Thursday thoughts

"This is a shocking tragedy", said Superintendent Paul Morris, after 17-year-old Sharmaarke Hassan died of a gunshot wound.

It's a sad waste, but it's not a shocking tragedy. He was an outlaw. Last month he was found guilty of possessing cannabis and offering to supply it, for which he was given a one-year Community Punishment Order and 40 hours of community service.

Sharmaarke was also convicted of breaching the terms of his Anti-Social Behaviour Order at Thames Youth Court late last year.

The Asbo was imposed on November 2 and ordered the teenager to stay away from Buck Street in Camden - less than half a mile from where he was shot. He broke it the following day.

Sky News also tell us that "he is believed to have been a member of the north-west London gang The Money Squad, one of a number of Somali gangs in the area". So it is a sad waste but it is not a shocking tragedy. Can we have a sense of proportion, please?

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Looking out at the rain, it's hard to believe the strawberry picking season is upon us. Radio 4's PM programme has just carried an item from a strawberry farmer saying he can't get enough labour because the government is limiting employment of temporary labour from Bulgaria. Temporary Polish workers don't come any more because the Pound has fallen against the Zloty, so UK earnings convert into considerably less Polish money than last year. And local English people aren't interested. So a proportion of the crop will rot in the fields.

As a taxpayer, why should I pay unemployment benefit to fit people within reach of this work who refuse to take it? But the politically correct BBC concentrated on the awful restrictions on immigration.

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And if this isn't unkind enough, let me now invite you to show no sympathy for members of Labour's NEC. Remember the Labour Party's loans? It still owes millions of pounds and The Guardian's report suggests it is an unincorporated association. So officers would be liable if the party couldn't pay its debts.

Of course it's unlikely to come to this, but such are the loans building up for repayment that it's certainly not inconceivable. Remarkably, however, this multimillion pound organisation seems never to have considered it. Did high flying whizz treasurer Jack Dromey never ask the question? Evidently not. David Pitt-Watson did, and that's why he declined the post of general secretary, reportedly after a furious row with Gordon Brown. And it's evidently acceptable for the GMB union to indemnify what The Guardian calls "its two members on the NEC".

NEC member Janet Anderson MP is clearly a woman of the world.

I am very concerned and we should look into the situation immediately. If this is the case, I can't see how anyone, unless they are very wealthy or are indemnified, like in the case of the GMB, can serve on the NEC. I can't see who would want to be general secretary following this advice.

Where has Janet been all this time? How many years have Mr Brown and Mr Blair served between them on the NEC? And Mr Blair's previous job was ... wait, it's coming to me ... ah yes, he was a lawyer.

Clearly the people running the Labour Party are fit to run the country.

Green goddesses

You've probably never heard of Alice Farr or Valerie Elliott. Alice works for The Woodland Trust, who describe themselves as "the UK's leading woodland conservation charity".

By acquiring sites and campaigning for woodland, we aim to conserve, restore and re-establish native woodland to its former glory. Currently we own and care for over 1,000 woods, covering over 50,000 acres.

A kind of woodland National Trust then? Not exactly. They urge us to take action now to stop climate chaos and "plant a tree to help biodiversity adapt to climate change"! We should sign up to "Icount". Yes, "we can stop climate chaos".

Hm, not just conservators of woods, then. But seemingly it still qualifies as a charity.

Commercial sponsorship and grants from charitable trusts and bodies such as The Heritage Lottery Fund and The Forestry Commission account for almost 25 per cent of funding.

It's up to shareholders how much of their money their companies give to greenies. (Incidentally, only 75% of the charity's money is spent on the charitable objectives.) But the grants aren't inconsiderable. In 2006 (information trickles slowly in greenieland) grants totalled over £3.8m.

Who are the generous providers of grants for the greenies? It looks like you and me. In 2006 over £1m came from the Forestry Commission. The Heritage Lottery Fund provided £800,000. The Department for Communities & Local Government chipped in £473,000. The Environment & Heritage Service, Northern Ireland provided £287,000, unnamed local authorities £255,000, DEFRA £178,000 ... the list goes on. Oddly, they got £99,000 from the North West Regional Development Agency - yes, that's right, Development Agency.

Out of this £3.8m of state money (our money, actually), £3.1m was "restricted grants", meaning the greenies could only use them for specific purposes.

The Trust is not short of ambition. Over the next five years they want to establish a further 5,000ha of new native woodland and involve 1 million children in planting 12 million trees. Over the next 50 years they aspire to double native woodland cover; "everyone to be within 4km of an accessible large woodland" (so presumably flattening tracts of towns and cities); "every child to have the chance to plant trees"; and "absolute protection of ancient woodland" (my italics).

