State spending out of control

Two stories in today's papers show how the state doesn't care about spending money effectively and in line with people's wishes.

Officers in one of the UK's largest police forces have been spending up to 80 minutes filling out a single holiday request form, reports the Daily Mail. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) admitted that staff in certain divisions had been taking well over an hour just to ask for time off work.

They say they have sorted this now. But if it was allowed to get to that state, that reflects the force's casual attitude to efficiency. Value for money is clearly not a constant driver for them. Be sure there will be plenty of other examples, even just at GMP.

Second is the story of village residents furious that £324,000 of public cash is being spent on a river project to help fish instead of flood defences to protect their homes.

The residents have had to campaign for flood protection - which is an insult, they shouldn't have had to. Meanwhile, the Environment Agency applied for money from DEFRA which could only be used for ecological and recreational improvements. They said the area had been improved for wildlife such as fish, otters and kingfishers. The agency is also planning to build a car park and canoe launch at the site.

The Environment Agency set themselves above the residents who pay the taxes. Again and again we see local people at the whim of unaccountable national government agencies who take decisions about their lives.

These are local decisions. They should be taken locally, with democratic accountability.

The Environment Agency and DEFRA are a law unto themselves. Turn the system upside down. That money belongs to the people. The people should decide how their money is spent.

P.S. Can government afford fish ladders when they owe so many billions anyway?

The significance of Gillian Duffy

OK, Brown was unlucky. But it's revealing of his mindset. Evidently voters have to be screened before they are put in front of His Highness. And that's after he was supposed to be talking with ordinary members of the public.

So the politburo mindset is on clear show.

Much more interesting, though, were Mrs Duffy's questions. No party but UKIP or the BNP has any answer to her point about East European immigrants. If it's important in Rochdale, it's also apparently important in Wolverhampton, where unemployed people were complaining that when jobs at some firms became vacant, they just bus Poles down from Chester on an agency basis.

Her question about government debt stood out. Our children will be paying it off in taxes for 20 years, she said (or was it 25?). Mrs Duffy gets the scale of the government debt problem.

This is despite the best efforts of all the main political parties. And Mrs Duffy didn't sound as if she'd just had a revelation from the IFS that morning. She wasn't asking if it was true. She knew, and it was a truth that was familiar to her.

So are the parties being less successful in keeping the lid on public understanding of the scale of the debt problem than they'd hoped?

That may turn out to be the significance of Gillian Duffy.

Neil rogers greenies

The Daily Politics is running a series of afternoon debates among the parties' portfolio holders. They are chaired by Andrew Neil, our best political broadcaster, together with a different subject specialist each day.

Yesterday was the environment debate, for which the Greens were included.

Neil's robust interrogation easily revealed the unreality of the parties' environment policies and their lack of democratic legitimacy. Clearly none of the participants commanded his respect. Well worth watching for its educational and amusement value.

Sadly he failed to ask the key question, though: If all your policies somehow got implemented, how much difference would it make to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and hence (by your reckoning) to temperatures?

Ed Miliband said he was in the hands of the scientists. (We recall that Lord Adonis was in the hands of the safety officials over the ash cloud until he decided that ... er, he wasn't.) As to the prospect of impartial BBC coverage from scientists, Bishop Hill has picked up an interesting BBC programme. Listen carefully.

So Brown is finished

Unless something astonishing happens in the election campaign, Gordon Brown will have lost his political authority. So he will be finished at Westminster.

Would he be welcomed at an international body? Hardly. His people skills are minimal. In an arena where the power to influence and cajole is important, Brown would flounder.

Apparently that leaves university teaching.

Who would want to be taught by Gordon Brown at university? A major requirement is to have an unflinching regard for facts and truth (unless you're a climate scientist).

Brown is not a nurturer. He twists facts, and is a bully. I wouldn't have wanted him teaching me.

Labour ministers in a different world

On Planet Miliband it's fine to spend £80,000 on a design consultant to make small changes to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office logo.

Ruth Kelly has been able to buy a big house in a very smart area of London near to Catholic schools which offer high quality free education to devout Roman Catholics at our expense.

