Beware politicians' definitions

If a politician offers you a definition of a term during a discussion, you can be sure that they want to steer you away from another meaning of the word that they're scared of.

Thus Jacqui Smith on Stalinism.

In my book, Stalinism and a police state happens when ministers direct and interfere with specific investigations that the police are carrying out.

No, minister. True, Stalin signed off lots of death lists personally, but his State apparatus knew their role and didn't need his personal directions for every person they oppressed. They knew their job.

And look at the police here.

The police here used the same obscure piece of common law against Sally Murrer. Coincidence? How many more investigations are taking place on the basis of this dubious offence? I think we should be told, but I'm sure we won't be.

Damian Green on Sunday

The BBC has two useful summary updates - here and here. Local Milton Keynes journalist Sally Murrer has written a chilling account of her experiences when she was pursued under the same common law here.

A police source is reported as saying they believe they have enough evidence to charge Mr Green already. It had better be a pretty meaty offence and not a technicality. Do the police think the CPS would consider it in the public interest to prosecute? Would any English jury convict?

One way or another, Damian Green will now be in the history books. There are also several senior policemen whose careers should now probably be history. Sir Paul Stephenson took charge of the Met when Sir Ian Blair was resigned. His job application to succeed Sir Ian will be examined by a Home office committee chaired by Sir David Normington, the Home Office permanent secretary who called in the police. Since Stephenson ignored Boris Johnson's "trenchant" criticism of the proposed arrest, it's hard to believe it would be acceptable to the Mayor if Jacqui Smith chose him. The Telegraph says the police operation was overseen by Bob Quick, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner and Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer.

Two names to look out for.

(Incidentally, Inspector Gadget chose not to publish my critical comment about his complacent blog piece.)

Not just one foreign country

Is Europe becoming less uniform? Lack of uniformity among member countries mattered less when the EEC was formed. The people were poorer and more dutiful. Relations and negotiations were conducted among a cosmopolitan elite.

This is changing in two ways. As Europe emerged from post-war reconstruction and the ensuing cold war, national characteristics were able to flourish again in the warmth of peace and relative prosperity. At the same time, national political elites started to become more dependant on their increasingly aware populations for continuation of their political careers and membership of the elite at the European level.

Thus the trend toward uniformity implied by the Monet vision failed to happen in some important respects. Economically illiterate European politicians pitchforked most of Europe into a single currency, with the result that the gulf in styles of economic management between North and South Europe caused greater strains.

Even within Northern Europe the economies have run in different styles. Britain borrows, Germany saves and shuns credit cards by choice. Britain advocates free trade, France lightly disguised protectionism. France and Germany have policy strategies, Britain claims to favour the free market, which is often an excuse for avoiding policy choices.

As more south European countries have joined the EU - for the money - so the amount of corruption has leapt. Romania, Bulgaria and many Balkan countries are institutionally corrupt. Southern Italy is institutionally corrupt. If you doubt this, your Christmas book list should include the richly written and stomach churning Gomorrah (for Italy), and McMafia for Bulgaria, the Balkans, and the rest of the world.

The more you gaze on Europe, the more foreign it seems.

Serious issues in the Damian Green affair

There was nothing good about the arrest of Damian Green, but some good may come of it. Claptrap about the supremacy of parliament is laughable, but in our poor excuse for a democracy it is one of the few defences we have against over-mighty governments. Matthew Parris calls the arrest "an outrage that brings shame on Britain".

Strange how the police told Boris Johnson and David Cameron before the arrest but didn't tell any ministers at all. Michael Howard says the Home Secretary should have known. Maybe they didn't speak directly to any minister. Maybe the notice was too short for any minister to know personally beforehand.

Sir David Norrington is quoted as saying that the leaks were preventing the effective running of the department. This doesn't justify arresting an MP. First, Jackboot Norrington lied. The Home Office was probably running more effectively than before. Nothing putting the nation's security was leaked. Second, all the leaks were of information which should have been available in a democracy. The government suppressed it for its own political convenience.