This policy of absolute protection emerges in the Trust's recent statement on the decision by West Sussex County Council to approve planning permission for oil exploration in the South Downs. The BBC reports that -

Council officers told the committee there was a "clear and overriding need" for oil exploration and that the development accorded with the National Minerals Policy.

But this charity supported by taxpayers' money is having none of this. They describe the decision as "an act of vandalism on our natural heritage". Their release lists bodies which supported them. Not everyone did, as the report in the Telegraph makes clear. And the Maidstone News points out:

Alice Farr of the Woodland Trust still called the drilling “an act of vandalism” – even though no objections came from the Environment Agency or Natural England.

In explaining the Trust's opposition, Alice sets out the policy of this taxpayer funded charity.

Now is the time to move away from fossil fuels and put our efforts into the search for renewable energy. Climate change is the greatest long term threat to ancient woodland and this decision flies in the face of that.

Conservers of woodland, maybe, but conservers of woodland with a radical greenie agenda.

Valerie Elliott, the other one you'd probably never heard of, doesn't work for the Woodland Trust. She is Countryside Editor of The Times, and judging by this piece she would probably describe herself as a campaigning journalist. Her line that the "search for black gold is sweeping the country" boils down to the revelation that "The Government has received 60 applications from 54 companies to explore 182 plots". In a sinister move, however, it is "keeping the details confidential because they are commercially sensitive". Ooh.

Villages, hamlets or new estates will learn about a prospector’s interest only if permission is sought to drill or extract oil.

And what is wrong with that?

Worse follows. She reports that -

Conservationists and locals in West Sussex have expressed outrage at the county council’s giving approval for exploration Markwell Woods — an ancient woodland near Chichester, and part of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Er ... not all of them, Valerie, but don't let facts obstruct your bias. She calls these reactions "stirrings that could indicate the start of a nationwide resistance to Dallas-style entrepreneurs" - note the pejorative "Dallas-style"; do they wear cowboy hats? Or have all the hats been snapped up by cowboy journalists?

More significantly, Valerie Elliott provides no evidence at all of "nationwide resistance" - not a shred. Could she be hoping to stir some up and act as a co-ordinating point?

To be fair, though, nationwide resistance there will doubtless be, even if only from Alice and her fellow absolutists in national charities supported by taxpayers' money.

Where our money goes

Some of the numbers turned up by the Tories' review of government business support are mind boggling.

To start with, there are some 3,000 individual schemes, delivered by 2,000 different agencies and costing more than £2.5bn a year.

Around two-thirds of the money is spent simply telling businesses where to find advice and what grants are available.

A third of the money spent on regional support schemes goes on administration.

A big part of the case against Labour is incompetence. They are no good at getting value for money. Too often they see big spending (they call it "investment") as an end in itself. Every time the government says, "We have invested in schools and hospitals", think "The government has taken money from taxpayers and spent it".

The Government has set out to reduce the 3,000 business support schemes down to 100 by 2010. But how did they ever get to anything like 3,000, who's been responsible for getting value for money, and why should it take so long to stop this waste of our money?

Just one example of how wasteful big government and big politicians' egos are.

How much does green idiocy cost households?

David Miliband's unconvincing performance in front of Jeremy Paxman this week after his Green lecture did at least leave one agreeing with him that Green is the new Red.

Frank Field recounts how Labour MPs have had to abandon doctrine after doctrine to New Labour in the hope of being elected, but "all the party’s activists believed it remained committed to the poor". What it has come down to is that "the very essence of being a centre-left MP was rudely and brutally questioned by the 10p abolition".

This sounds pretty minimal for a political philosophy. In fact, of course, Labour remains in favour of a huge redistribution of income since that is the only way it could "abolish child poverty" on its own egalitarian definition. Blair and Brown knew that the swing vote they needed would never embrace this policy, which was why Blair pursued it by stealth.

Benn and Miliband both seem to crave some overarching creed they can subscribe to. For both of them it is in their genes. Benn's father is a famously loony left-winger, while pere Miliband was a Marxist academic.

For both of them Green is the new crusade. Miliband nailed the green flag to his political mast in his lecture, and in the past has called for the EU to re-invent itself as a champion of the environment (whatever that means). And Hilary Benn recently said:

The Government is committed to building a low-carbon economy, here and around the world. That means a complete change in the way we live and an economic transformation that will put Britain at the forefront of a technological revolution in the way we use and source our energy.

