Spanish local government again

I've been banging on from time to time about the dire financial state of Spanish local government (click the Spain label below). Today the Telegraph runs a very good piece by Harriet Alexander, misleadingly headlined in the print edition "Broke: the corner of Spain where the party is over".

Highlighting the small town of Moia, she tells us that

In Catalonia ten further councils are thought to be on the verge of financial collapse.

Indeed, the Federation for Municipalities and Provinces estimates that 40 per cent of Spain's local governments are in serious economic trouble.

• Moia, population 5,800, owes €25m - nearly four times its annual budget. Some local businesses have been owed money since 2005.
  
  
• Moratalla's two garages are owed €120,000 by the local authority and refuse to fill up municipal cars.
  
  
• In Barbate, 180 tons of rubbish are accumulating on the streets after the council's workers went on strike, having not been paid since June.

One Spaniard tellingly says

The problem is that Spain in many ways is still a Third World country – we joke that Africa begins when you cross the Pyrenees. We should have been living within our means, renting houses, driving old cars, developing slowly and securely. But we went crazy.

Obviously central government is in no position to bail out local government across the country.

Maybe it won't be the international bond markets that bring Spain down. Maybe local governments' debts will bring Spain down from within.

Ming speaks - yes it's rubbish again

As self-regarding boobies go, Sir Ming Campbell is in a league of his own. The preening ninny has now pronounced again:

The European Convention on Human Rights was one of the most important contributions which Britain made to post-War Europe.

It should lie right at the very heart of our constitutional circumstances.

My view is that the ECHR is a fundamental right and that is something we should not depart from.

I do not want in any sense Britain's commitment to the whole notion of human rights to be watered down.

Notice there is no substantive argument here, just an assumption that we should respect this peacock's moral authority.

How valuable to have someone whose instinct always leads them to take the wrong side.

Get on with your job, Pickles

Eric Pickles glories in telling The Telegraph how he opposes Vince Cable's proposed "mansion" tax, and how he'd consider letting a supermarket have some space in the admittedly extravagant atrium of the departmental building he has inherited.

Just maybe Mr P should spend more time on his own job. Maybe he should be asking himself why Welwyn Hatfield Council has to tiptoe around unauthorised “temporary B&B accommodation for gypsies and travellers”, according to Welwyn Hatfield Council’s planning officer Richard Aston.

If the local residents had their way, they might prefer to see one of their number permitted to build a granny annexe and Mr Rooney's caravans booted off his land.

Local referism certainly has a part to play here. Indeed, councillors wanted the caravans off the land. But the council is fearful of expensive court action if they put a procedural foot wrong.

So this is not about local democracy, it is about the planning system frustrating democracy, and that is the responsibility of Eric Pickles and his ministers and officials.

Rossendale Council has decided to save £92,000 a year by stopping some doorstep refuse collections. Now, they seem to have chosen a cack-handed way to implement it. But evidently the proposal breaks no law. "Local authorities are legally obliged to collect household rubbish but not to collect it at the doorstep", The Telegraph tells us. Of course residents losing the doorstep service will not receive a council tax rebate.

Now, if you polled the locals on how they would like to save the money, doorstep refuse collection would probably come way down the list. This is a case where local referism should surely come into play beforehand, rather than the residents having to band together and petition their local dictatorship democratic local authority to pretty please change their minds.

But why isn't the duty of doorstep refuse collection written into law? Who might be the minister responsible for allowing this?

Step forward, tribune of the people Eric Pickles.

Tim Godwin is not a leader

The police hate the idea of elected commissioners. They want to keep their "operational independence".

Against this background, Tim Godwin, acting head of the Met, is the last person we are likely to feel sorry for in the present situation.

Officers have been angered by accusations that they held back during the crisis, says Sky News, and Mr Godwin said these claims were "extremely hurtful and untrue".

Poor diddums! Go to Ealing and tell them that. Go to Croydon, go to Tottenham, go to Clapham.

Mr Godwin has been showing what an inspirational leader he is.

When asked whether his officers had been scared to "go in hard" in the wake of allegations surrounding the G20 and student fees protests, Mr Godwin said: "That is a debate I've been having with some of our politicians in the sense that there is an inconsistency of guidance from Parliament in terms of their expectations."