The leaks were no more dangerous than those Gordon Brown obtained when he was in Opposition. Thet were less dangerous than Robert Peston's reports. Have Peston or Brown been arrested?

The Speaker had plenty of opportunity to stop this outrageous raid on Commons premises. He was probably too busy adding up his expenses to try to understand any of the big, simple issues involved. He must surely lose the confidence of the House.

The FT puts this disgrace in a wider context.

Mr Green's experience has also highlighted part of the common law that needs reform. Charges of the same offence were dropped only this week against a local journalist in Milton Keynes. Her offence had been to find out from a helpful policeman whether a local footballer would be charged with an offence. She escaped only because of protections offered by the European Human Rights Act.

Governments must be jealous of giving the police too much power and of vague, open-ended offences. Unaccountable police forces with such loosely defined prerogatives are a menace to liberty. But there is little reason to hope that this administration will recognise this. The draconian anti-terror legislation it has introduced alone has given the police so much power that it has been used to detain an elderly heckler at the Labour party conference, stop protests and, last month, to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks. The government must stop making free with civil liberties.

And, as the FT remarks, "there must be genuine accountability for police forces". If no one is above the law, the police cannot be above the people.

Update - the Sally Murrer case was stopped in its tracks. This was even more heavy handed jackboot policing.

The police should have a lot to answer for.

Go on, plod, make my Damian

Damian Green must be cock a hoop. His name's more widely known today than it's ever been. Any ambitious backbencher will now want to become famous by receiving leaks.

Boris was told of the arrest beforehand and expressed "trenchant" concerns about it.

The Mayor finds it hard to believe that on the day when terrorist have gone on the rampage in India that anti terror police in Britain have apparently targeted an elected representative of Parliament for no greater crime than allegedly receiving leaked documents.

Why are the police are prioritising their resources on abusing our civil liberties? The acting head of the Metropolitan Police Service has shown himself unfit for high office.

As The Times Red Box blog points out, we have seen heavy handed police action before against a receiver of information in the case of journalist Sally Murrer, championed by Private Eye and by Nick Cohen in the Guardian.

Bad though the Murrer case is, the action against Damian Green is infinitely worse because he is an MP - and an opposition MP. The police arrested him and searched his house and his Commons office. Raedwald's blog asks about the official who allowed them in - apparently a Mrs Jill Pay, the current Sergeant At Arms. Doubtless she is now persona non grata with MPs, and with the Speaker, an incompetent man faced with a dispute he will not welcome. We need a Speaker who is a clear thinker on the limited but important range of questions he has to cover. Which this man is not.

It will also be important to focus on the exact wording of disclaimers about what the government didn't know. The police may not have told ministers directly, but they may have briefed officials. When they say they did not tell ministers that the arrest was going to happen, are they implying that no one in government knew the general line of enquiries, and that police were using the old common law?

It's inconceivable that the CPS would find it in the public interest to prosecute Damian Green. The police would know this. They arrested a Member of Parliament, kept him for nine hours, and searched his records, in order to facilitate an investigation where a junior official had apparently already been identified. There was no reason to think they could ever bring the MP to trial. Are they going to start fingering journalists too?

Jill Pay may be doomed. The acting head of the Metropolitan Police should certainly go.

All the denials by government and the police will have been written by lawyers, and should be dissected in that light.

Update - Douglas Carswell thinks the Speaker sanctioned the search in the Commons.

Not a Great Dictator, an Incompetent Dictator

It was a remarkable budget, planning for ballooning government debt even on its own optimistic assumptions, but the not-very-great Dictator in our so called democracy didn't want to schedule a debate in parliament and it was left to the Opposition to squeeze a meagre three hours from the Speaker.

It was also remarkable because no one thinks its main measure, a temporary cut in VAT, will do any good. Commentators have queued up to point out that it's trivial against the price rises we've been seeing. While falling commodity prices will doubtless bring some reductions, the plummeting value of the pound is sure to make imported goods dearer. Retailers condemn the VAT change because it will give them a headache of extra work at their busiest time of year for no gain that they can see, and they will have to absorb the cost of making the changes.