Maybe he would care to follow Miliband into the Newsnight studio so that Paxman can dissect this statement - perhaps sharing the session with Nigel Lawson, author of the astringently readable "An appeal to reason - a cool look at global warming", or Philip Stott, whose blog is an oasis of accessible sanity.

The Tories also show signs of reverting to traditional behaviour. Whereas Labour craved the enfolding arms of a Big Faith, Conservatives' aim was firstly to get and keep power, and secondly to manage change incrementally. In this sense their leader's lack of principles is an advantage, as we see the environment dropping down his political agenda. This will not be through any conversion to the truth that he misunderstood the science and the policy consequences, but simply because it's not playing well in polling data.

The latest commentator to pick up the environmentalists' incoherence is Bernard Ingham in the Yorkshire Post, brought to a wider audience by Philip Stott. What ails politicians who dance to the green tune, he asks. Have they lost their powers of reason?

I ask because their pre-occupation with combating something that may or may not exist – that is, man-made global warming – is responsible for part of the growing burden of costs with which every household is now saddled.

So, he asks, how much is this costing us? We don't know because government and Opposition don't want to strip out the costs to show us.

Let's forget the so-called climate change levy (CCL), which has as marginal an effect on domestic consumers' bills as it does on CO2 reduction. Instead, the real damage is done by Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) designed to encourage the development of wind, wave, tidal, solar and other "renewable" forms of electricity. These are as idiotically conceived as the CCL, since nuclear and large-scale hydro-electricity, which emit next to no greenhouse gases, are excluded from both.

ROCs latterly have provided a 100 per cent subsidy substantially to wind power – so far the only major renewable source of electricity – and earlier this year, the Business Department forecast they would cost £23bn by 2020, or, nearly £1,000 per household. And for that we would optimistically get only 14 per cent of our electricity – and then only when the wind was blowing.

Unfortunately, that figure was out of date when it was calculated because Tony Blair had signed up to a battily impractical EU requirement to produce 20 per cent of our energy – and not just electricity – by 2020 from renewables.

If we are to offset the massive use of oil and gas for transport and domestic heating with renewables, we shall, as things stand, have to generate up to 45 per cent of our power with wind. So that will treble the eventual cost to £3,000 per household – without providing a reliable power supply.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, says that eight per cent – or £80 – of the current average current gas and electricity bill can be attributed to environmental charges and this is only going to rise with the billions required to link remote and largely useless wind farms to the grid.

This is not to mention more generally the costs of the carbon trading and offsetting rackets, the Treasury's punitive tax revenue from petrol and diesel, Gordon Brown's new "green levy" doubling car tax revenue to £4bn while, on the Treasury's own admission, reducing carbon emissions by less than one per cent, and taxes on rubbish.

"Why", asks Ingham, "do we put up with this "green" extortion to so little purpose? That's the real mystery."

It's no mystery at all. It's because politicians chop the costs up into little pieces to make it hard for anyone to add them all up.

Last year the Taxpayers' Alliance (thank you to them for pointing me at their paper) calculated that

In 2005-06, the total burden of green taxes and charges – Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty (net of road spending), Climate Change Levy, Landfill Tax and the net cost of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – was £21.9 billion. (This figure excludes Air Passenger Duty as emissions from international aviation are not included in national CO2 emissions totals.)

That's over £800 for each household in Britain, before you consider the cost of regulations. Some costs, for instance, are concealed in energy bills.

And the burden will have gone up a lot since then.

Something for the weekend, sir

This morning's parcel from Amazon brought Squandered by David Craig and Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming.

Craig in his introductory chapter entertainingly pairs promises by Blair and Brown at the start of their premierships.

Blair --- Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime
Brown - Punish crime and prevent it by dealing with the root causes

Blair --- We will make education our No. 1 priority
Brown - Education is my passion

Blair --- Tackle the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour
Brown - Take action against anti-social behaviour

Blair --- Everyone is entitled to dignity in retirement
Brown - Respect, dignity and security in old age

Blair --- We will get the unemployed from welfare to work
Brown - Advance to a Britain of full employment

Blair --- Restore trust in politics
Brown - Rebuild trust in our democracy.

All good knockabout stuff. It'll be interesting to see how the following themed chapters develop.

Lawson's foreword starts with a jawdropping disclosure.

While my three previous books had no difficulty whatever in finding a British publisher (indeed they did so before they were even written), this book, despite being promoted by an outstanding literary agent, was rejected by every British publisher to whom it was submitted - and there were a considerable number of them.

As one rejection letter put it: 'My fear, with this cogently argued book, is that it flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide market'.

It was published by an American publisher who owns Duckworth.

