Boris: get ministers out of their cars

Boris has a cracking piece this morning about ministerial cars.

Murdoch on the BBC

Richard North picks up Murdoch jnr's nasty attack on the BBC in a piece which reflects this blog's views.

For Murdoch to be stymied we don't actually have to read the BBC's output - as long as it's there, it stops powerful, sinister looking people like him charging for news and comment and making society that little bit less open.

Though of course he could charge now for his opinion pieces - which the Beeb doesn't carry - and see if people were willing to pay.

And come to that, most of the stuff on the front pages of The Sun and the NoTW doesn't make it to the BBC's site.

So come on, Murdoch, start charging for those now!

And did he suggest that the market he wants to create would bring us any developments in journalism that we don't have already? If so, I missed it in the coverage.

By his special pleading, James Murdoch has pulled off the tricky feat of being more repugnant than the BBC by a mile.

A new nasty and sinister hate figure.

More unaccountable officials

Residents in Dobwalls, Cornwall, wanted to spruce up a new roundabout - which is covered in weeds - with several colourful species of flower.

However, when the parish council wrote to the Highways Agency it was told the plants could catch the eye of passing drivers - and cause an accident.

The council chairman said:

We wanted to put some flowers in because the thing is covered in weeds. It is a terrible eyesore.

But we were told it would be a distraction to drivers and might cause health and safety issues. We just wanted to make it presentable.

It looks totally unfinished - there's plenty of roundabouts with plants and trees on. It is stupid.

A spokesman for the Highways Agency said:

The main issue is one of safety. As a rule our policy is not to plant or construct anything that could cause a distraction.

These is also an issue of maintenance and access to think about. We have planted low maintenance grass on the roundabout.

What we should care about is how these unelected, unaccountable, invisible officials get away with making these pettiflogging rules.

How many accidents have been caused by flowers on roundabouts? There is no forum where these people can be challenged, where their taxpayer paymasters can have their say. They are invisible judges and juries in their own cause.

More power to the elected parish council.

More unaccountable officialdom

The Nationalised Health Service has spent thousands of pounds on a booklet that tells nurses to put pot plants in patients' rooms to counter climate change.

We're told it's £8,000. I bet it's more. To start with, it was funded and put together by the NHS Confederation and the NHS Sustainable Development Unit and charitable organisation, the Faculty of Public Health. That alone raised the costs.

(The Faculty is the standard setting body for specialists in public health in the UK. What it is doing getting involved in this silliness is anyone's guess.)

The handbook recommends a number of ways to reduce the carbon footprint. For example more flexible working hours, bus timetables in the staff room to encourage more people to use public transport. Teleconferencing, car sharing and cycle racks to reduce the amount of travel by car.

Pot plants on wards are suggested, as is more locally produced and vegetarian food in hospital meals. Patients are also encouraged to lower their carbon footprint and improve health by walking and cycling more and eating more locally produced food.

Cushioned officials love extending their reach and producing this sort of guff. It burdens front line workers - the ones who make the difference - and taxpayers pay for it.

Such waste is endemic in a big taxpayer-funded organisation.

Targetitis - why government can't run things

An independent school headmistress tells us

One state school head teacher on one given day last year had 39 initiatives from the Government on his desk, and only four of them had anything to do with the curriculum. That’s a very successful state school as well.

Teachers are spending a lot of time preparing for these constant changes – imposed by the Government – rather than enjoying a period of stability where they can refresh their own subject knowledge. In the independent sector we are not swamped – we can focus on the curriculum. In the state sector, the focus has been taken away from the subject.

Balls and his ilk don't get it and they never will. The centralists think they can impose targets and away they go. They have no feel for how to get the best out of an organisation because they've never worked on the front line.

To them, organisations have to be directed centrally, and monitored centrally. Consumers have to take what the state decides is good for them and have no real say in those decisions.

Government needs to let go.

Jana Bennett spoils blogger's breakfast

Jana Bennett doesn't get it. She has defended the BBC’s position in not publishing details of the individual salaries of its performers.

We have said that we would look at block spend on talent because that could be meaningful to the public.

Actually it would be meaningless - and that is just why this panjandrum would consider giving the information.

For presenting 'Strictly Come Dancing' this year Bruce Forsyth has taken a pay cut to £500,000. Does that affect my attitude to him? Absolutely. Does everyone have to agree with me? Absolutely not. But taxpayers pay the licence fee, and we are entitled to know.

