we know that most politicians give no sign of understanding anything about economics at all, here or in the rest of the EU. I am no flag-waving Jerusalem singer harking back to the grand old days of the British Empire. I just don't get why the political class wants to give our freedom away - and indeed their freedom too - and condemn us to the likelihood of gradually pauperising foreign rule.

Silence is not consent.

Big state organisations look after themselves

Not an arresting opener, I grant you, but a solid truth that is also important. If it is true, it creates a presumption against "big government".

This is not about whether education should be "free", or healthcare should be "free". It is about whether governments are the best people to run these services.

In a historical context, it's amazing that they still do. No one would now argue that the nationalised British Steel made Britain world leaders in steel technology and production. Did our telephone system flourish under government control? We've abandoned the idea of nationalised industries, but to a great extent we still have nationalised education and a Nationalised Health Service (NHS).

The Conservatives are moving towards a less rigid model of education provision. So we may start to see that in a few years if the Crewe by election is a pointer to the future (though it may not be).

Proposals to dismember the unmanageable Nationalised Health Service are thin on the ground, and indeed the NHS is Mr Cameron's sacred cow. But the NHS is a huge state organisation, easily big enough to breed its own culture. Today's Financial Times shows how hospitals and primary care trusts have prepaid suppliers many hundreds of millions of pounds and have hidden money in other ways in order to keep the NHS surplus for last year down to the forecast £1.8bn, in case the Treasury tries to claw some back.

The chairman of one London hospital said it had not only been prepaying suppliers but also shifting money to charitable trustees to get it off the books by the end of the financial year. Some primary care trusts are also said to have prepaid local authorities for services.

Now, this is not just a one-off quirk in the NHS that our wise all-seeing ministers can easily sort out. The Scorpion remembers over ten years ago an approach to a German friend of mine by a German state organisation. They had the same problem - they looked likely to underspend for the year. So could they pay this year for the goods her company supplied and take delivery during the following year when they needed them? With pleasure, she said, but if they were so desperate to give her company cash in advance, they would have to pay it interest for the privilege. And they agreed.

And we know the NHS doesn't give us quality care. The best that can be said is that there is a very mixed picture on the quality of care in the NHS, and this evidence on quality raises questions about whether the gains have been value for money.

The main objective of NHS managers is to do enough to keep their jobs. If this means obstructing patient complaints, so be it. If this means running a dirty hospital, so be it.

In his book Squandered, David Craig reports the NHS's own estimate that 34,000 people a year die unnecessarily in NHS hospitals and a further 25,000 are unnecessarily permanently disabled. He says over 6,500 people a year die from hospital acquired infections, and suggests - sadly with no supporting evidence - that "we would only have 100 deaths a year if we could match the levels of some other Northern European countries". But doctors fudge the numbers. The Patients' Association reports that

Inaccurate reporting on death certificates is a constant feature of calls to our helpline. Bereaved relatives should not have to fight for accuracy, doctors have a duty to provide it.

If you want an example of how the clunking fist of the Nationalised Health Service can crush a man, you can read Who Cares? by Amanda Steane, his widow.

Paul Steane went into hospital with a minor problem – through repeated neglect in two NHS hospitals he emerged an invalid.

Throughout his time in hospital, his wife Amanda desperately tried to alert nursing staff and hospital authorities to the things that were going wrong with her husband.

Every time she alerted them to a new horror, they would promise that nothing like that would ever happen again – but every time things got worse.

Finally, an invalid deprived of his independence, his legs, his ability to communicate and everything he enjoyed, Paul Steane took his own life.

Inexperienced doctors, overworked nurses, filthy wards, inadequate care - all of these were guilty for Paul Steane’s death.

Hospital management denied all responsibility, claiming key parts of Paul’s medical records had been ‘lost’. But a nurse, outraged at what was happening, sent Amanda copies of the ‘missing’ records and the police began to investigate.

More than 30,000 hospital beds have been lost since Labour came to power, with record cuts in NHS wards last year. We now have half the number of hospital beds per 100,000 of population that they have in Germany, France or Holland, giving us a bed occupancy rate above 85% compared to 60% in some other European countries. Overcrowded hospitals are harder to keep clean. In the same decade that the beds were cut, death rates from the infections MRSA and Clostridium difficile rose five-fold. More than 2,000 maternity beds have been lost since 1997.

Ministers cling to the fiction that they have a grip on the organisation and they know best. How can a few ministers grip any organisation where the cost of the bureaucrats alone is over £722m a year? Indeed, how can anyone actually run such an organisation? It's impossible. There can be any amount of well meaning tinkering at the edges. But it won't change this core central fact.