The Mail reports that

She made an £81,000 profit on her Bolton constituency home, which she bought for £109,000 in 2001, and will receive a £32,000 Commons pay-off.

This was after she had used her taxpayer-funded second home allowance to pay for £31,000 of renovations at the Bolton home.

And we know about Ed Balls knowingly breaking the law.

Balls's first offence?

Ed Balls has been done for using a handheld mobile while driving. He explains that he didn't want to wake his sleeping children.

He must get lots of calls on the long drives to and from his constituency. On the long drives, his children must often be asleep.

Does anyone seriously believe that this is the first time Ed Balls has broken this law?

The alpha controllers expect us to obey their increasing numbers of laws. But they break them. Not for them to set an example. Ed Balls is too grand to be law abiding.

No SNP on election debates, thanks

Most questions concern the UK as a whole. Topics affecting only England cover 84% of the UK's population. Add the Welsh for issues affecting England and Wales, and we get up to 89%.

Do we want a fourth podium for one Scottish party covering a mere 8.5% of our population? No. It would be a distortion.

Subject to roundings, the population proportions are

England - 84%

Scotland - 8.5%

Wales - 5%

the ridiculously expensive Northern Ireland - 1.6%

Prescott bombs on Today

Interviewed by John Humphrys, Prescott managed to sound like a throwback to a previous political era - antediluvian and irrelevant, chanting the same old chants.

By the way, don't these people realise how unattractive their hectoring sounds? Maybe for people like Prescott and Huhne it has become second nature.

Clegg goes beyond the pale

In the second TV debate, the quote of the night came from Nick Clegg. For him, the MEPs the Tories sit with in the European Parliament are a

bunch of nutters who deny climate change and homophobes.

For Nick Clegg, if you "deny" manmade climate change, you are no better than a homophobe. You are a "nutter".

I also don't want to be a member of a United States of Europe. That probably makes me a nutter twice over - a fruit(cake) and nutter, maybe?

Nothing like insulting a big chunk of your electorate.

Afterwards, Sky News indulged itself in interviewing politicians who of course all boringly claimed their man had won. Kay Burley was in heaven, with all those people wanting to talk at us. For the rest of us, though, it was tediously predictable. Why do the media think this is good television? The only striking image from the spinning was to see just how much of a bully Chris Huhne is. He changes questions and talks over everyone. Even more unattractive than he was on Today. Hectoring is easy, Mr Huhne, but not attractive.

The spinners' line is that Brown is no PR smoothie, he is serious. But the striking truth is that Gordon Brown can't improvise. Gordon Brown is another Edward Heath, unimaginative, and ploddingly set in his ways.

Newsnight seemed excited to have assembled the same group of political spinners that Kay Burley had interviewed about an hour before. This is no more interesting when the interviewing is done by Emily Maitlis. Can't you do any better than that, so called leading political analysis programme?

As Richard North points out, there was nothing in the debate to ruffle the EU's feathers at all. Damn them, they can't even get their apostrophies right.

Some of the Lib Dems' actual policies are now starting to see the light of debate, providing a few facts for the many voters who seemed perfectly content to make up their mind without needing any. Overall, the debate confirmed that there is no coherent party which represents my views. I am excluded from the political consensus.

Nutter that I am, the three main parties can whistle for my vote.

How democratic is this?

If swings were uniform across the country, how many seats would each party get?

The BBC has a nifty election seat calculator. Based, for instance, on the 16th's YouGov poll, Conservatives with 37% of the vote would get 278 seats, Labour, with only 31% of the vote, would get 6 more seats, and the LibDems, with 22%, would have 59.

This blog has no regard for Cameron, but this is unfair to people who vote for him.

Brown reinvents the past

Did Gordon Brown, the all-seeing sage, promote his campaign for global reform of the financial system less strongly as he should have done, while the short-sighted numpties of other countries concentrated on keeping the regulation of their banks light?

There's no evidence for this narrative of Brown's, says Jeremy Warner, as he produces several quotes from Brown back then extolling his régime of ... er ... light regulation of the banks.

Another shameless lie from Gordon Brown.

And Brown now seems to think that stiffer regulation can prevent future problems. No it won't. The practitioners are always ahead of the regulators.

