Balls and Balls again

Philip Johnston has written an excellent column about the appalling case where Ofsted insists on regulating friends providing childcare for each other's children.

Sign the Downing Street petition against this state intrusion into people's lives here.

Probably we will never know whether Balls and his ministerial team approved this or were asleep on the job. Either way Balls has shown again that he's not fit to be a minister. (Who was behind light regulation of the banks?)

Balls and other centralists think only the state can bring about good results. They think people are incapable of good independent thought. Quite apart from this obnoxious principle, is the state any good at bringing about improvements? How much would all this intrusive monitoring cost? We haven't been told. Who would pay for it all? You and me. Might we maybe have better things to do with our money?

Johnston notes

The pressure organisation Action for Children worked out that successive British governments have made more than 400 major announcements relating to children and young people over the past 21 years, leading to 98 Acts of Parliament, 82 strategies and 77 initiatives, many of which are no longer working. Three quarters of these policy changes and statements were made in the past decade under Labour. This is a sure sign of a governing class that has lost all sense of what are the proper limits of state activity.

And he rightly asks how such a law could be drawn up in the first place, and then be passed by a Parliament "that seems to have been asleep for the best part of the past decade, other than when it comes to putting in expenses claims".

No one comes well out of this, not the regulators with their closed, fanatical mindset, not ministers, not the official Opposition, not backbenchers.

Meanwhile the Balls empire has had a luxury £3m makeover at our expense. They say this was cost effective as they were able to bring two sets of offices into one building.

Why do they need so many officials? Did they sell off the space they vacated? And why did the specification have to be so high?

They blued that money because they could. Because they consider themselves our wise masters, and for wise masters nothing that can be bought with our money is too good.

UK Highways Agency lies

The Highways Agency has listed three motorway projects around London which happen to finish before 2012 and spun them as preparation for the Olympics.

They're nothing of the sort. You're being lied to.

The M25 widening between junctions 27 and 30 is more than one junction widening project. Work around the M11 junction (there is always work around the M11 junction) is due for completion by Summer 2010.

Junctions 16 to 23 are to the north west of London - nearly as far from the olympic site as the M25 gets.

The A1(M) tunnel refurbishment is also nothing to do with the olympics. At considerable cost of money and disruption, the project will improve ventilation in the tunnel to being it up to "european" standards. Are we frequently plagued with asphyxiations in the Hatfield tunnel? No. Is Hatfield anywhere near the site of the 2012 olympics? No.

Not only do the Highways Agency toss our money about unnecessarily, they also insult us by claiming that these projects are to do with the olympics.

Lies.

A remarkable report

How could Gavin Hewitt report on the German election for BBC1's News last night without giving us any voting projection numbers? And he even used lazy film of CDU activists waiting for the announcement, which by then had been broadcast.

Shoddy.

Depressed in Spain

Buried in the Telegraph's Business Section again (it's a numbers story, see) is Armageddon's report on predictions that Spain is sliding into an economic depression. One forecast is that Spain's unemployment will peak at 25%. There's a huge overhang of unsold properties.

He repeats his theme that the fixed parity of the euro will make it harder for Spain to claw its way out of its economic hole. So will unsuitable interest rates and the eurozone's tight monetary stance. German criteria rule. But the German economic machine has squeezed its wage costs. Spain hasn't and probably can't.

The Spanish may love the euro for the moment, seeing it as their confirmation of modernity. Will that last? Especially as they won't be the only eurozone member in the mire.

Let's stop creating new offences

Yes, no new offences until the existing laws can be enforced properly.

1.7 million people across the UK are driving uninsured, say the Motor Insurers' Bureau. Now they are talking their own book - but presumably these people are driving unlicensed vehicles which are potentially dangerous, as they probably don't have MoTs either.

185,000 uninsured vehicles were seized in 2008. 40% were crushed or sold.