The first priority of people in big state organisations is always to look after themselves. This was true even under Stalin, when his hand could reach anywhere into the organisation at any time and send its members to the gulag. It's also true in the Nationalised Health Service, where managers fired for killing people just get big pay-offs. It always was true, and it always will be.

Snouts in the trough

This image from the northern Ireland Department of Agriculture & Rural Development shows MPs being paid their expenses claims.

The story's been shunted off the front pages by endless speculative pap about what's going on in the Labour party, but it's a genuine scandal. Much of the coverage has focused on individually outrageous items like the £1,600 window cleaning bill from Barbara Follett for 2003/4. Over two years she also claimed nearly £4,000 of telephone bills, more than £8,000 for security, and £4,819 for utilities, for using a flat in her husband's name as her second home.

But the biggest scandal so far is that government ministers - in a Labour government, a government that was going to be whiter than white and the servant of the people - were nominating their taxpayer-funded grace and favour residences as their first homes, and claiming expenses for their so called second homes, the only ones they owned. Ministers seem only to have asked themselves whether this was within the rules. But it was clearly a moral scandal.

There should be no second home allowance at all when an MP's constituency is within commuting distance, as is the Stevenage constituency of the rich and hypocritical Mrs Follett, who apparently is the equalities minister. She is just one of the first out of the starting blocks. There will be others playing the same game.

If there is to continue to be some sort of provision for a second home, an MP's first home should always be deemed to be in the constituency they represent. If they then need an additional base in London - as most will - Parliament should make available suitable properties to live in rent free, or an amount equivalent to the rent on them.

This would turn the present system on it head. As The Times reports -

The use of the allowance to pay off mortgages has been a boon for many MPs. According to the documents, David Cameron, the Tory leader, was claiming £1,742 a month in mortgage payments in 2006; George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, was claiming £1,560; and William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, £1,200.

There seem to be few checks on whether mortgage payments fairly reflected the initial purchase price of the property. Tony Blair claimed on a £90,000 mortgage for his constituency property. However, his wife said in her recent autobiography it had cost only about £30,000, although a similar amount was spent on refurbishment. It is not clear why the mortgage is larger than the purchase price of the house.

Co-habiting MPs should only qualify for one allowance. There are regular prosecutions of people who claim housing benefit fraudulently by concealing the existence of a resident partner. The rules which MPs have put in place for other people should apply to them too.

Commentators feel obliged to stress that these MPs haven't broken any rules. This is absolutely not the point. We pay junior bureaucrats small amounts to follow rules, and even then we expect them to use some common sense sometimes. MPs are expected to judge political and moral issues. These expenses claims morally stink. If MPs wallow in the stench under their noses, why should we take them seriously as guardians of taxpayers' money?

Congratulations to campaigner Heather Brooke. She runs a blog, and has space in The Sunday Times today to set out the background. She reminds us that the Speaker has sanctioned the expenditure at least £200,000 of taxpayers' money to stop the public from finding out how public money is spent. "Even now, we must wait until the Autumn for a full breakdown of individual claims and receipts for all MPs’ allowances." Do read her well written potted history of the scandalous cover-up campaign so far.

We can be sure, as she says, that this is the tip of the iceberg. This instalment covers just the second home allowance, and just a few MPs.

Incidentally, haven't Conservative MPs favouring secrecy noticed that their leader spoke recently in favour of Accountable Transparency for government spending? Agreed, that was for items over £25,000. But the principle is there. Accountable transparency is party policy. You probably voted for it when your party proposed it in the Commons.

To all MPs - if your expenses claims are giving you sleepless nights, blame yourselves. If immoral expenses claims cut short more political careers, good job.

Meanwhile this blog - and I hope others - will follow the gradual unveiling of the iceberg.

Watching Italy

Contrary to what seems to be the conventional wisdom, Mr Timpson isn't the greatest celebrity in Europe and Crewe is not the centre of the world.

How much more fascinating to watch the volatile Mr Berlusconi trying to manage the fissiparous tendencies in Italy, the strongest of them - the Northern League and the Movement for Autonomy (of Sicily) - embedded in his coalition. Tito Boeri picks out three main challenges.

First, fiscal federalism.

• The Northern League calls for fiscal federalism to prevent public money going south, with proposals that 90% of tax revenues stay in the areas that generate them.
  
  
• The Movement for Autonomy wants revenues from oil refined on the island to go to Sicily.
  