As Warner concludes, structural reform, or break-up of the banks, still provides the only foolproof answer. "Once the present inter-connectivity of banking is outlawed, so that everyone knows where they stand, market discipline will reign supreme of its own accord." Wholesale banks will be allowed to fail.

"But", says Warner, "that may be too free market for Brown".Indeed! Where would they be without the influence of the all-seeing sage?

Community action

Wadda ya know? The Tories propose that communities should be enabled to take more control of their own destiny, and the very next day we see that the village of Lyddington is installing its own broadband.

Great.

Labour failed on welfare and immigration

We can't afford the bloated welfare budget. Two snapshots.

The Davey family's £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier. Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Indeed Mrs Davey says: 'I've always wanted a big family - no one can tell me how many kids I can have whether I'm working or not.' No, but there should be a ceiling on how much of our money she can get.

These cases are simply offensive. If Mr Davey won't work, he should have to put in hours and hours of community service. The more money he gets, the more hours he should have to work.

Separately, a committee of MPs has recommended that young people in England should not receive state benefits unless they are working, training or in education.

They are suggesting adopting a system used in Holland, to reduce the number of 16 to 25-year-olds not in education, employment or training, known as Neets. They said the Dutch equivalent of jobseeker's allowance was dependent on being in work, education or training.

At the end of 2009, astonishingly nearly 15% of 16 to 24-year-olds were classed as Neets. We cannot continue to pay for this.

The number of new private sector jobs created during the Labour government was almost the same as the net number of immigrants. Like Mr Davey, many young Neets found it more comfortable to stay on benefits. We simply cannot afford it any more.

Tory benefit fraud proposals again

As Oldchimer has kindly pointed out, the 'two strikes' rule on temporarily stopping benefit fraud for a period became 'one strike' this month.

The Guardian also has more detail on the Tory proposal. Cheats would only lose unemployment benefits for up to three years when they abused the system three times. They would keep other benefits such as council tax, housing benefit and tax credits.

Under the Tory proposals, benefits would be cut for three months after the first offence, six months after the second and for up to three years after a third. Offenders would probably need to be convicted of an offence, though Tories say that would not be a prerequisite.

So it has even more holes in it. Theresa May tries to defend this feeble clutch at a headline here. But passing a new law to 'send a message' has become a bad habit under the Labour government. It is the despairing argument of a politician arguing for a feeble proposal.

The BBC's Mark Easton on Tory localism

He's against it - of course - emphasising the negatives on Radio 4's six o'clock news.

NHS - too big to succeed

Two reasons wny a huge, monstrous galumphing NHS will never work:

If a hospital receives a referral for a specialist to see a sick patient, the "target" clock starts to tick. If that specialist's clinic list looks as if it will be in danger of breaching the waiting-time targets, the clinic is cancelled, thereby stopping the clock. The referring GP (who inevitably incurs the wrath of the patient) has then to re-refer. This practice is widespread.

Pity the poor person on a waiting-list for an operation for a debilitating and painful condition, which nevertheless is not a form of cancer. Under the current structure, a cancer patient, possibly in remission and in reasonable health, will be seen in preference to the patient who is suffering pain and poor health.

And the BMA writes about the treatment of whistleblowers:

In an alarmingly high number of cases, managers had indicated to doctors that by speaking up, their employment could be negatively affected.

We have published guidance on whistle-blowing, and established a helpline to provide support for doctors who are considering raising their concerns, or facing problems in the workplace for daring to speak out on behalf of their patients.

To move forward we have to address the underlying issue of the culture of secrecy and blame in the NHS.

The BMA have it wrong. The problem lies in the size of the NHS as an organisation. It is too big. Even a managerial genius would never be able to make it run effectively. Its size makes it largely unaccountable. The senior managers who run it will always be able to run it in their own interests rather than the patients'.

No amount of tweaking, restructuring, whatever you want to call it, will ever change that.

If you are in favour of the NHS as a universal provider, you are accepting huge and continuing waste. For ever.

Banks are said to be too big to fail. The NHS is too big to succeed.

The fat of the land

Following a recommendation from Liverpool Schools’ Parliament, the council is considering banning the word “obesity” from its health campaigns for fear of offending overweight children.