In a TalkSport interview, Lawson said that someone had paid for a copy to be sent to every MP free of charge, so the publisher has already sold more copies than some so called celebrity autobiographies achieve, and they attract substantial advances.

The first chapter proceeds to undermine the IPCC's reports in layman's language from many angles that will be familiar to readers of Umbrella Blog and the blog of Philip Stott, and concludes

It is, however, prudent to err on the side of caution. For that reason, in the remainder of this book I shall work on the assumption that the majority (IPCC) view described earlier in this chapter is correct, while bearing in mind that, to a very important extent, this issue is in fact anything but 'settled'.

This promises to be an entertainingly bracing read.

You play, we pay

The Taxpayers' Alliance blog Burning Our Money has as its non-job of the week Islington's advertisement for a Senior Play Ranger.

The requirement for "an experienced play worker who is level 3 qualified in play work" alerts us that this is not some isolated Islington loonery - there is a whole qualification structure out there. We know it must be important because Islington will be using "initial two-year funding received from the Big Lottery Fund". Yes, lottery players, your money is going to good causes.

How much of this is going on? Search Google for .uk sites which include the word "council" and the phrase "play ranger", and it offers you "about 3,250 pages". I'm not going to read them all, but one guesses that:

1. There will be a 'national strategy'

2. There will be guidelines and enablers and possibly inspectors

3. It will be costing us a lot of money across the country.

Indeed, North Hertfordshire helpfully inform us that

The Government-commissioned document ‘Making the Case for Play’, produced by the Children’s Play Council (2002), has highlighted the importance of play in children’s development and raised its profile nationally. In 2005, central Government pledged £200 million to improve children’s play facilities, and in November of that year the Big Lottery Fund (BLF) launched a £155 million Children’s Play Initiative.

How does North Herts get its hands on a share of this boodle?

Each District Council has been allocated a proportion of the BLF Play funds, with North Hertfordshire entitled to up to £227,000 over three years. However, in order to draw down these funds, Districts have to make a written application setting out their intentions. Part of this criteria (sic) is that Councils have a Play Strategy and Play Partnership.

There were four "contact officers" for the North Herts strategy submission, the Acting Children’s Services Development Manager, the Community Development Manager, the Senior Lawyer, and the Accountancy Manager. I bet they even took their meetings seriously.

This goes on across the country. Here's an inspiring picture from Richmondshire (no, I didn't invent it). Smiling are (left to right) Paul Radley, Army Welfare Service; Kate Davis, Richmondshire Community Safety Partnership (on the swing); Coun Jane Branch, Chairman of Play Partnership and Member Champion for Recreation and Healthy Lives; Judith Bromfield, Richmondshire Council for Voluntary Services; Lynda Powell, Head of Partnerships, Richmondshire District Council; Vivienne Osborn, North Yorkshire County Council 4 Youth; Simon Robson, North Yorkshire County Council Sure Start. Good people, doubtless, but should we be forced to afford them?

To take one more example, Cheltenham's Play and Free Time Strategy for Children and Young People in Cheltenham 2005 - 2008 informs us that

The Play and Free Time Strategy for Cheltenham has been developed by using three key strategic agendas, Every Child Matters, the Gloucestershire Play Policy and Cheltenham’s Community Plan.

Perhaps not surprisingly considering this ludicrous spending (not to mention the ludicrous overheads caused by all this paperwork), we find that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister was involved.

“When children play together, parents invariably talk together and new community alliances are forged. Inclusive play spaces can be the seedbeds from which sustainable and inclusive communities grow.”

That won't stop if the play strategy and the play rangers are abolished overnight.

If we are to have national nannies, they should be funded locally, so that local communities can decide whether they want to pay for such a "service", and if so what they want it to do in their area.

Maybe local communities would prefer their money to be spent on open spaces. Maybe local communities would prefer their money to be spent on home care for the elderly. Maybe people in local communities would prefer their local authorities not to spend their money on this at all, but to leave it in their own pockets, where it came from.

But how much more convenient for the state nannies to organise it centrally. Local authorities are immune from challenge, because they are bound by national rules. So the central bureaucrats can nanny all the local authorities, and being part of the large central apparatus they themselves are safer from challenge.

It is not the state's money. It is not the local authorities' money. That money belongs to the people. You play, we pay.

Freedom to waste

Rachel Sylvester has space to fill this week so she has written a piece about which politicians are cavaliers and which roundheads / puritans. This would be sad as a parlour game after lunch on Sundays, and certainly didn't deserve publication.

Despite a fondness in some quarters around here for orotund language, most of our umbrellablog colleagues cleave to the roundhead tendency. Certainly none of them could be described as wrong but wromantic.