Nationally, over 232,000 people were convicted for driving uninsured last year - one conviction every three minutes. Yet six out of ten believe they will get away with it.

Well statistically they probably will! Enforcement isn't keeping up.

Why isn't it a paying proposition for the insurance industry to track down uninsured vehicles themselves? Because they just add £30 to the cost of law-abiding motorists' insurance premiums.

Ban the lobbyists

So "dozens" of Conservative parliamentary candidates are working in the lobbying industry that seeks to influence their party’s leadership, reports The Times.

Ban PPCs from doing that. It's their potential constituents who matter. Their local opponents should be down on them like a ton of bricks.

How to recruit BBC newsreaders

Test candidates to produce a shortlist. Then tell them to submit sealed bids saying what pay they will want. Cheapest to taxpayers gets the job. If all the bids are too high, the job will be readvertised. If there's more than one acceptable lowest bid, the winner will be picked by lot.

Doctrinaire leftie language

The Guardian reports that Michael Gove's team are already having an education bill drafted.

Schools would be regulated less. The freedom which academies have to set pay and conditions for teachers would be extended to all schools, allowing them to pay above the odds for the best teachers. It would also be made easier for headteachers to sack under-performing staff.

The paper quotes Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, saying:

Academies are not the answer to school improvement – the idea this would be writ large across education is unacceptable.

Unacceptable! Yes, teacher knows best. Never let democracy stand in the way of the monopoly provider expert, Christine.

If people vote Tory, they will know what education policy they have voted for.

BBC misses the point again

The BBC are running an insulting story headlined

BBC seeks older female newsreader

I don't care so much about the ex-newsreader prima donnas. I'm much more concerned that BBC news presenters are overpaid - with our money.

Yet again the BBC has got hold of the wrong question.

Iain Martin predicts Gordon Brown's future

Gordon Brown picked up his gong for Statesman of the Year last night in the U.S., he writes.

The honour is a glimpse of his future in America if he loses the forthcoming general election. I predict that his friends ... will secure him a grand academic post covering questions of government (brackets, Saving the World) and he will spend more and more time in the comforting embrace of the U.S. liberal establishment and ever less time in Britain. Sarah Brown will launch a transatlantic PR/charitable enterprise. They will buy a house in Cape Cod. Both will say what a relief it is to be out of the Number 10 bunker.

Saville enquiry

The cost is of course a scandal. Shaun Woodward loftily says

Doing the inquiry was, I think, absolutely essential for the trust to be built between the British government, the Irish government and all the parties that would eventually become party to the peace process and political process.

If they had simply divvied out the cost among the people of northern Ireland, how much would each have got?

What would make us save more?

Jeremy Warner writes a thought piece exploring how effective our devalued currency may be in bringing us a surplus on trade. We'll become more like nations in chronic surplus, he suggests. I'm less optimistic that the surplus will be sustained, but each to their own. He points out that foreign purchases will be dearer and then turns to savings.

Savings, he reports, "will need to be much higher", possibly as much as 10% of GDP according to one commentator, against an average over the past twenty years of no more than 4%.

(He adds that the savings rate could be lower, if, as the National Institute has suggested, the retirement age as well as age of entitlement to the state pension is immediately raised. "In such circumstances, people would need to save less for their retirement while the cost to the Government of financing public sector and state pensions would be lower. But while this might be an economically eloquent solution to the problem it is also about as likely as a month of Sundays. Just to suggest it would be political suicide." Quite. So it adds nothing to the argument.)

The bottom line, he concludes, is that over the years ahead, Britain is going to become more like the existing surplus nations of Germany, Japan, and China.

We will be producing and saving more, but consuming less.

And what will bring about this increased propensity to save? Japanese and German consumers are notorious savers. Their governments would probably prefer them to spend more.

Not so the British. So what nasty medicine would cause us to change our habits? It's not going to happen just like that.

It's the crucial missing link in Warner's argument.

News values

"Sweeping new powers could see Brussels seize control of City", reports Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph.