Businesses will now be able to reclaim less VAT on their fuel purchases and will have to absorb the extra petrol duty that replaced the VAT. Small businesses on flat rate VAT will pay more net tax, as Tony Sharp explains.

Vince Cable has hammered at his central point that the government isn't doing enough hard work on the important parts of the economy that are seizing up, while Frank Field would have preferred to see income tax cut and worries whether the government will be able to fund its huge borrowing requirement in the money markets.

Of course only a Great Dictator with a cloth ear could have opted for the VAT cut, while a rise in tax allowances was out of the question because it would have removed people from the web which the Great Spider wishes to weave around everyone.

Frank Field concludes that the budget "raised some fundamental questions about the Government’s competence in running a crisis economy". He continues that "its lack of action on the 10p [tax rate abolition] raises the most fundamental questions about its moral purpose".

In Gordon Brown’s last budget the cut of 2p in the standard rate of tax was paid for largely by abolishing the 10p starting rate of tax. Millions of low paid taxpayers were made worse off.

The £2.7bn compensation package announced in May did not restore the relative position of the low paid. The tax concessions apply to all taxpayers including all those standard rate payers who had benefited by the 2p standard rate reduction.

Yesterday’s budget merely extended relief to all taxpayers. In no way did it restore the relative tax burden of low paid workers to the vast majority of workers paying at the standard rate.

The Government therefore faces the charge that it either doesn’t understand what it has done to the 10p group of taxpayers. Or that it doesn’t care. Either way it is a pretty bloody outlook.

Worse than a bungle, an incompetent mess.

Wednesday snippets

The greenies are out in force in the comments on Peter Lilley's piece highlighting (but in a rather odd way) the costs of the government's vain policy of cutting the UK's carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.

The contents of the Impact Assessment are astounding. Whereas it puts the Bill's potential cost as up to £205bn, it says the maximum benefits of this massive expenditure is £110bn.

Back in current economics, Bruno Waterfield picks up forecasts of economies' prospects. Britain is expected, by the European Commission, to go into a deeper slump than any other EU economy, except for Latvia and Estonia.

EU forecasters have also predicted that unlike countries, such as France and Germany, Britain will be hit by a "budget deficit and debt spiral" - why would Berlin want to emulate those policies?

Britain's heavy burden of public debt is expected to rise at a faster rate than most other major European economies to hit over 60 per cent of total GDP by the end 2010.

While public debt in most EU countries is expected to breach a relaxed annual Brussels debt cap of three per cent of GDP "by some decimals" over the next two years, British debt will be more than double the ceiling.

Can the Tories make this stick? Waterfield claims that Britain's economy is poorly structured for the downturn, worse than those of Germany and France.

On a smaller scale, the Taxpayers' Alliance report that Hammersmith & Fulham have announced that for the third year running they will be cutting council tax by 3%. Any other conservative councils in this league?

Abroad, James Bartholomew points to a report in the Straits Times that cabinet ministers and top civil servants in Singapore will see their pay packages shrink by up to 19% next year.

All civil servants will also be getting about one month less in various bonuses at the end of this year, as compared with last year.

A statement from the Public Service Division (PSD), which oversees civil service matters, cited the economic slowdown as the reason for the moves.

That's what we like - performance related pay with objective criteria.

We're being governed badly

I don't like being governed badly.

The government ran up high debt in calmer economic times. Now they are surprised the banks which we shored up aren't lending more freely, they are going to blow money on a fatuous VAT cut, and they haven't said how they would plan to bring government borrowing back down if they won the next election.

Around two thirds of the jobs created under Labour were paid for by taxpayers, the Financial Times has calculated. And "of the 1.07m additional jobs taken by women between 1998 and 2006, 963,000 were in the sectors where the public sector predominates or is almost the sole purchaser of services ... the differing fates of the sexes in the labour market over the past decade suggest that the public sector remains much more hospitable to women than the private sector, particularly in the case of older women with childcare responsibilities who want to work part time."