Her analysis of her market is flawed. Kevin Lygo from Channel 4 hits the nail on the head. He said the pay market was “grossly distorted”:

If the BBC want to get someone they absolutely can. They don’t understand how disproportionately rich they are compared to the commercial sector.

Oh but they do. They just don't care.

Of course Jana Bennett wants to be exempt from accountable transparency. The Conservatives' Ed Vaizey says they would work with the BBC to make salaries public.

Fat chance. Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, has said that the salaries of the BBC’s highest paid entertainers should stay secret because they have no control over its funding.

He said if the salaries of entertainers were publicly scrutinised and “forked over”, it might make them want to go and work elsewhere, “which would not be in the best interests of the BBC”.

Maybe Mr Vaizey has overlooked George Osborne's pledge that expenditure items of £25,000 or more would be published on the web.

If this applies to government departments, it should certainly apply to the BBC.

The BBC are spending our money. We are entitled to know how it is being spent.

The BBC used to tell its stars "we won't make you rich, but we will make you famous". No longer.

Why an unreformed NHS will never be sorted out

It's not the harrowing tales of neglect, suffering and death - which could touch any family at any time.

Frank Field relates his own bad experiences of the NHS and then shockingly writes

The nurses commented how kind it was of me to feed the old lady. I didn't have the courage to tell them that it was their job; and that they had stood in a group gossiping, watching what I was doing. I was fearful that they would take it out on my mother if I did so.

If Field felt powerless, what hope for the rest of us?

This is the clinching argument. The Nationalised Health Service's establishment is too powerful.

The Nationalised Health Service has somehow to be broken up. There is no other route to proper accountability.

Catching up after holiday break

Helen Szamuely has a useful post counteracting the humbug about Senator Edward Kennedy.

And Douglas Carswell links to a review of a new book subtitled "Immigration, Islam and the West".

(Carswell, incidentally, is a Tory MP thinking and writing about issues which the morally bust UKIP could have made its own during Cameron's honeymoon. That won't happen now.)

Don't waste your time on this wind

Coffee House's Peter Hoskin commends articles by Larry Elliott and Steve Richards. Don't bother.

Elliott & Richards have produced pretty meagre fare.

Sure, the Tory line on the NHS is brain dead. But Labour studiously has no line on anything like this at all. Elliott's piece is only worth while if the point 'what about Labour?' never occurs to you while you're reading it. Unlikely.

Richards rehashes a little at some length. During an election the broadcast media must studiously observe neutrality, so they can't reflect the rightist tilt of the blogs.

And outside the excitable world of political journalists and bloggers, how much of this will seep out to the average voter?

The top down controllers during the election campaign will still have far more influence than Richards' windy piece allows.

I suppose they both have space to fill. Quite why Hoskin encouraged me to spend my time reading them, though, I'm not sure.

Sea view

To Frinton, for a sunny day at the seaside. We were greeted by a display of thirteen wind turbines out to sea.

There was a reasonably stiff breeze. So were the wind turbines whirring?

Not exactly. Three stirred lazily, the other ten were motionless.

There was probably more activity on a hot summer's day at an Edwardian house party.

Cameron bottles sacking Duncan

Bad mistake. Duncan is preening, smarmy and odious, with no politically redeeming features at all. A liability to the party.

But evidently Duncan is the sort of person Cameron wants round his table.

Bad mistake.

Coward.

Costly impractical command bureaucracy

I never quite understand why we don't flood into Whitehall outraged at the cavalier way the government pours our money down the drain.

The CPS has just issued a paper suggesting that slimming down educational quangos could yield annual savings of ... not £1m (which would be bad enough), but £633m! That's £10 per person per year being spent on educational quangos.

We can't afford it.

It's of dubious value to schools anyway. The Telegraph reports that documents received by schools over a 12-month period contained almost 1.3 million words. There are now 37 different statutory policies that schools in England and Wales have to adhere to.

You cannot run any organisations like this, but Ed Ballsup has no idea about that, never having run anything in his life. His department comprehensively fails to get it.

A DCSF spokeswoman said: "This allegation confuses schools' legal responsibilities with communications to schools.

"Schools do have responsibilities in law, and we make no apology for alerting them to the information they need to deal with important issues like child protection, bullying and race equality."

She said it was not Government policy to email full documents to schools, and hard copies of documents were sent only in "exceptional circumstances".