And where will you find this report? Not on their front page. On page 2, maybe? No. In fact their main news section can find space for a swearing airline boss, and for detailed coverage of Gadaffi's 90+ minute rant at the UN (tee hee), but not for this important story. No, you have to look at their business section.

It'll be on their front page there, then. Well, no, it's the lead on page B5. Even odder, Damian Reece writes about French and German lines on banking regulation with no sign that he's read the report at all, concluding:

Neither Steinbrück's foaming mouth nor Sarkozy's Napoleonic stomps should be allowed to hijack one of the few opportunities we have of sorting this mess out properly, with maturity and in a measured way.

No one needs workable, meaningful reform of financial services more than the UK given its importance to our economy. But neither should we be afraid to pursue those rational reforms unilaterally without the French or Germans. Remember, their own banks face a new lurch towards crisis, having been in denial about their rotten balance sheets. We should avoid being dragged down with them.

And he's sure we have the choice?

Harriet Harman's spokesman lies

You'll know of the government fact sheet put out by hapless Harriet's department celebrating "women in power" which did not name Margaret Thatcher.

Her spokesman now says that

We have acknowledged the oversight and have taken steps to amend it.

1. Why are hopeless Harman's department spending their time and our money on this pointless exercise?
   
   
2. Why does hapless Harman expect us to believe such a stupid lie? Are we all as stupid as her? No.

Vince's first cuts list

St Vince has put out his first list of cuts - summary here.

He provides economic criteria to judge parties' cuts programmes by, which will be useful for interviewers.

What catch the eye, though, are some of his proposed cuts. Tories will be pleased that they include Regional Development Agencies, which will make RDAs that little bit harder for Labour to defend. The state sector unions won't be pleased to see their members' pay and pensions receiving detailed attention.

And that figure of "around £600 million a year" from cutting educational quangos looks very like the saving which was being urged on Michael Gove a few weeks ago. And Vince puts this in the context of a policy shift - "curbing the centralisation in education".

Update: A new poll has Vince as the most trusted UK politician, scoring a massive 52.8 out of 100. And if that's all the most trusted can manage, what about the rest ....

A good poll result

The serfs aren't happy ...

Is global warming really so settled?

An update to the previous post, where a scientist implied that objections to the AGW thesis were somehow residual. In one day on Watts up with that we can read

• How unpredicted inactivity on the sun may well be a sign of global cooling
  
  
• Researchers have shown that high atmospheric and oceanic oxygen content makes the climate colder. In prehistoric times, the earth experienced two periods of large increases and fluctuations in the oxygen level of the atmosphere and oceans. As Watts remarks, "If this is true,with the biomass photosynthesis of CO2 and converting it to oxygen, it would seem to point to a self regulating effect of the biosphere on climate".

Finally there's some amusement value in this Fox News video:



UPDATE There's a very readable summary of the case against AGW here.

Questioning a climate change survey

Richard North analyses the results, but you have to ask questions about this survey on attitudes to climate change in southern and eastern England.

The BBC tell us that "a questionnaire survey was filled in by 551 people, from a range of ages and backgrounds, between September and November last year" - but evidently it has only been released now, the best part of a year later. Why? Is this good science?

The scientist in charge

stressed the survey participants were representative of the nation as a whole and reflected a range of views.

“The very green and the least green were equally likely to respond,” she said. “This wasn’t an anomalous finding."

Norfolk and Hampshire are representative of the nation as a whole? And how could she know that "the very green and the least green were equally likely to respond?"

On any scientific basis this survey looks highly questionable.

Just as we saw a shift from "global warming" to "climate change", so we now see a shift from the politicians' mantra that "the science is settled":

Dr Whitmarsh added: “There are broad questions about how science is taught and communicated. If the impression is that science provides certainty then people are going to think when science is uncertain that perhaps there’s a reason to dismiss the evidence.