So it seems most of the extra jobs under Labour were paid for by us taxpayers, and that the state is able to accommodate large numbers of women workers whose job may not be their first call on their time. Could it be that there's slack in them there jobs? The whole piece is worth pondering.

Notoriously Labour's play policy on energy is putting us at ever greater risk of major power shortages. And the government has legislated to cut our carbon output by 80% by 2050. Lord Lawson explained politely in the Lords why this was barking. The planet is not warming and no other country proposes to follow such a policy. "We are in the position of being completely on our own." The relatively small and easy cuts agreed at Kyoto didn't happen. "Given that we could not get close to 5 per cent even while it was possible to outsource emissions, it beggars belief that we think we can get to a 50 per cent reduction by 2050, of which our share will be an 80 per cent reduction, at least", especially as China and India won't support the policy.

(In passing it's good to learn that Lord Lawson's book on global warming, An Appeal to Reason - which he had difficulty getting published - has already been translated into two European languages and three more foreign editions are on the way.)

Finally in this short tour of major government mismanagements, the government's own projections show that the UK population will reach 70million in 20 years' time.

Of the extra ten million, seven million will be due to immigration. That is equivalent to seven times the population of our second largest city, Birmingham. Almost all the increase will be in England - much of it in the South-East, which is already our most congested region.

Yet there is no policy in place which will reduce this number, even though the government has admitted that the extra annual production per head resulting from immigration amounted to between 42p and 62p per week - a trivial amount compared to the extra pressure on state services and our environment.

These are just a few examples of how government is ducking big issues. We will surely have to pay for it.

Of VAT and banks

However excited Westminster gets, a cut of 2.5 percentage points in VAT is only 2.12% off the general price level - a drop in the ocean. M&S needed 20% off to make s difference, Debenhams 25%. Some staples rise by more than that in a week.

And evidently this is a short term offer.

Then you read more leaks. The government plan to postpone tax rises - for which it will grotesquely seek political credit.

They also plan to continue the temporary relief for some poorer people adversely affected by Brown's tacky gesture of abolishing the 10p tax rate - but some will remain poorer. Previously government said it couldn't afford to right the injustice for them all. Of course affordability is out of the picture now; evidently the injustice is to remain.

This package won't change behaviour in our household. For many private sector earners the worry will be job security, which won't be allayed by barely visible temporary price cuts. State employees have less to fear.

So not so much a damp squib, more a non-event.

Ken Clarke and Vince Cable put their fingers on more substantial challenges, including the behaviour of the banks. Brown and Darling poured money into the banks without understanding them. It's not just that they went overboard into capital markets they didn't understand. This was part of the change in their behaviour when they stopped being utilities and became strongly profit oriented.

Capital markets weren't the whole story. The banks turned their attention to their many personal and small business customers. Personal borrowers were often encouraged to take out banks' payment protection insurance (PPI), which was the dearest in the business. For instance, they charged the full premium up front, not month by month, and it was added to the amount of the loan, to generate more interest income for the banks as well.

Small business customers were weaned off overdrafts - more economical for the customer but harder for the banks to administer - and encouraged to take out loans instead. Banks knew that businesses with cash flow problems had few other places they could turn to. The customer was over a barrel and was made to pay for it in the interest of profit maximisation. Harsh fees became the order of the day, in one bank in particular. Another bank would announce out of the blue to a customer that their business was no longer wanted, for no good reason that the bank was able to explain.

Lending to small businesses was de-skilled, and the new less skilled officials were given increased numbers of customers to administer. Bank managers became profit driven, with targets to sell increased numbers of products, and customers complained that their lending officers lacked the experience to talk intelligently to them about their businesses.

It's clear from MPs' postbags that banks are tightening terms of credit for small businesses, claiming that times are tougher. In many cases those borrowings will be secured to an extent that there will be no real risk at all, just a slightly increased chance that the bank may have to realise its very adequate security.