  
• Mr Berlusconi's party has endorsed a bill recently voted on in the Lombardia region. It keeps 80% of revenues from VAT in the region in which it is generated, 15% of the income tax, and all the revenues from taxes on oil, tobacco and gambling. The bill also proposes devolving a number of programmes funded at the national level to local administrations, limiting how much redistribution can occur across regions.
  

This, says Mr Boeri, would leave some regions without sufficient resources to pay school teachers.

Italy badly needs to cut public spending, which has grown faster than its gross domestic product, especially at the local level. By making local governments fiscally responsible it could reconcile these two goals, by imposing political costs if they run large deficits.

The Italian finance minister has called fiscal federalism the "mother of reforms".

Second, there are conflicting demands for yet more changes in the electoral law.

Third, Mr Berlusconi needs to resist the temptation to fulfil his manifesto pledges to cut taxes in clumsy ways.

Of course there are other issues. Economic growth is flat, partly thanks to Italy's membership of the eurozone, which stops it devaluing, its usual salvation in the past. The former governor of the Bank of Italy - now a senator and part of Mr Berlusconi’s political movement - has been ordered to stand trial over alleged wrongdoing in the country’s banking scandal of 2005. (He was alleged to have favoured an Italian bidder for a bank over ABN Amro and looked pretty bang to rights at the time.)

But the government also proposes strong measures against immigrants and crime. A decree will provide for "easier" expulsion of illegal immigrants - and the confiscation of property they might have rented from Italians! Illegal immigration would become an offence carrying a jail sentence of up to four years. Illegals might be detained in centres for up to 18 months pending their eventual expulsion . Officials insist the plans do not violate EU law. But this looks unlikely - the re-establishment of border controls would violate the Schengen agreement.

And new measures aimed at the Mafia would lead to greater confiscation of their assets and eliminate plea-bargaining in court.

Misha Glenny focuses on the huge power of the Camorra and other criminal groups.

For years, it has been dumping rubbish and toxic waste brought in from northern Italy on lucrative contracts in and around residential areas.

Now Neapolitans, he says, are setting fire to this garbage indiscriminately, provoking a crisis of public health.

Glenny points out that the European commission is contemplating action against Bulgaria for failing to act against corruption now that it has got into the EU and got its hands on the money. When it comes to Italy, he says, Brussels has always applied double standards (as it does to fellow founding member France when it smashes debt ceilings that are supposedly mandatory in the eurozone).

Cracking the whip over a weak accession state such as Bulgaria is easy. But the EU appears scared of threatening similar measures against Italy. If Berlusconi's government fails to adopt serious measures against the Camorra in Naples, the time has come for the EU to take as tough an approach to Italy as it does to Bulgaria. It is simply outrageous that Naples is suffocating under a blanket of smoke and xenophobia generated by an organised crime syndicate that Rome refuses to challenge.

And where are these troubles and crime centred? In the south. Which brings us back to the Northern League. How much more interesting than our own dear Crewe.

Or perhaps Italy is more interested in Mr Timpson.

Going Dutch on education

In a piece that must be music to the ears of Tory education spokesman Michael Gove, Nikki Schreiber, who has lived in The Netherlands, describes in The Independent some advantages of the Dutch education system.

Education in the UK, she says, does poorly in international tables. "The country that came top of the Unicef report and did consistently well in the international league tables was the Netherlands."

She claims that they spend less on their education than we do, but the big difference between the systems is choice. And she makes their system sound appealing.

Each pupil, she says, has a price tag, and the cost of educating a child goes directly to the school that the parents have chosen, state or private, from the Ministry of Education. "Not all the price tags are the same; they're weighted according to a child's socio-economic background, so that the child of an asylum seeker who doesn't speak any Dutch will have a relatively larger price tag to account for the extra services he or she might need."

The administrative rules are that all schools have to be approved by the Ministry of Education, but as long as that approval is gained, a group of parents can set up a new school knowing that all pupils come with a price tag and the local council will provide the school building. The government controls staffing levels and pay. Schools are inspected and and the national curriculum must be taught and exams taken.

But how the curriculum is taught is up to the school and a staggering 70 per cent of children attend independent schools. Well, they call them independent schools but it doesn't have the same meaning as in the UK. For a start they cost a fraction of the price, because of each child's right to a price tag and the provision of the school premises; most independent schools in the Netherlands charge about 500 euros a year per pupil, and there's no equivalent to Eton. This means that there are a lot of different styles of schools: Steiner, Montessori, international/bilingual (generally more expensive) and faith schools. There really is a great deal of choice and no such thing as a catchment area.

So parents are the market that decides which schools will flourish.