“The way we teach science should be more about reflecting the inevitable uncertainty of science.”

The BBC in charming de haut en bas mode pronounces that the survey "shows there is still some way to go before the public's perception matches that of their elected leaders".

Or just maybe our so called leaders should bring their heads down from the clouds - about which their "settled" science understands so little.

Cameron returns to accountable transparency

It's a fixation of this blog that accountable transparency is the single measure with the most potential to transform how we are governed.

David Cameron returned to the accountable transparency theme yesterday and Sam Coates has raised some interesting issues. First his extracts of what Cameron said:

But perhaps the biggest change will come through transparency. With a Conservative Government, every item of government spending over £25,000 will be published. Online. In full. No ifs, no buts. And if we win the next election, we’re going to publish online all public sector salaries over £150,000 too.

I don’t think people understand yet what a big difference this is going to make to government and how it spends.

The old way of cutting public spending normally starts with ministers ordering a spending review.

A big name is appointed to lead it up, a “no-stone-unturned approach” is promised and a shopping list of cuts is produced.

The axe fails to fall and a few years later the whole ritual starts all over again. It is never enough.

The savings made are a blip on the balance sheet.

One of the insights of our times is that transparency can be used as an extraordinary tool for spending restraint.

Look at MPs’ expenses.

The simple act of publishing information online has brought about real change. It has transformed the culture of MPs’ spending at a stroke – and it is already starting to save money.

Just imagine what will happen when we publish all government spending online.

Coates then comments that "there will no doubt be a political battle over the limits of this".

For instance, he asks, would they aggregate individual items of less than £25,000?

Would they list the overall sums spent on items such as surveillance cameras? Or the contracts? Will they list suppliers? How much details will we get on the type of thing spent? Does "government" include MI5 and MI6. Police? What about other non-government public bodies? What happens to commercial contracts? How will companies react. What about civil servants? Will defence procurement be included? What about foreign office payments?

Civil servants, he concludes, are very nervous about this proposal. Mischievously, then, we could take this as confirmation that it's on the right lines. And, Coates points out, "there was no sign of compromise in Cameron's "no ifs, no buts" pledge".

So they may have to live with it.

Good.

Now if the EU adopted accountable transparency .... Fat chance.

How do you get rid of quangos?

Dennis Sewell in the Spectator recently made some good points about the seriousness of the quango problem, stressing how Labour placemen and centralising bureaucrats are dug in to quango appointments and will be hard to dislodge, but he didn't go beyond analysis to action.

Douglas Carswell has been worrying away at how you abolish quangos (for instance here). He wants quangos' annual budgets to be subject to MPs' approval. Constitutionally I like the shape of Douglas's solution. But would MPs be up to handling the sheer number of quangos and the weight of paper which the quangocrats would probably shower them with?

So what to do?

1. Each government department should list on the web what quangos report to it and how much they spend. Include grants to 'charities'.
   
   
2. Each department gets say 3 months to announce it will chop at least say 25% of quangos reporting to it - obviously names too. Then it gets 3 months to do it. All shown on the web - names and savings targeted and achieved. A bit of ministerial competition won't hurt.
   
   
3. Only then do select committees come in. To stop them being bogged down in paper (it's easy to imagine a concerted campaign by the quangocrats), MPs will need to specify how much paper they are prepared to receive from each quango. There will be some rough justice, but if a minister wants to keep a quango that's been listed for abolition there should have to be a motion of the House. Again, names, timescales, savings and outcomes on the web.
   
   
4. The first year would just cope with survival or not. With the slashing and hacking out of the way, MPs could have more time from the second year onwards to scrutinise/approve quangos' annual budgets, moving from 'live or die' decisions to cutting sizes and scope of quangos that had survived the first rough cull.

It will be important to have a clear, simple process ready to roll on day one, preferably laid out before the election in the manifesto or an authoritative speech, so that the bureaucracy knows the process itself is not up for discussion.