In its usual naive way, government has tossed taxpayers' money at the banks, trusting them to deal leniently with small businesses in a difficult financial climate which they themselves and their international counterparts have caused.

But banks are accustomed to big profits. As the Competition Commission is happily stopping the banks from taking advantage of their privileged position as lenders to sell individuals PPI, so the banks have announced that they will consider increasing the costs of personal borrowing - in this difficult climate and with several of the banks effectively nationalised - in order to recoup profits on PPI which were partly illegitimate in the first place.

In the same way, banks seem to be looking to the largely captive small business market to recoup some of the losses they have suffered in the capital markets through their own ineptitude and greed. Government seems to have no idea how to tackle this.

The people Vince Cable wants to rope in to unblock the housing market are businessmen, not ex-bankers. But, in getting to grips with the terms banks offer to small businesses, it may be ex-bankers that government must turn to. Not the great banking lords who threw the dice and brought their banks down in the pursuit of ever greater profit, but coalface bankers who lent money week in and week out, who knew the banks when they were the utilities the government seeks to re-create, rather than the profit-chasers the banks have become in the past few years.

This could only be done by task forces on the ground, not by a couple of non-executive directors meeting occasionally in a distant boardroom. But does government have the courage for such intervention?

State mismanagement

Pensions for state employees have to be high, we were told last week, because the state needs to attract the best.

So when Tim Stone, the government's nuclear adviser, seemingly wanted to review possible obstacles to building nuclear power stations, did he turn to those comfortable, high powered civil servants?

Er ... no. He sought outside advice from Berwin Leighton Paisner, a leading City law firm. Why? And at what cost? Well, we don't know, but they don't seem to have told him anything that Booker or North could not have covered in one of their pieces, at no cost to taxpayers.

But that would have been inconveniently public.

For another example of bad state administration, consider the response of Mr Ballsup to the Haringey events, which could hardly have been more cack-handed. Pass over his typically clumsy lie about the policy of the Information Commissioner (rebutted by Mr Thomas). Mr Ballsup is sure he is cleverer than the rest of us, which speaks volumes about his vanity.

Mr Ballsup's big idea is that child protection should be managed by local boards of public bodies. This recipe for slowing down decision making and gumming up the administrative works does nothing to address the problems of culture and competence in social services departments.

Inspector Gadget's blog routinely castigates social workers for their can't do attitudes. Social workers have extraordinary powers through the secretive family courts, yet the culture of the profession seems out of tune with public attitudes. And are their councils in control of them? Not in Haringey.

And the response of Mr Ballsup, whose instinct for spotting issues and right answers is as woeful as his mentor's? He wants to diffuse responsibility more, decrease accountability, involve as many people as possible in decisions.

A correspondent writing to the Telegraph points out the benefit that mature volunteers can bring by visiting households at risk. Not a contribution Haringey deigns to accept.

But the department made 60 visits to that household and the baby died. There can be no excuse whatever for this. If this is not incompetence by everyone in the council who was involved, what is?

Haringey needs to be flushed out, not have its incompetence become less visible - which is Mr Ballsup's solution.

Our dysfunctional state apparatus

A baby was killed after sixty visits by social workers. The council is sorry but their department head isn't to blame. There is no can to carry. Ofsted gave Sharon Shoesmith a glowing report. The head of the inspection team had worked for her. Her department ignored advice from local police and left a baby at home to die with his spine broken. Council staff attended lavish junkets - including 'team-building' trips to Barcelona and Dublin, and a £1,600 tea-party at the Ritz - while the baby was being tortured and beaten under the noses highliving Sharon Shoesmith's social services staff. A whistleblower who tried to alert ministers to failings by Haringey social services six months before Baby P died in its care was rewarded with an injunction silencing her. This not from a private employer, but a state department which taxpayers fund. We are told that social workers were overloaded by having as many as eighteen cases – which doesn't seem a lot if you run things crisply. Days after Baby P's death a senior Haringey councillor insisted "much had changed" at the local authority since the murder of Victoria Climbie seven years earlier. Liz Santry, the council's cabinet member for children and young people, used an email to criticise the media for linking the two tragedies.