The words “obese” and "obesity" would be dropped from all schemes and strategies aimed at improving children’s diets and health. Instead they would talk about "unhealthy weight".

Of course people with bulimia also have an unhealthy weight. It's like talking about "climate change" when you mean "global warming". Mealy mouthed.

But hang on. Why is a local authority spending taxpayers' money on health campaigns at all? Aren't they there to collect rubbish and maintain the streets?

The bureaucrats are growing fat on taxpayers' money.

Pearson criticises cost of EU

UKIP leader Lord Pearson has told Andrew Marr that the elephant in the room on the economy is the cost of EU membership - the net cash the UK sends to Brussels each year is £6.6bn he says. He calls it "squandered squillions".

Tory benefit fraud proposals a modest start

The Tories say no public sector employee should receive more than ten times the pay of the lowest paid worker in their organisation. That's the headline. But there will be exemptions (e.g. surgeons) ... there will be a commission to review cases ... and as an emailer to The Daily Politics said, stand by for the lowest paid jobs to be outsourced. Hearing this, Andrew Neil described the proposal as 'more full of holes than a Dutch cheese'.

The Conservatives have also proposed that third time benefit fraudsters should be stripped of benefits for up to three years. The BBC discovered that the number of people the DWP knows of recently found guilty of benefit fraud for the third time is ... zero. Certainly I do not recall any in my benefit fraud blog.

Yet there is more to the Tory proposal, as the Yorkshire Post makes clear:

Under the Tory plans, claimants caught committing benefit fraud once would lose their out-of-work benefits for three months, a second offence would result in a six-month sanction, and a third offence would see the benefits withheld for up to three years.

Existing rules remove benefits for 13 weeks for those convicted of fraud twice.

The new pledge would apply to jobseeker's allowance, incapacity benefit and income support – though, we are told, "vulnerable claimants such as parents would have payments reduced rather than cut off".

More holes.

The case for stronger penalties in unanswerable. Benefit fraud costs at least £3.5bn a year (not the central estimate of £1.1bn the government claims) and the DWP is so overwhelmed that it can't even prosecute all the frauds it finds. So a deterrent is needed.

These people do it for the money. So hit them in the pocket. It was money that motivated them, and a financial penalty will help to deter them.

Everyone convicted of benefit fraud who doesn't go to prison should have to do unpaid work.

Benefit thieves should also have to repay twice what they've stolen, and should not be eligible for any further benefits – including tax credits - until they have. A confiscation order should be automatic and immediate.

If you don't punish people who are convicted of an easy crime, the offence will continue to look attractive.

It's striking how little welfare has featured in the campaign so far. Yet it's a major part of state spending. Cost cutting on welfare is inevitable.

It's our own fault

Cameron says he wants to reach out to The Great Unwashed, or whatever it was he called us. By "us" here I mean the bloggers standing on the touchline hurling rotten vegetables at the contestants, crying, "You're all the same".

Richard North has called this group "the refusniks", what he describes as a "sturdy bunch" who are not taken in by the theatre or the mass media's embrace of it.

North and Warner are among those berating Cameron for his conciliatory attitude to the EU, and for his advocacy of an anti-carbon dioxide agenda. I agree.

The Cameroons argue they needed to detoxify their party. In England at the last general election Labour did indeed get 92 more seats than the Conservatives. But the Tories got more votes.

The Tories' agenda was popular. In England it was more popular than Labour's. But constituency boundaries skewed the result, giving Labour more seats than they deserved.

So to overcome this systematic bias to Labour, the Tories have had to move their pitch further in Labour's direction.

Unsurprisingly, this leaves many voters feeling abandoned, including the sturdy refusniks. Cameron has stolen our party, they cry. Give it back.

This was not done by stealth. Indeed, a stealthy approach would have been pointless. So we were warned. We knew we had it coming.

What choices did we have outside the big three? Not the BNP, a stupid and socialist party who have been gifted support by the main parties' weakness on immigration. Not the Greens, who want to force us all to be poorer in the name of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis which looks increasingly likely to be wrong. Not UKIP, headed by a ruthless, careerist mountebank (and yes, Farage does still call the shots).