Not being constrained by catchment areas also gives parents more choice – in the Netherlands it seems to work along the lines of, "if I can get there by bike it's an option". But what it really means is that parents don't snare themselves in mortgages to get into catchment areas they can't afford, or pay expensive school fees or face the humiliation of having to rediscover a lapsed faith. They can choose whichever school will suit their child best. Not all parents make an active choice but enough do to influence the standard of schools everywhere.

She makes this pattern sound immensely attractive.

Away with state control of where your child goes. Away with the state bully threat that your child's educational future may be decided by a council lottery. Away with detailed control by Mr Balls and your local authority.

Obviously there must be issues within the Dutch system. For instance, what of the child no school wants?

And there would certainly be issues about how we get to there from here.

But imagine you want to go down in English history as a great reforming education minister - not a mean ambition to have. Imagine you have that ministerial post for the full term of a government.

Imagine a government moving steadily toward such a régime - perhaps piloting it in one area and then rolling it out nationally.

Imagine the huge changes in society which that could start to bring about.

Of course there would be problems. For instance, such arrangements might increase educational segregation; governing bodies might be captured by religious purists or politically correct activists. Conservatives probably have two years before an election to air such issues and test such policies.

But imagine how exciting and huge such changes could be. Slashing slavery to Whitehall, and probably slashing educational bureaucracy too. And as a by-product exposing Mr Balls as the obsolete, grey, statist control freak that he is.

Of course Dutch society is different from English society. But this template has to be worth a close look.

Cameron supports accountable transparency

This blog has argued that accountable transparency would be a hugely democratic innovation. In this age of databases it should be easy to put details of state spending on the web so that anyone can view them.

Click the label at the end of this post if you want more on this theme.

In his speech on Monday, David Cameron focused on state sector cost and waste, highlighting three themes. It's worth setting out passages as a reference point.

First, the cost of social failure. Family breakdown, unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction - these social problems rack up the biggest bills for government, so we've got to get them down.

Second, the cost of unreformed public services. Massive top-down state monopolies cost more and deliver less, so we need to improve the running of public services through more choice, competition and non-state collective provision.

And third, the cost of bureaucracy itself. All bureaucracies have an inbuilt tendency to grow, so we need to call a halt to the wasteful spending and inefficiency we've seen under Labour.

He claims that "there is now a distinctive modern Conservative approach to public service reform, based on clear thinking about how we can give power over services to those who use them".

Where services are individually consumed we will transfer power over those services to individual people, giving them a choice between competing providers.

And where services are collectively consumed, we will transfer power over those services to the lowest practical tier of government, opening up provision to social enterprises, private companies and community organisations.

But the list of examples isn't ground-breaking.

So in education we will end the state monopoly and allow new schools to be set up by a wide range of expert organisations, giving parents real school choice for the first time.

We knew that.

In the NHS we will get rid of the top-down political micromanagement and put the power in the hands of patients, who can choose the GP who they think will get the most out of the NHS on their behalf.

I've always chosen my GP.

And in prisons and probation we will empower the local managers - and pay them by results.

Heard that before too.

Then Cameron comes to accountable transparency.

We are using the best private sector expertise to find ways to save taxpayers' money and improve service delivery. But I do not believe that it's enough to just stand here and make promises about efficiency. I believe we need to create additional pressure on ourselves - and that's why I believe transparency in public spending is an absolutely vital part of this.

In this "post-bureaucratic age", he says (I must have missed that) "the information revolution makes such detailed accountability possible for the first time".

That's why last year, we introduced a Bill in Parliament to force the government to list on a public, easily searchable website, every item of public spending over £25,000.

"Unsurprisingly, Labour blocked it - but I can promise you that this will be one of the first innovations of a Conservative Government.

Civil servants will hate that. Bring it on for local authorities, agencies, quangos and the BBC.

Green goddesses

You've probably never heard of Alice Farr or Valerie Elliott. Alice works for The Woodland Trust, who describe themselves as "the UK's leading woodland conservation charity".

By acquiring sites and campaigning for woodland, we aim to conserve, restore and re-establish native woodland to its former glory. Currently we own and care for over 1,000 woods, covering over 50,000 acres.

A kind of woodland National Trust then? Not exactly. They urge us to take action now to stop climate chaos and "plant a tree to help biodiversity adapt to climate change"! We should sign up to "Icount". Yes, "we can stop climate chaos".

Hm, not just conservators of woods, then. But seemingly it still qualifies as a charity.

Commercial sponsorship and grants from charitable trusts and bodies such as The Heritage Lottery Fund and The Forestry Commission account for almost 25 per cent of funding.