Expectations? I think everyone expects the police to keep the streets safe. I don't even know what Mr Godwin means by his obfuscation. Do the police want operational independence or don't they?

Two things we can say for sure. First, senior police don't deserve operational independence. (Well we knew that anyway from the bureaucracy and political correctness they have persisted with.)

Second, if Mr Godwin feels able to protest that the criticism is "extremely hurtful", it is plain that he still doesn't get what a failure his policing has been.

It beggars belief how any police can be unaware of the extent of their failure, but Mr Godwin, it seems, has managed it.

One for the scrapheap.

The discredited

Bully boy Prescott shouts on Question Time at anyone who dares criticise Labour education policy - because after all they spent a lot of taxpayers' money building new school buildings very expensively. But as Peter Oborne reminds us, Labour ducked the far more important tasks of tackling discipline in schools and taking on the teaching unions.

Labour also played down the importance of the traditional family. Guido amplifies Oborne's charge on this:

It was Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first refuge for battered women, who in the late eighties identified Labour’s then radicals Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt as dangerous feminist ideological enemies of the family. Harman and Hewitt were in those days leading lights of the loony left’s radical feminist wing, arguing in pamphlet after pamphlet that “It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion.”

Why would anyone take any notice any more of the discredited Harman?

Sky News reports that "a top UK police body has questioned David Cameron's need to draft in a former New York chief to advise him following this week's riots".

Apparently something called the Met Inspectors Branch Board insist they are better placed to offer guidance.

Don't they get it? Under their tutelage police stood by and watched rioting, looting, violence, and damage to property.

Why do they think anyone at all would think it worth while to consult our senior police about anything, after they comprehensively failed to deliver on the most basic task that we pay them for?

They ask

Why won't the Prime Minister consult us?

Don't you get it, you failures?

One ludicrously lenient sentence

The Daily Mail reports that Bernard Moore has been jailed for 20 weeks for assaulting a police officer.

Moore pleaded guilty to using threatening words or behaviour likely to cause alarm or distress and assaulting a constable in the execution of their duty.

The defendant, said to be clearly under the influence of alcohol or drugs, shouted abuse at police and attacked PC Joseph Doyle.

The officer told the court in a statement: 'I could feel him scratching at my face trying to gouge my eyes out.'

Moore then told the policeman: 'I will come for you when you are asleep.'

District Judge Khalid Qureshi dismissed his claims it was a reckless assault rather than intentional and sent Moore to prison.

He said the victim had been lucky to escape with only a small cut to his nose.

This sentence is ludicrously lenient. It should have been at least two years. How soon will he be out? Ten weeks? Will he care?

I hope the crown will say loud and clear that it is to appeal against this unacceptably lenient sentence.

Surprise surprise - Greece is breaking its word

Much piffle about how further lending gifts by the so called European Central Bank will depend on recipient countries following the ECB's policy prescriptions. Evidently Berlusconi's second speech about plans for the Italian economy was eerily similar to measures set out in a letter from the ECB which has subsequently emerged.

Will the electorates of debtor nations accept big dollops of austerity from foreign commissioners? Of course not. Will the taxpayers in the German group be willing to keep lending giving money to featherbedded economies? We keep being told they won't, but what signs have we seen of a serious backlash?

Even France is now saying that they really are going to stop borrowing more fairly soon, honestly. France hasn't had a balanced budget for over three decades.

Meanwhile, Greece's state budget deficit in the seven months to July 2011 widened 24.6% from a year earlier.

The Finance Ministry said that the cumulative state budget deficit rose to €15.51 billion in first seven months of the year—compared with €12.45 billion a year earlier, while net budget revenues fell 6.4%, budget expenditures jumped 7.1%.

What more evidence does anyone need that Greece's euro membership is doomed?

Presumably Sarkozy wants to string this out as long as possible because of the huge amounts of Greek sovereign debt held by French banks.

But default and devaluation will have to happen.