Let us hope MPs would be up to the task.

HMRC's shambolic peformance in tax credits case

Someone pursued for an alleged overpayment has written her account. Read in full what Sharon France wrote here.

The first I knew of an overpayment claim was when a collection officer arrived at my door on the 10th June 2008 with a demand for an outstanding Tax Credit claim for £5,076.75. ...

A claim was then filed against me on 14th August 2008, and was received and processed on the 18th August 2008, and then passed to Guildford Court on the 2nd September.

I then completed a Money Claim Online form denying any overpayment and at this point I submitted a full defence. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) responded to my defence with a standard letter addressed to the wrong people!!! This letter included the usual demand for the full amount and the repercussions if it were not to be received. Following this, I appeared at Guildford County Court on the 16th December 2008 for a pre-trial review. At the pre-trial review, I was able to explain my defence and listen to HMRC stating that they were relying on a Certificate under Section 25a of the Commissioners for Revenue & Customs Act 2005. They could not produce this Certificate on this date and the case was adjourned until the 25th February 2009. After this hearing, I received a further letter from HMRC answering points that I raised at the hearing. Unfortunately, I received this on the 18th of February, and the only information on it was a list of my addresses, that I already knew! we returned to court for trial.

On hearing both myself and the the representative from HMRC, a court order was raised asking me to resubmit a full defence and for HMRC to accept an appeal for the missing returns to be considered in retrospect. The case was adjourned until the 28th April....

At the court hearing on the 28th April the Judge questioned HMRC over the validity of a Certificate under Section 25a in Tax Credit cases and again adjourned the case. The Court then produced an Order stating that the HMRC had to file a full written reply to my defence and also provide the certificate that they would be relying on by the 12th May. HMRC was also ordered to complete a trial bundle by the 26th of May and send to both the court and myself. I in turn had to produce my own trial bundle by the 9th June. This I did. Unfortunately, HMRC did not produce either item.

I again attended court on the 17th June 2009. The Judge reviewed my trial bundle before calling all parties to the hearing room. At this point, it was discovered that no representative had appeared for HMRC and the Judge therefore, due to lack of evidence, trial bundle and representation STRUCK OUT the claim.

One example of HMRC's efficiency. Well done, Gordon Brown.

Boris paints it brightly again

Boris has once again demonstrated his peerless power of communication today. In his Telegraph column he contrasts the shiny new palaces of the Brussels branch of the Euro-parliament with the rundown Westminster provincial parliament and its cowed MPs.

And he concludes

You do not need to understand the detail of the directive on Alternative Investment Fund Management, for instance, to grasp that it is aimed at businesses in London, and risks doing considerable damage to such businesses, and yet our Parliament in London is wholly irrelevant. These hedge funds, private equity and venture capital firms had little or nothing to do with the financial meltdown of last year. But it happens that they have long been unpopular with certain European governments, who took advantage of the crisis to dust down an old plan of attack – rather as George Bush took advantage of 9/11 to launch an irrelevant attack on his father's bugbear, Saddam Hussein.

The result is a directive that threatens to drive such businesses outside the European Union. Of course there is a case for sensible regulation, and there is still time for that directive to be improved. But who is going to do that work? There is no point in the venture capitalists and the hedge funds lobbying any British ministers. Under the new co-decision powers of the Euro-parliament, those crucial amendments will be made in Brussels by Euro-MPs.

Indeed, with more directives in the pipeline, the future of the whole UK financial services industry is probably in their hands. That is why it is so telling to see the physical contrast between desiccated Westminster and sleek, self-confident Brussels. Power has passed, is passing, and under the Treaty of Lisbon, will pass further to the Euro-parliament.

Thus he sets himself as the only senior politician from a major UK political party to have made this point - and with a style and verve which has eluded the UKIPygmies.

And this was no obiter dictum on Boris's part, it was the thrust of his column.