It's up to shareholders how much of their money their companies give to greenies. (Incidentally, only 75% of the charity's money is spent on the charitable objectives.) But the grants aren't inconsiderable. In 2006 (information trickles slowly in greenieland) grants totalled over £3.8m.

Who are the generous providers of grants for the greenies? It looks like you and me. In 2006 over £1m came from the Forestry Commission. The Heritage Lottery Fund provided £800,000. The Department for Communities & Local Government chipped in £473,000. The Environment & Heritage Service, Northern Ireland provided £287,000, unnamed local authorities £255,000, DEFRA £178,000 ... the list goes on. Oddly, they got £99,000 from the North West Regional Development Agency - yes, that's right, Development Agency.

Out of this £3.8m of state money (our money, actually), £3.1m was "restricted grants", meaning the greenies could only use them for specific purposes.

The Trust is not short of ambition. Over the next five years they want to establish a further 5,000ha of new native woodland and involve 1 million children in planting 12 million trees. Over the next 50 years they aspire to double native woodland cover; "everyone to be within 4km of an accessible large woodland" (so presumably flattening tracts of towns and cities); "every child to have the chance to plant trees"; and "absolute protection of ancient woodland" (my italics).

This policy of absolute protection emerges in the Trust's recent statement on the decision by West Sussex County Council to approve planning permission for oil exploration in the South Downs. The BBC reports that -

Council officers told the committee there was a "clear and overriding need" for oil exploration and that the development accorded with the National Minerals Policy.

But this charity supported by taxpayers' money is having none of this. They describe the decision as "an act of vandalism on our natural heritage". Their release lists bodies which supported them. Not everyone did, as the report in the Telegraph makes clear. And the Maidstone News points out:

Alice Farr of the Woodland Trust still called the drilling “an act of vandalism” – even though no objections came from the Environment Agency or Natural England.

In explaining the Trust's opposition, Alice sets out the policy of this taxpayer funded charity.

Now is the time to move away from fossil fuels and put our efforts into the search for renewable energy. Climate change is the greatest long term threat to ancient woodland and this decision flies in the face of that.

Conservers of woodland, maybe, but conservers of woodland with a radical greenie agenda.

Valerie Elliott, the other one you'd probably never heard of, doesn't work for the Woodland Trust. She is Countryside Editor of The Times, and judging by this piece she would probably describe herself as a campaigning journalist. Her line that the "search for black gold is sweeping the country" boils down to the revelation that "The Government has received 60 applications from 54 companies to explore 182 plots". In a sinister move, however, it is "keeping the details confidential because they are commercially sensitive". Ooh.

Villages, hamlets or new estates will learn about a prospector’s interest only if permission is sought to drill or extract oil.

And what is wrong with that?

Worse follows. She reports that -

Conservationists and locals in West Sussex have expressed outrage at the county council’s giving approval for exploration Markwell Woods — an ancient woodland near Chichester, and part of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Er ... not all of them, Valerie, but don't let facts obstruct your bias. She calls these reactions "stirrings that could indicate the start of a nationwide resistance to Dallas-style entrepreneurs" - note the pejorative "Dallas-style"; do they wear cowboy hats? Or have all the hats been snapped up by cowboy journalists?

More significantly, Valerie Elliott provides no evidence at all of "nationwide resistance" - not a shred. Could she be hoping to stir some up and act as a co-ordinating point?

To be fair, though, nationwide resistance there will doubtless be, even if only from Alice and her fellow absolutists in national charities supported by taxpayers' money.

Where our money goes

Some of the numbers turned up by the Tories' review of government business support are mind boggling.

To start with, there are some 3,000 individual schemes, delivered by 2,000 different agencies and costing more than £2.5bn a year.

Around two-thirds of the money is spent simply telling businesses where to find advice and what grants are available.

A third of the money spent on regional support schemes goes on administration.

A big part of the case against Labour is incompetence. They are no good at getting value for money. Too often they see big spending (they call it "investment") as an end in itself. Every time the government says, "We have invested in schools and hospitals", think "The government has taken money from taxpayers and spent it".

The Government has set out to reduce the 3,000 business support schemes down to 100 by 2010. But how did they ever get to anything like 3,000, who's been responsible for getting value for money, and why should it take so long to stop this waste of our money?

Just one example of how wasteful big government and big politicians' egos are.

Benefit fraud again

The tale of a Gateshead man jailed for 15 months is so bizarre that it repays reading in full. He claimed job seekers allowance in the name of his jailed brother - which apparently prisoners can do legally. And he made two bogus applications for Emergency Community Care Grants. On one he claimed he needed to flee as his abusive father was about to return from Pakistan. And he "submitted ... a claim for a grant to cover removal costs for his sister in Leeds, falsely stating she had lost her husband and son in the London bombings." This hard work made Mr Ramzan £2,387. He admitted 15 charges of making false statements to get benefit - successfully - even though he already had what the paper calls "already has a string of convictions for dishonesty, including deceptions and perverting justice".