Elsewhere in the state apparatus a murder victim's elderly mother is to drag the criminal justice system into the dock at a landmark inquest which is to investigate why a rapist was freed with minimal supervision – but the hearing won't be until next September.

At Gosport Council they are more zealous – over tenants' doormats, which might pose a health and safety hazard. A council spokeswoman defends the policy even though the councillor who heads the council's housing board thinks it is over the top.

Meanwhile, the DWP has failed again. Delivery of the new Employment and Support Allowance, which replaces Incapacity Benefit, will rely on manual processes and postal services for the first nine months because a new £295m computer system is not ready. The delay comes despite assurances given in June by Lesley Strathie, then Jobcentre Plus chief executive, that the system would be ‘business ready’ for the ESA’s October launch.

Bureaucracy yes, planning no

Bureaucracy is fine. It enmeshes captures subjects in the coils of the state, from which there is no escape, giving the wise ministers ever more ability to fine tune subjects' lives with increasing precision.

Or something like that.

Planning, on the other hand, requires decisions. Decisions can upset people. So ministers prefer to sit on their hands.

So no power strategy. Hence Britain has minimal gas storage compared to other gas consuming countries, Britain faces blackouts within ten years as power stations go out of service. Nine oil and coal-fired power plants are to close by 2015 because of an EU directive that aims to limit pollution.

As Dr Jon Gibbins of Imperial College says -

You can't guarantee that the lights will stay on.

You are just taking a tremendous risk. You don't want to take a risk with the electricity supply. People die when you lose electricity supplies.

We have had endless dithering with inquiry after inquiry over the last five years, yet we have nothing actually built, apart from a few gas plants.

Yet, as Tony Sharp points out, our gas supplies are vulnerable.

But an energy strategy would require decisions from ministers. Decisions far outside Mr Brown's limited comfort zone. Stand by to shiver as Mr Brown leads the world ... er, not.

Deeper into the bureaucratic mire

The economic crisis is showing Gordon Brown in his true colours again. He is publicly telling his "independent" Bank of England what to do about interest rates. And word is that he intends to deliver a fiscal stimulus using his beloved tax credits.

Tax credits can never work properly, as we have noted here, here and here. No administrative changes could ever make them work properly - even if they were competently administered, which they are not - and they are wide open to fraud. Like his predecessor, the great centralist believes that bureaucracy can magically achieve any fine tuning he desires.

We will also be on the way to another dose of redistribution. Mervyn King stresses that increased government borrowing can only be temporary. Once the economy starts to pick up, state income and spending will have to move back to balance. What chance then that tax credits would be cut back to former levels? None at all.

This is a cloak for more redistribution by stealth. Doubtless gormless George Osborne will let this too waft past him with another feeble, unfocused twittering protest.

Take more people out of the state's net by raising personal allowances.

You bray, we pay

Actually this is unfair to donkeys, as we're going to have a pop at state sector asses who call for politically correct language.

Town halls and other public sector bodies were told by ministers last year to replace the phrase ‘terrorist attacks’ with ‘anti-Islamic activity’, and to talk about ‘community resilience’ instead of ‘extremism’.

Lo and behold, that daft initiative has been the subject of a state sector report looking at the impact of the £50million Preventing Violent Extremism programme launched two years ago to recruit public services to try to persuade young Muslims against supporting terror networks. But far from rallying Muslims against terrorists, the language has spread confusion, says the report from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Audit Commission compiled at your expense and mine.

It said there were sensitivities over language in some places but in others ‘there was a preference for plain speaking so that issues could be dealt with openly rather than being avoided or disguised as something else’.

It also found the campaign had been marred by a failure of the agencies involved to share information.