This outbreak of looting won't be temporary

Chuka Umunna, Labour MP for Streatham, says he wants to see Blackberry's messenger service "temporarily disabled" between 1800 BST and 0600 BST to stop those organising disorder.

Don't they get it yet? You can't assume this will blow itself out in a few days. It's getting sophisticated. Spotters on bikes check where the police are and then cycle off to tell the others.

We are going to have to give the police plastic bullets permanently, and give them the discretion to use them without referring up. Yes, people will get hurt.

No good saying it's unBritish. These few days have changed British policing for ever. The genie is out of the bottle. The looters know their power.

More touchy feely wimpy (rolling post)

Alastair Campbell tweets

Recall of Parliament raises expectations of policy or legislative change. Start with reversal on EMAs, Sure Start cuts and Social Excl Unit

This is wrong in so many ways.

First, there is no spare money.

Second, even if there was, rewarding the lawless is the worst possible answer. If you're going to reward anyone, reward those who were robbed, those who were burned out.

Money is not the answer for these looters. The EMA? Wholly irrelevant. 13 year olds don't get the EMA, looters of plasma tv's who drive Golf GTIs don't get the EMA.

The policy/legislative change isn't more taxpayers' money for the underserving, the Labour way, but realistic toughness.

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Sir Hugh Orde says the violence needs to be stopped before wider issues in the community, such as the rebuilding of trust, can be addressed.

The trust that's been lost is taxpayers' trust in the police to protect them and their property, not the trust of the looters out on profitable jollies.

==========

Professor Gus John of the Moss Side Defence Committee in Manchester tells the BBC News Channel the young people involved in the unrest have lost hope in their futures.

We're dealing with a betrayed generation of young people. They have been marginalized from any debate about the country's future and they are making themselves heard on the streets.

Tripe. Anyone is free to join in a debate on the country's future. Anyway, what future does the Prof think they want? A future with free tv's, trainers and burgers.

==========

Kids Company founder Camilla Batmangelidgh tells Radio 5 live's Richard Bacon that the people rioting are the "ignored underclass" and that this is them "taking revenge".

Ignored in just what sense? What would count as them not being ignored? In what sense are law abiding teenagers not ignord while the looters are?

Camilla is talking as much whiny rubbish as the mad professor.

==========

To be effective, changes will have to be permanent

Calls over the blogosphere for phone networks to be shut down, for curfews, for the army to be brought in.

All pointless.

The looting has to be stopped by changes which are permanent and are seen to be permanent. Otherwise we will only see a lull in the looting.

Wimpy politicians will twist and turn and will hate this hard truth, but it's the only way.

Governance has changed big time. That will have to be paid for.

Changes announced must be permanent.

What the looters are suffering from

What are the looters suffering from?

Government spending cuts? What spending cuts are those? Government spending is going up.

What they are suffering from is impunity. The police are too constrained, the courts are weak, the professional middle class whingers keep making excuses for looters. In Tottenham the self important Widow Grant was issuing demands on Radio 4 for the police to jump to her bidding.

So the looters go on their sprees, confidently expecting no consequences.

The government will probably try to get away with the minimum it thinks it can do. Probably it won't be enough.

Follow Inspector Gadget.

I have spoken to many law-abiding members of the public. Feelings are running very high against local youths. People are displaying hatred and frustration, flavoured by a fair amount of racism. I don’t think there is an appetite for funding any further assistance to the part of the community which caused this.

The overwhelming feeling is that major force should be used now, before things get completely out of hand. People are worried they will die in their houses. The arson threat is everywhere. There is a lot of frustration about lack of police attendance until we tell them we are from Ruralshire, then they are just silent as the implications of this sink in.

We have heard about the armoured vehicles in Clapham, which cleared the street in minutes. We want to carry out a baton charge at a line of angry youths who are setting fire to a huge wheelie bin in the doorway of a post office, but we are told to ‘hold the line’.

This has to stop. Gadget says police on the front line are worried about the Tomlinson case. It seemed there that someone harmless was struck viciously out of sheer vindictiveness. But a genuine melée is different. Stuff happens, and the community has to live with that.

The army is no answer, for what happens when they withdraw? The police need riot control tools, and maybe more discretion for the front line.