Malcolm Smith from Grimsby has been jailed for 14 months "after fiddling more than £45,600 in benefits by pretending he was severely disabled and could walk only short distances".

He claimed he had suffered a stroke, had arthritis in his hands, knees, feet and arms, suffered from high blood pressure, had an ulcer, bronchitis and could walk only eight metres without discomfort.

Father-of-eight Smith also claimed he needed help from his partner to get in and out of bed, a court heard.

But he was helping his son sell mobile phones on the market and said that, if his benefit was stopped, he would take up burglary as a career. Not much of a threat from a disabled man, especially as he already had substantial amounts of cash hidden away.

A grandmother from Gwent has been jailed for four months for defrauding Torfaen Council out of council tax relief and housing benefit of £23,126 over a period of at least 12 years, claiming her partner wasn't living with her. They had a joint bank account.

In Southall a former councillor has admitted cheating the council of more than £45,000 in benefits over seven years. Joginder Saroe was caught using the exclusive David Lloyd gym and driving an expensive Mercedes with a personalised number plate, while claiming disability benefit in 2005. Suspended sentence, amazingly.

North Tyneside Council is reporting it detected more than £250,000 of overpayments in the past year. On Teesside

Investigators are working with banks and utility companies to access information about suspects' finances, tools which have resulted in more than 79 Teessiders being taken to court so far this year for fraud believed to total more than £800,000.

Last year 144 people were prosecuted for benefit fraud having stolen more than £500,000 between them.

Between April 2006 and March last year, the DWP tracked down 424 offenders in Lothian and Borders. They had to repay the illegally-claimed cash while many had to pay a penalty set at around 30% of what they stole. At present the DWP is investigating a one-legged man caught working as a roofer in North Berwick, East Lothian. Council officials believe up to 38,000 Edinburgh households could be fraudulently claiming the single-person household discount of 25%.

East Dunbartonshire Council report that more than £450,000 in fraudulent claims were tracked down last year. The figure was recovered from 61 individuals, with the biggest single case involving a woman from Kirkintilloch who cheated the system out of nearly £85,000.

Voice Risk Analysis software (VRA) successfully trialled at Harrow and elsewhere is now at last to be extended, but only to a pilot by a further 15 councils. Funding for this pilot is £1.5m, while Harrow alone reports saving over £360,000. Blackpool - which identified more than £1.3m in overpaid benefits and prosecuted 70 people last year - wants to be one of them.

The fallacies behind green costs

"Green costs" is my shorthand for the prices we are having to pay for the government's low carbon measures, as taxpayers and consumers. It's worth while reminding ourselves how flimsy the basis for them is.

First, the correlation between "global temperatures" and atmospheric carbon dioxide is poor. Correlation with solar activity looks better. But in reality global climate is a hugely complex system which science is only beginning to understand. The computer models which are the supposed scientific basis for low carbon policy have to be regularly revised, as we saw only last week, and they seem to be poor at predicting temperatures.

Nor, then, can we assume that some change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead to a predictable change in temperature.

Even if politicians accept the dodgy science, the economic justification for pauperising ourselves doesn't hold water either. Even the IPCC admits that "the costs and benefits of mitigation ... are broadly comparable in magnitude". And, asks Nigel Lawson rhetorically in his book

How great a sacrifice is is either reasonable or realistic to ask the present generation, particularly the present generation in the developing world, to make, in the hope of avoiding the prospect that the people of the developing world, in a hundred years time, may not be 9.5 times as well off as they are today, but 'only' 8.5 times as well off?

Finally, note that the UK is responsible for 2% of emissions, while the Hadley Centre claims that "only by a reduction of 70% in [global] carbon dioxide emissions would we be able to stablilize its concentrations in the atmosphere".

This is hubristic hobby policy.

That's the background to the green costs we're tracing - pointless extra costs imposed on the population at a time when disposable incomes are shrinking.

For instance, the annual cost to the British taxpayer and energy consumer of support for renewable energy of one kind or another is already nearly £1bn a year to meet less than 2% of UK energy needs.

To see others, click on the "green costs" link below.

The cost of green

Occasional posts about the costs of green measures being foisted on us. Contributions welcome.

We concluded yesterday that in 2005-06, the total burden of green taxes and charges – Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty (net of road spending), Climate Change Levy, Landfill Tax and the net cost of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – was over £800 per household.