He has shown caution in his decisions about running London's government. Intriguingly, though, he increasingly suggests capacity to speak the unspeakable at a national level in an engaging manner. And who knows where that will take him?

The BBC & the BNP

A nervous BBC is putting the word out that it may invite the BNP to appear on Question Time because of the number of votes it received.

The BBC's chief political adviser, Ric Bailey, said the BNP had now "demonstrated evidence of electoral support at a national level."

He said this would be "reflected" in the amount of coverage the party received on BBC programmes such as Question Time.

Whatever you think of the bizarre BNP, it's about time. Question Time has been accepting audience questions critical of the BNP, giving panels openings to condemn then unanimously with no right of reply.

If you disagree with a party, getting them on and exposing their weakness - not name-calling, which is probably what we'll get - is the most effective way to deal with them.

People voted for them. In a democracy, their votes are to be valued as much as those cast for the politically correct main parties. Straight debate may reveal the BNP as nasty clowns. Or as consensus busters.

Bring the debate on.

Nigel Farage again

Richard North has delivered his take on Nigel Farage's present situation.

There are strong rumours that our Nigel has overstayed his welcome in Brussels and that the forces of darkness are not a million miles from feeling his collar, making his continued tenure as an MEP expensive and increasingly insecure. Reinventing himself as a Westminster MP – his lower salary fortified by his MEP pension - could head off the wolves and given him protection from impending disaster.

Tim Worstall has yet to spring to Nigel Farage's defence there. Before doing so, perhaps he should note Richard's response to one of the commenters on his piece, who had accused him of personal bitterness:

Mister, if I wanted to be bitter, the words would scorch into the screen and your machine would catch fire when you opened up the site. For a Machiavellian, low-grade shit, who wouldn't recognise a principle if it leapt up and bit him on his arse, I have been very level and fair.

Back with Buckingham, Quentin Letts reminds us that

The position in Squeaker Bercow's Buckingham constituency may rest on Patrick Phillips, a former High Sheriff who two months ago also declared his intention to stand against Mr Bercow.

Mr Phillips describes himself as 'Conservatively minded' and said yesterday that 'at the moment my hat is still in the ring'. He has been attracting a good deal of support from Tory voters, some of them party members who cannot bear Mr Bercow.

If he did stand, would he rob the Squeaker of crucial votes? Or would he dilute the Farage vote? If the Tories ran Mr Phillips as their official candidate, they could perhaps both get rid of Mr Bercow and defeat Mr Farage.

If Mr Phillips declines to stand, Buckingham with these two candidates should surely be on Martin Bell and Terry Waite's list.

This is what 'public sector investment' means

Yesterday this blog highlighted Frank Field's calculation of what declining state sector productivity had meant for the Nationalised Health Service.

An analyst for the Taxpayers' Alliance now writes that

As much as £58.4bn – half of what Britain pays in income tax each year –is lost due to falling efficiency in the public sector. While the volume of output may have increased, evidence suggests the quality of service has not – and taxpayers and those who depend on public services are the ones that are losing out.

The calculations are based on numbers from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), released in June. They found that public sector productivity between 1997 and 2003 had declined by 3.2 per cent. On August 14, they issued a correction to this report, pushing the figure up to 3.4 per cent.... Total amount of output might have increased, but the "cost per output" (as it were) has just increased, too. Indeed, the fall in productivity is directly linked to the wholesale budget boost, as more money has simply been pumped through unreformed and unimproved systems that could not cope with it.

But over a 10 year period private sector productivity rose by 27.9%.

As this blog maintains, policy for these huge services is made by ministers who have no experience of running so much as a whelk stall. So the allegedly tough decisions they call for aren't likely to cut the mustard.

What Labour call 'public sector investment' will always produce huge government waste. Conceptually, the only way to slash it is to hand the services themselves to competing private sector providers whose prosperity will depend on service quality.

The services will still be free at the point of delivery, because taxpayers through the government will pay for them.