These have to be permanent changes, so that rioters know the police will always be able to deploy resources instantly.

Gadget is obviously right in saying that we need more support from the courts. Sentencing is unacceptably namby pamby. Is 16 months in jail too long for Charlie Gilmour? No.

Repeated community sentences are unacceptable. The country needs harsh prisons which criminals don't want to go back to.

After the last few nights the country has changed. If we can't afford proper policing and enough prisons, why are we shelling out to the EU and the IMF? Can we afford foreign adventures any more?

The country needs greater toughness and a dramatic realignment of resources. Impunity is not acceptable.

More NHS secrecy

Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust have paid out a secret amount of your money for a misdiagnosis by a doctor whose name is secret, even though a secret report said she had been working within her professional guidelines and no fault had been attached to her.

Had she done this before? Has she done it since?

That's a secret.

An abuse of state power and state money

Yes, it's social workers again, removing children from their parents on the say so of one doctor and severely limiting the parents' access. It took over two years for the family to be reunited.

It wasn't social services who probed the original medical opinion.

The case collapsed a week before a final court hearing, after the family consulted a U.S. expert who found no suggestion of any sexual abuse.

A UK doctor agreed - and the original doctor who had examined Courtney then accepted their findings.

Newport council asked for the case to be dropped.

The family were reunited in September 2006. Understandably, the couple then began a compensation battle against Newport council and Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust.

It's taken nearly five years for the claim to be settled. Taxpayers footing the bill are not allowed to know the amounts of the settlements. Nor do we know the amount of the legal costs.

So we don't know the financial cost to us of this foul up.

What went wrong, and who is to blame?

Under the settlement, the family are banned from commenting further on the case.

A state body should never be allowed to impose a gagging order like this.

Did I ask who was to blame?

The NHS Trust said a serious case review had established that the doctor who examined the child had been working within her professional guidelines and no fault had been attached to her.

We can't judge. We don't know who she is. Does she have a track record of this? Was it a one off, or do we have shades of the notorious Dr Marietta Higgs?

You don't get told. You just get to pay the bills to keep these smug so called public servants comfortable until they get it wrong again.

An unbelievable untruth

"Power went out at Peterborough Hospital at about 2215 BST on Thursday and a back-up generator failed".

Sounds serious so far?

There's more. "The emergency department blacked out as were the operating theatres, along with the maternity and critical care units. Power was restored at 0230 BST on Friday."

But don't worry. A spokesman for the hospital said

Patient safety remained a priority at all times and patient care was not compromised in any way.

What? Patient care was a priority? Not the priority?

Let's see. The emergency department is blacked out for hours, the critical care units are blacked out for hours, and patient care is not compromised in any way?

Did Comical Ali land another job? Do they really expect us to believe this?

EU keeps fumbling and spending

There's much silly talk about that EU heads of government shouldn't be on holiday. For all the good they've done so far, they may as well stay there.

Their predecessors were told that the new euro would never last, because of the differences in economic performance between member countries. Perpetual subsidies by the north to the south on the necessary scale were never going to be practical politics, but the EU's politicians recklessly shut their eyes to that - among them the facile Blair.

So the politicians shovelled their voters into the eurozone, and now they are fumbling its restructuring into manageable units, at continuing costs to their taxpayers. If they had kicked out Greece and Portugal as soon as it became obvious they would have to default and devalue at some point, there would certainly have been turmoil. But turmoil will happen anyway. In the politicians' defence it is argued that they had to give their banks time to cut their holdings of doubtful sovereign debt. But who was responsible for the financial regulation which allowed banks to get into that situation in the first place?

So for all their fumbling and bumbling the politicians may as well stay on holiday. But the French are probably busy, working on plans to obfuscate their banks' huge holdings of Greek debt, maybe with the aim of palming them off onto some EU institution or other.

How long will EU taxpayers continue to put up with this? Opinion polls may show them expressing high levels of trust in the EU - but for how much longer?

***

The Guardian continues its series reporting how beastly things are for people in Greece under the austerity. Yes ... and? Things are a lot beastlier a few miles away across the Mediterranean. Greece doesn't believe in paying its debts. Never has. In governance, as a country you pay for what you get, and Greece has chosen governments which continue to run up debt the country won't be able to repay.