We commented that the burden will have risen. One issue is the aim that all homes should be zero-carbon - using on-site power generation to cut emissions - by 2016, reports the Financial Times. Most agree the scheme is the toughest of the new rules, adding about £30,000-£40,000 to the £200,000 cost of a new home.

In any case, homeowners may be unwilling to buy "zero-carbon" homes and are worried about the potential costs involved.

About 60 per cent of people polled preferred traditional-looking houses. More than 30 per cent said they had no interest in buying a house with built-in equipment to generate energy, such as solar panels or a mini wind turbine.

Many raised concerns over other potential features, including windows that do not open as far as usual to ensure that the home leaks less hot air.

Remember being consulted about this policy? Thought not.

Among those surveyed, nine out of 10 people thought the climate was changing. "Only" (the FT's word, I assume) 45 per cent thought this was mainly the result of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

How much does green idiocy cost households?

David Miliband's unconvincing performance in front of Jeremy Paxman this week after his Green lecture did at least leave one agreeing with him that Green is the new Red.

Frank Field recounts how Labour MPs have had to abandon doctrine after doctrine to New Labour in the hope of being elected, but "all the party’s activists believed it remained committed to the poor". What it has come down to is that "the very essence of being a centre-left MP was rudely and brutally questioned by the 10p abolition".

This sounds pretty minimal for a political philosophy. In fact, of course, Labour remains in favour of a huge redistribution of income since that is the only way it could "abolish child poverty" on its own egalitarian definition. Blair and Brown knew that the swing vote they needed would never embrace this policy, which was why Blair pursued it by stealth.

Benn and Miliband both seem to crave some overarching creed they can subscribe to. For both of them it is in their genes. Benn's father is a famously loony left-winger, while pere Miliband was a Marxist academic.

For both of them Green is the new crusade. Miliband nailed the green flag to his political mast in his lecture, and in the past has called for the EU to re-invent itself as a champion of the environment (whatever that means). And Hilary Benn recently said:

The Government is committed to building a low-carbon economy, here and around the world. That means a complete change in the way we live and an economic transformation that will put Britain at the forefront of a technological revolution in the way we use and source our energy.

Maybe he would care to follow Miliband into the Newsnight studio so that Paxman can dissect this statement - perhaps sharing the session with Nigel Lawson, author of the astringently readable "An appeal to reason - a cool look at global warming", or Philip Stott, whose blog is an oasis of accessible sanity.

The Tories also show signs of reverting to traditional behaviour. Whereas Labour craved the enfolding arms of a Big Faith, Conservatives' aim was firstly to get and keep power, and secondly to manage change incrementally. In this sense their leader's lack of principles is an advantage, as we see the environment dropping down his political agenda. This will not be through any conversion to the truth that he misunderstood the science and the policy consequences, but simply because it's not playing well in polling data.

The latest commentator to pick up the environmentalists' incoherence is Bernard Ingham in the Yorkshire Post, brought to a wider audience by Philip Stott. What ails politicians who dance to the green tune, he asks. Have they lost their powers of reason?

I ask because their pre-occupation with combating something that may or may not exist – that is, man-made global warming – is responsible for part of the growing burden of costs with which every household is now saddled.

So, he asks, how much is this costing us? We don't know because government and Opposition don't want to strip out the costs to show us.

Let's forget the so-called climate change levy (CCL), which has as marginal an effect on domestic consumers' bills as it does on CO2 reduction. Instead, the real damage is done by Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) designed to encourage the development of wind, wave, tidal, solar and other "renewable" forms of electricity. These are as idiotically conceived as the CCL, since nuclear and large-scale hydro-electricity, which emit next to no greenhouse gases, are excluded from both.

ROCs latterly have provided a 100 per cent subsidy substantially to wind power – so far the only major renewable source of electricity – and earlier this year, the Business Department forecast they would cost £23bn by 2020, or, nearly £1,000 per household. And for that we would optimistically get only 14 per cent of our electricity – and then only when the wind was blowing.

Unfortunately, that figure was out of date when it was calculated because Tony Blair had signed up to a battily impractical EU requirement to produce 20 per cent of our energy – and not just electricity – by 2020 from renewables.

If we are to offset the massive use of oil and gas for transport and domestic heating with renewables, we shall, as things stand, have to generate up to 45 per cent of our power with wind. So that will treble the eventual cost to £3,000 per household – without providing a reliable power supply.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, says that eight per cent – or £80 – of the current average current gas and electricity bill can be attributed to environmental charges and this is only going to rise with the billions required to link remote and largely useless wind farms to the grid.