No surprises about these other three parties. Just as we knew Cameron was calculating that he could take the refusniks for granted, so we knew the main contenders outside the three party consensus were no good.

It's been obvious for years.

So as we throw our rotten vegetables and berate the three party consensus for excluding us, let's look at ourselves for a moment.

We knew we had this coming. We've known it for years.

And what did we do about it?

Nothing.

Some people are more comfortable as outsiders. Warner doubtless enjoys his florid railing at the consensus. Righteousness is comfortable.

If that's what you want, it's fine to be smug. But that doesn't mean our hands are clean.

Stopping a tax rise does NOT take money out of the economy

Gordon Brown keeps saying that not putting up national insurance would "take money out of the economy".

Gordon Brown is lying.

It would take money out of the state's coffers. But who's to say people and businesses won't spend it themselves? They might even prefer to use it according to their own preferences rather than Brown's.

The Tories would cut state spending instead of putting up national insurance. Brown says this would mean fewer teachers, police or doctors. Probably all three. The sky would probably fall in too.

Labour says there is waste to cut. Hm. The Tories couldn't do that?

Labour say they could cut waste. Just not yet.

Thug Brown

In the last question of PMQ's, an SNP MP asked Gordon Brown whether he would order an enquiry into the recent resignation of the Labour leader of Glasgow City Council.

Brown merely answered by attacking the MP's voting record, focusing on the amount he had voted with the Conservatives - and then sat down.

This boorish, bullying refusal to answer questions is an insult to democracy.

Second, why is Speaker Bercow being so pusillanimous? Why is Brown allowed to get away with insulting us all?

BBC wastes more of our money

Huw Edwards introduces the 10 o'clock news from Downing Street.

A waste of our money. Get back in the studio.

The Daily Politics

How come the first election edition was already less interesting than their normal programmes?

Perhaps because all the politicians could do was to lob political clichés from their trenches.

Red tape to be swept up?

From today, reports The Telegraph

Street works operatives have to be reassessed every five years before they can re-register on the Street Works Qualification Register.

Looks like one for the litter bin.

Labour hypocrisy on NI rise

Alistair Darling says, "the last time NI went up was in 2002 ... employment after that went up". Might employment have risen more if NI hadn't gone up? We don't know, nor does Mr Hypocrisy Eyebrows. So just who is trying to take us for fools?

As the BBC reminds us, earlier this week 37 business leaders backed the Conservatives' plans on NI:

But Mr Brown said despite this there was "widespread agreement" among economists and businesses - including the CBI, IMF and the Institute for Fiscal Studies - that it would be "wrong" to take money out of the economy [my italics] this year to fund the policy.

In what sense would this be "taking money out of the economy"? What he means is taking money away from the state. In Mr Brown's mind, seemingly the state is the economy. But as Janet Daley pointed out yesterday, they are not the same at all.

If I have more money to spend, why is that worse for the economy than the government having more money to spend?

The default position is that I've earned it, it's my money, and government needs to justify to me every penny of my money it wants to take from me.

Mr Brown's presumption is evidently that money is better in the hands of the state than of the citizens - the road to Leninism.

But do the citizens exist to serve the state? Or is the state there to be the servant of its citizens?

What global warming is that?

How much global warming is there?

Amazingly, we don't know. What we do know (for the UEA's Prof Jones told us) is that over the past decade there has been no statistically significant rise in temperature – which certainly wasn't foretold.

As Ross McKitrick explains (in a contribution Bishop Hill rightly describes as astonishing, because of the lengths the establishment went to to suppress his findings), climate data is supposed to be a measure of something that does not, in most places, even exist. In most (inhabited) places around the world, the temperature outside would only be the climate if you happen to live where no one has never changed the surroundings, through any modification of the landscape.

Often the temperature data series are collected in places that have gradually got built up over time (urbanization). Producing a long time series of climate data requires making a lot of assumptions about how the various dribs and drabs of temperature data around the world need to be adjusted to reveal the continuous residual “climate signal”. In other words, all the changes in the recorded temperatures that are caused by things other than climate change need to be filtered out of the data: urbanization, deforestation, equipment modification, etc. These are called “inhomogeneities.”