A wastefully pointless idea bunglingly executed. Oh how we taxpayers rejoice. Now no doubt the self-important Hazel Blears would prefer blogs to applaud her ruling clique, but while they continue to bleed us to finance such trashy initiatives, why would anyone sane want to praise them?

Local authorities seem particularly prone to such initiatives. Thus Caerphilly council has adopted the view of a Welsh race relations body that the word ‘British’ can be as offensive as ‘negro’ and ‘half-caste’. This body is Valrec, the Valleys Race Equality Council, headed for five years by the infamous Ron Davies (pictured above), yes he of Clapham Common fame, who is paid £27,000 to be its chief.

Well it is up to the Welsh if they want to pay this ass to head his worthless quango - which judging by its name doesn't even cover the whole of their dinky principality.

Tax credits can never work

This blog has noted that tax credits are not only unworkable, but also offer huge scope for easy fraud.

They are inherently unworkable because they demand that the poor - many with minimal experience of dealing with officialdom - understand that they need to keep the state updated with what may be frequent changes in their personal circumstances - and how to do that.

The rules require timely notification of a vast amount of personal information to a central point which in practice is uncheckable.

And the rules produce anomalies.

Another contact now claims that Poles can claim for children back in Poland and they can have the money paid into polish bank accounts. They claim and then only need to work 16 hours a week to qualify for WTC and CTC.

Native Britons. he says, can only have the claim backdated three months but asylum seekers can have the claim backdated till the day they came to the UK as soon as asylum is granted.

Gordon Brown's tax credits system has to be hopelessly complicated. And this is not a design fault that can be cured.

But it's not as if this great lumbering monster is being run properly. As Tax Credit Casualties points out, errors are commonplace and the state has draconian powers against people who have fallen foul of the apparatus through no fault of their own.

But tax credits aren't failing just because officials make a mess of individual families' affairs.

It's because the less intelligent have to communicate too much with officialdom - without help - over and over again - understanding a mass of rules. This is inherent in the concept of tax credits.

So, even if you iron out the anomalies, tax credits can never work.

Even if all the officials start to get everything right all the time, tax credits can never work.

The huge masses of information flowing into central points can't be checked, so tax credits will always be wide open to easy fraud.

Tax credits have to be complicated. So complicated that they can never work.

Your privacy means nothing to the government

Maybe you're James Purnell leaving your open red box unattended on a train while you pop out to the end of the carriage to make phone calls. Never mind, your Department will play down those private documents you left behind and deny you broke guidelines even though you did.

They're less likely to cover for you if you're a civil servant. Lord Mandelson's Director of Corporate Services, a Mr Sachak, who runs the Queen's Award for Enterprise, read "restricted" emails on the train and even dozed off while they were on his screen. The Department for Business said:

This is a serious issue and should not have occurred. It was a careless mistake by the person concerned and we are investigating the circumstances.

Staff are being reminded of the department's stringent security rules and the importance of exercising caution when working remotely in public places.

But today's worst report is a breach by a contractor. Ministers have ordered an emergency shutdown of the Government computer Gateway, after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system.

For the past six years, reports the Mail, the Government Gateway has allowed members of the public and businesses to gain access to hundreds of services from 50 Whitehall departments, including self-assessment tax returns, VAT returns, pension entitlements and child benefit. This year 1.8million people have submitted their tax returns on the system.

The lost memory stick was found two weeks ago outside a Brewers Fayre chain pub in Cannock, Staffordshire, but the Department of Work and Pensions, which owns the Government Gateway, was made aware of its loss only last week when the 2in device was passed to this newspaper.

An expert who examined it for The Mail on Sunday said it contained confidential passwords, security software and the technical blueprint to the system known as the 'source code'. The memory stick is now in the hands of the police.

The DWP is insisting that the system's security has not been breached (my italics), but the paper was told that in the wrong hands the data on the memory stick could enable hackers to access personal details of the 12million people who have registered on the system, including their passwords.

Looks like the Information Commissioner's office may be busy tomorrow.

As for your own private data - government ID cards, anyone?