This is not to mention more generally the costs of the carbon trading and offsetting rackets, the Treasury's punitive tax revenue from petrol and diesel, Gordon Brown's new "green levy" doubling car tax revenue to £4bn while, on the Treasury's own admission, reducing carbon emissions by less than one per cent, and taxes on rubbish.

"Why", asks Ingham, "do we put up with this "green" extortion to so little purpose? That's the real mystery."

It's no mystery at all. It's because politicians chop the costs up into little pieces to make it hard for anyone to add them all up.

Last year the Taxpayers' Alliance (thank you to them for pointing me at their paper) calculated that

In 2005-06, the total burden of green taxes and charges – Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty (net of road spending), Climate Change Levy, Landfill Tax and the net cost of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – was £21.9 billion. (This figure excludes Air Passenger Duty as emissions from international aviation are not included in national CO2 emissions totals.)

That's over £800 for each household in Britain, before you consider the cost of regulations. Some costs, for instance, are concealed in energy bills.

And the burden will have gone up a lot since then.

Benefit fraud cases show national action is needed

A Farnworth woman claimed housing benefit, saying she needed it to pay her rent. But she was using it to pay the mortgage. She made nine false claims, from 1998 to 2004, resulting in a total of £30,784 in housing benefit being paid to her. But property owners are not eligible for housing benefit.

She made three of the false claims after having been given a conditional discharge for a separate benefit fraud - she pleaded guilty in October 2000 to illegally claiming benefits while working as a cleaning lady. But it seems no one thought to look at her other benefit claim for a further six years. Well done, chaps. Although the fraud was discovered in November 2006, her guilty plea has just come to court. Rightly she has been sent to prison.

A Bedford man has been jailed for eight months after admitting benefit frauds totalling £22,970. He started claiming from March 1997 and continued until January 2007 even though he held at least seven bank accounts which he had not declared. The council decided he had stopped being eligible for benefits in April 2002. So for nearly five years he had undeclared bank accounts. Mr Uddin's bank accounts peaked at £27,000.

Both these cases cry out for elementary database matching. If benefit fraud is running at £700m a year, might it not be worth while to check every claimant for housing benefit against the Land Registry database, and to check every benefit claimant against banks' databases? There is no human rights issue here. If you want taxpayers to support you, you should have to sign a waiver to allow checks of other databases. Claimants' names and addresses can be sent to the banks, who will only have to report positive matches. None of this is rocket science, even for the state sector.

The BBC among others reports on a Huyton woman who claimed to be so severely disabled that she needed help feeding herself, but worked as a dinner lady. She has been given a suspended jail term after she was caught on camera by benefit fraud investigators preparing food for over 400 schoolchildren, even though she received a Motability car and over £80,000 in benefits. She had been working as an assistant cook at a local school since 2000 using both her maiden name and a fictitious name, as well as a false national insurance number and date of birth. It took a tip-off from a member of the public to start an investigation.

The judge at Liverpool Crown Court seems to have bent over backwards to avoid sending Kim Toner to prison for her long term criminality. She was ordered to repay the cash (ha ha, how will she do that?) and given an 18-month suspended sentence. She was also ordered to undertake 300 hours unpaid work in the community and was made the subject of a six-month curfew which means she has to be home by 7pm every night. Yeah, right.

A Gloucester couple "who lived the high life while on state benefits" have been ordered to pay back £10,000 of the benefits they falsely claimed. They took three Caribbean holidays, filled their home with expensive furniture and drove around in a Range Rover. Mr James had admitted obtaining more than £31,000 in Income Support by deception, and with his wife, to obtaining more than £8,400 in housing and council tax benefit by deception. He had benefited from £169,694.29 of funds he could not (or would not) account for but was left with only £10,000 that he could pay back. For his wife, the benefit figure was £4,216.01 and the realisable amount was a nominal £10. He has 10 months to pay or face six months' in prison. She has 28 days or face seven days in default. They have got off lightly. The judge sentenced Mrs James to an 18-month community rehabilitation order with supervision. Mr James was sentenced to 12 months' jail suspended for two years with two years' supervision and 100 hours' unpaid work.

One Gloucester man comments:

This area of Gloucester is full of people who do not work and claiming for everything. I am fed up being a taxpayer and seeing these people sponge of the workers of this country. I suggest any body who is claiming after 6 months does National Service. I think you will then find these people will have got a job.

Action against such deliberate criminality is patchy and slow, and sentences are usually inadequate. Do not expect the new style listening government to do anything more than wring its hands and mouth platitudes.