It's all stuff which the apparatus wants schools to read. No one begins to consider how much it might be reasonable to dump on schools. Of course, whether the bumph is sent as hard copy or by e-mail is entirely irrelevant.

Michael Gove grabs this gift and says

Instead of giving teachers the powers they need over discipline or fixing the devaluation of the exam system, Ed Balls is swamping schools with such a tide of paper that it is obvious heads cannot read more than a fraction.

We will have a completely different approach - we will give teachers much more freedom, but we will make them more accountable to parents instead of bureaucrats.

The next government will need to save all the money it can, so there's £633m on the table to start with. Kerching. And more freedom for schools too.

Alan Duncan absurdly over-promoted

Alan Duncan is a vain puffed up man promoted far beyond his ability who has connived in arranging for expenses to continue to be paid without receipts.

His vanity is matched only by his conviction of his superiority to mere voters.

Paul Waugh picks up on Duncan's latest gaffe. Duncan has just issued a statement making a full apology for his remarks that MPs were now being treated "like shit" and forced to live on "rations" since the expenses scandal.

He claims he was joking. Waugh invites us to watch the video containing Duncan's remarks here - it's gently amusing. As Waugh writes, "you can make up your own mind whether the comments about 'rations' were a joke or not".

Clearly they weren't. Superior Duncan was serious, and believes the voters deserve to be hoodwinked.

Is this really the best the Tories can offer?

Too cosy at our BBC

We don't have to worry about the BBC buying the services of families of high ranking BBC employees, their spokesman tells The Mail.

Where executives have a close relationship with someone in a company we are doing significant business with, they may not play a role in the decision making process related to the award of any such business, including any commercial sum.

They don't have to.

Look at the connections The Mail has turned up. There will be plenty of outsiders jostling to do those jobs. And are we really to believe that the contract negotiations will be as robust as they would be with someone who hadn't got those connections?

It's taxpayers' money. No family deals.

Again the BBC defends the indefensible.

Less fisking in future?

The Guardian tells us that Rupert Murdoch plans to charge for all news websites by next summer.

Where he leads, others will doubtless follow.

Open primaries

Frank Field and Douglas Carswell are excited by the high participation of 25% in the Totnes open primary.

That would be one way to deal with the Julie Kirkbride issue. Let her and her husband stand in local primaries and see how they get on.

And I wonder how Alan Duncan or Hazel Chipmunk would fare if their local voters could voice their views in open primaries? It would certainly be more democratic than the present closed shop.

The problem's not Sir Humphrey

Douglas Carswell commends what he says is a first-class article in the Times, explaining that the civil service is a major obstacle to change. The author, Paul Richards, is a former special adviser to Hazel Blears and Patricia Hewitt.

In fact the piece is a second class article from the pen of a man who served two low quality ministers.

As you'd expect, he's avoiding the main issue. State employees won't change until ministers change their demands on them. Then they'll change sharpish, because their survival will depend on it.

So the real question is how to ensure that Tory ministers will behave differently from their predecessors. Some of them are so poor quality and so self-regarding that we can be pretty confident they'll put their own image first, just like the present crew.

Can anyone, for instance, imagine that Alan Duncan eschewing image for substance?

For a Tory MP, that's a issue uncomfortably close to home - unlike comfy speculation about the bureaucratic culture.

How do you turn a strutting peacock into a proper, serious minister? That's a far more intractable question.

Doozy

This is my new word for the day, but having read the definitions I think it has too many meanings for me to use.

Anyway, it's the label for a new paper used by Watts up with That:

This paper confirms 13 years of discoveries that suggest a key role for cosmic rays in climate change. It links observable variations in the world’s cloudiness to laboratory experiments in Copenhagen showing how cosmic rays help generate atmospheric aerosols.

And, as one commenter notes, it provides a testable hypothesis.

Luboš Motl is also quoted:

Each Forbush decrease can therefore warm up the Earth by the same temperature change as the effect of all carbon dioxide emitted by the mankind since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. While you might think that such an effect is temporary and lasts a few weeks only, it is important to notice that similar variations in the solar activity, the solar magnetic field, and the galactic cosmic rays take place at many different conceivable frequencies, so there are almost certainly many effects whose impact on the temperature – through the clouds – is at least equal to the whole effect of man-made carbon dioxide.

Our politicians tell us the science is settled, of course.