That would be fine, says McKitrick, if the climate signal were large and the “inhomogeneities” were small. But it is the other way round: “we are looking for changes measured in tenths or hundredths of a degree per decade, using data from weather stations where the inhomogeneities can easily shift the record by several degrees.” So the adjustment rules matter. Whenever we see a climate data series, such as the so-called “global temperature”, what we are seeing is the output of a model, not a reading from a scientific instrument. Thermometers produce some of the basic input data, but the models take over from there.

So filtering out these inhomogeneities is critical to establishing the residual amount of any global warming. The IPCC said that “urban heat island [UHI] effects are real but local, and have a negligible influence (less than 0.006°C per decade over land and zero over the oceans) on these values.” Yet the IPCC quotes no evidence for this suggestion that urbanization has a negligible influence.

But McKitrick jointly authored a paper showing statistically that the Climatic Research Unit hadn't fully adjusted for the warming effect of urbanization. Thus the CRU surface temperature data was compromised by non-climatic biases and these “contamination effects” added up to an overstatement of warming.

Their figure certainly feels too low. When we drive out of our neighbouring town to our more rural environment, we often notice a temperature drop of 1°F. Anthony Watts has now produced a kit which anyone with their own transport can use to measure their local UHI effect. Watts has done two trial runs at his local small town and come up with an initial UHI figure of 1.5°C. This of course is way above the unsubstantiated numbers of conventional climate science, and would skittle their estimates of residual global warming.

So work on actually quantifying these 'inhomogeneities' is crucial. Yet it doesn't seem to have been done properly. One study attempted it. But two further papers showed that the UHI effects had been underestimated.

So here we are. No reliable “global warming” record, yet billions of pound of our money being thrown at a problem which may very well not exist. Scientific consensus? No. Political choice? No. Do we get to have a say at all?

No.

If there's no choice ... don't choose

North is on the button again: "the Tories have nothing substantive to offer other than they are not (by name) Labour, and that Cameron is not Brown". As he says, this is not good enough.

Despite the desperate attempts of Spectator journalists to convince us, cast-iron Cameron is not in any meaningful sense a eurosceptic. And the case for AGW disintegrates by the day, but that does not stop Cameron seeking to outbid mad Miliband in attempts to pauperise voters with badly hidden green subsidies before bringing the economy down.

As North says, it is not just Anyone But Brown (ABB). Brown, Clegg and Cameron have clustered together. Why make a choice if that choice is a struggle? It is Anyone But Brown, Cameron & Clegg (ABBCC)*. Anyone got a poster we can put in our window?

(*Well, anyone but Brown, Clegg, Cameron or Farage)

Shooting down parachutes

Gerald Warner reviews the parachuting in of Tristram Hunt to Stoke-on-Trent Central. The short list of three decreed by the Labour centre contained not one local name. But, as Warner points out, "the party of Elizabeth Truss and Joanne Cash can hardly criticise Labour".

Warner concludes that:

The reality is that the House of Commons is rapidly being transformed into an appointed chamber on the model of the House of Lords. Both Houses of Parliament are becoming filled with appointees, under the “progressive consensus” that is the Labour-Tory collaboration against the interests of the nation.

One way to fight back is for a local party loyalist to stand as an independent. But what we need is the Douglas Carswell solution: genuine choice by the local party, and then open primaries before every election, even for a local party with a sitting MP.

Hazel Blears may have survived a closed party reselection meeting, but would she have got through an open primary? Probably not - but the electors in this safe Labour seat never got to sit at the table.

Democracy?, concludes Warner. "None of that messy nonsense nowadays."

Essay factories

The Times reports on "essay factories" offering 2.1 degrees or your money back.

Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, is reported as saying: “It is potentially very serious and undermines the whole fabric of higher education.”

No amount of legislation or plagiarism analysis will prevent these operations. In any case, plagiarism analysis is not what academics should be doing.

The solution - as commenters on the site are pointing out - is to abolish course-work. Go back to end of year or end of course exams. The main risk of cheating then is by the academics in setting the questions, but that is much more easily contained.

Abolish grading by course-work.