The world - and even the EU - will at some point stop lending to Greece altogether, because it thinks it won't get its money back. Greece will have to default on its debts. But that won't do it much good unless it can also contrive a currency devaluation. Only question: will it do that after a revolution, or before? By the time Greece accepts the inevitable, how much more of their countries' money will the banks and the eurozone governments have squandered?

The Sun cheers us up

Thousands of people who entered competitions on The Sun website have been warned that their personal information may have been stolen, reports the BBC.

The company said it had reported the matter to the police and the Information Commissioner.

Did the company say that with a straight face? What did the police and the Information Commissioner say, I wonder. "Never heard of you"?

It gets better.

News International ... said: "We take customer data extremely seriously".

Yes, we all know how seriously you take data security.

More on proper sentences

I wrote briefly on proper sentences the other day. Comments - for which many thanks - concentrated on Guido's death sentence campaign, but I was trying to say there is a wider problem of sentencing, in that instances of light sentencing seem to pop up every week.

Inspector Gadget highlights another one today.

Richard North has been highlighting clunkingly severe penalties for technical offences - the latest here. Yet real crimes such as benefit theft are often dealt with by a slap on the wrist.

We're told they're only following the sentencing guidelines. Yet who writes those? And how visible is the process?

In passing, we notice Charlie Gilmour's mummy says he's finding prison isn't very nice. Actually, dear, we don't care. At all. And she tweets:

I would advise anyone who's thinking of protesting to wear [a balaclava]. Is so unfair that only one side gets to wear armour.

Now I begin to see what people mean about his duff parents.

Spoilt Greek children out to play again

It's The Guardian of course which gives space to the undergraduate antics of some provincial Greeks, referenced by Richard North.

The paper calls its piece "a beginner's guide to the crisis". Staff laid off by a closed restaurant squat there and keep it open. Taxi drivers have been protesting at government plans to open up the industry. (Competition would obviously be the work of the devil.) Demonstrators push aside road toll barriers and wave motorists through. Banners read: "We won't pay", and "We won't give money to foreign bankers".

This undergraduate action continues in supermarkets.

He also stages supermarket ambushes, handing shoppers big protest stickers to place on any goods they consider ludicrously expensive. Milk is a favourite. Noulas and his group fill trolleys with goods and ask the manager for a 30% discount. When refused, they abandon the full trolleys at the till.

Tee hee. That is so brave, so clever, so unselfish.

People refuse to pay for their Athens metro tickets, "with protesters covering ticket machines with plastic bags". Other demonstrators close the cashiers' rooms in hospitals. In Thessaloniki

The latest target was the German consulate, where dozens of demonstrators chanted and spray-painted the pavement, demanding the European Union did more for Greece.

Run that past me again? The children want to be lent more? Any mention of how these additional loans they're demanding would be paid back, along with all the rest? Thought not.

This is not a serious political movement, and The Guardian's piece is not "a beginner's guide to the crisis" - unless the paper means it is a guide to the crisis written by a beginner. No mention of the early retirement age. No mention that paying tax in Greece is optional. One of John Redwood's constituents was just back from Greece.

I asked my source what it had been like. He said it was like going to a party. The restaurants were full where he visited. He saw plenty of economic activity. Everywhere he went he was told they liked tourists who pay with cash, not credit cards. The view seemed to be that they did not trust their government to spend their money wisely, so why go out of their way to put the income through the books or pay the taxes? If you could add the unofficial economy into the figures it might not look so bad.

The spoiled children stamp their feet and demand more. It's jolly well not fair, they whinge.

Meanwhile our EU and IMF masters keep throwing our money at the spoilt children. And some commentators actually seem to take the children seriously.

Keep stamping your feet all you like. Just don't expect more of my money. You've had too much of it already.

Keep calm and carry on

Journalists at the BBC are taking part in a second 24-hour strike over compulsory redundancies.

Members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) began their strike at 00:01 BST. From Tuesday, members will also observe a work to rule.

Together, we can get through this.