Labour never talk of "public spending". It's always "investment in public services".

What they mean is "taxpayer funded state spending". It doesn't all go into services (think quangos, overseas aid, fake charities, the EU...), it's not all investment (we pay running expenses too, like salaries and pensions for the rising number of state employees controlling our lives), and the ONS has shown that the return on the investment element is poorer than it should be.

Add the final brick in the wall that politicians will never be able to ensure that a nationalised industry gives good and improving value in the eyes of its customers, and the case for government getting out of service provision is unanswerable.

The remaining question is how.

Split the banks up

Wat Tyler persuasively repeats the case for splitting the banks' banking businesses into (at least) two parts. As the excellent Liam Halligan and others have been proposing for some time, taxpayers would guarantee the 'high street' retail operations, while casino banks (aka investment banks) would be allowed to fail.

He writes that

We agree with Bank of England Governor King: if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big. Which is another reason why our regulators should focus on breaking up the big megabanks into their retail and wholesale components. We simply can't afford banks that are too big to fail.

So why won't politicians do it?

If the Tories were in power, Labour would be accusing them of protecting their City chums. But what's in it for Labour ... apart from the tax revenue that casino banking (aka wholesale banking) generates?

Faragist flutterings

So Nigel Farage is to stand against Bercow. Like Ian Hislop in the libel contest between Al Fayed and Neil Hamilton, I'd like them both to lose.

What of Farage's track record of non-disclosure over his own huge expenses? This mountebank failed at Bromley, and would deserve to fail again against any worthwhile 'Independent Conservative' (or whatever label you want to choose) who stood against him.

You could also argue that his expenses non-disclosure fully qualifies him for the attentions of the Bell and Waite brigade.

Stand by for (a lot) more candidates, I suspect.

So criticising the NHS isn't unpatriotic

When Dan Hannan criticised the Nationalised Health Service, the new mini-minister condemned him as unpatriotic.

Frank Field has now looked at its poor productivity record under Labour. The figures are pretty startling. Wat Tyler gives some examples from the consultants' report of how this has come about.

For Frank the solution is to require the bits with a poor productivity record to improve. It would take ages, you couldn't be sure it would stick (how did things get this way in the first place?), and you'd have to monitor the rest.

It's surprising Frank wants to preserve this nationalised industry, since his comments have already holed it below the waterline, as I blogged last week.

No nationalised industry monopoly has ever put its consumers first.

The Nationalised Health Service is too big and complex for ANYONE to run, let alone political pygmies who have never run any organisation in their lives and can therefore bring their ignorant inexperience to bear as well as their natural ministerial vanity.

Start from those undoubted facts and it's clear the thing can't be fixed. Then you move on to how to change things.

That's not unpatriotic.

A short discussion on lightbulbs

The BBC appear to have initiated their forum discussing the lightbulb ban this morning. At 5pm it is already closed.

You can check the ten most recommended messages here. Can anyone see a theme?

Prisoners should have no right to cosmetic surgery

Jack Straw's decision was right even if the policy was put forward in a cackhanded way. And the judiciary, in the person of Deputy High Court judge Michael Suppertone QC, should have no right to require more taxpayers' money to be spent on imprisoned convicts.

The Tories should unravel this mess.

Suppressing freedom of speech

Remember Heather Brooke? She's the excellent red haired journalist specialising in freedom of information who started badgering the Commons for details of MPs' expenses.

Not surprisingly she's given evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Their officials want her to agree to suppress parts of her evidence in the published version. She rightly refuses.

Their reason? Their lawyers regard parts of it as "potentially defamatory".

Now those passages are facts - facts already in the public domain, as Heather points out. See for yourself here.

So what does "potentially defamatory" mean? Just that 'somebody might not like the facts being republished and take exception, and we can’t be bothered to check whether they’re true or not'?

‘Potentially defamatory’ in this sense could cover anything controversial. For public officials to support this is a disgrace. And dangerous.