Quite apart from being unilluminating, Ms Sylvester's analysis is actually wrong. The government is not in the hands of puritans. How can we tell? Turn a few pages of the Telegraph and you will find a review by Gillian Reynolds of a recent File On 4.

It is a tale of Regional Development Agencies living high on the hog at taxpayers' expense. A modern puritan would have sacked the offenders at once. But there would be little to stop their successors doing it again.

In the tentacle state, local satraps run unfettered and unchallenged. In the nationalised health service, heads of hospitals spend large sums, and in some cases kill people, with no effective supervision. Lack of accountability could work if there was a gulag for these people, but our government's softness means they just get punished with a fat pay-off.

For the extravagances revealed in File on 4 there is no sanction at all.

In general, complaints to the minister responsible for RDAs, Margaret Hodge, receive comment but are handed back to the agencies for action. As the programme made abundantly clear, since there is no open accounting process, no public scrutiny of performance or probity, these expensive, shadowy, quangocracies are not being held duly responsible.

It seems unlikely that Lady Hodge in her role as Culture Clown is also responsible for RDAs. Indeed, she would be better employed on the back benches, and it's inexplicable why she remains a minister (is she really the best the government can offer?). However, the minister responsible might compel the local satraps under their wing to introduce accountable transparency, so that all spending is itemised on their websites and they can be held to account, as increasingly happens in the States. They could make the RDAs more accessible (geddit?).

Support the Taxpayers' Alliance. A bunch of flowers to Gillian Reynolds for bringing this to another audience, and hair shirts all round for the Regional Development Agencies.

That money belongs to the people of our country, not to you.

I don't believe it

As the Major government was drawing to its close, Cecil Parkinson appeared on Question Time. He cited a statistic as showing the government's good economic performance and drew jeers from the audience. "But it's true!", he protested, missing the point. You could almost feel through the screen the audience's refusal to believe anything the government was going to tell them.

Governments come into office with a certain amount of credibility, which they then proceed to draw on to bamboozle their electors. What they don't seem to understand is that it is extremely hard to top this store up again, except through a period in opposition. Every time Gordon Brown claims that "inflation" is running at about 2% a year, people will shake their heads as they think of their supermarket bills and their energy bills, not to mention their council tax bills.

Government can never admit it's wrong. So home information packs are an aid to faster property sales, the nationalised health service and state education are improving by leaps and bounds, the army gets the equipment it needs, people are abandoning their 4x4's and walking instead, crime is falling, sentencing is proportionate, energy policy is under our control, making unwilling children stay at school until they are 18 is progressive, your personal data is safe in our hands and any isolated accidents aren't a government failure, the Olympics will be splendid value for money, state spending isn't generally wasteful, and we're wriggling out of a referendum on the EU constitution.

And off they spin into their parallel universe, followed only by a few political groupies.

They can't even convince the increasing population of polar bears that we all need to act to prevent global warming. What then about the hundreds of thousands lately stranded in China by unseasonal snow? And British polls have consistently shown that the public doesn't buy the claim that man made global warming is endangering the planet, despite the best efforts of politicians of all hues, and environment correspondents across the media, including the BBC. Unaccountably the British public considers it a tax-raising ruse, though the truth is more sinister. When Mr Miliband combines two wrongs to claim that the new role of the European Union should be to fight global warming, he probably believes it! But out here we don't.

Back in the Commons, the media are starting to look more closely at the numbers with which McStalin spatters PMQs. The Spectator's Coffee House blog regularly picks up examples of claims which he can only have taken from a dodgy dossier. The Opposition have yet to get to grips with this - not even his most fanatical supporters could claim Mr Cameron as a policy wonk with a feast of figures at his fingertips.

Meanwhile the rest of us will continue to sigh as we get these broadcasts from the parallel universe - indignation long past, saying with a resigned sigh, "I don't believe it".

Just as Cecil's audience didn't.

Drowning, not waving

Why trust governments with big questions when they can't get smaller things right?

If somebody wanted to replace the 46 fire control centres in England with nine regional sites, at a cost to taxpayers of £100m, with the first one due to open in autumn 2006, you'd maybe accept a little slippage.

None of them has opened, reports the Telegraph (in a piece which hasn't made the website) but you can't call that seriously late yet. And the cost? The Fire Brigades Union says it has risen. What are we looking at? A 15% rise (to £115m) maybe?

Not according to the union. Has it perhaps doubled, then, to £200m?

No. The new figure is a stonking £1.4bn. How does the government justify this?

The £100million figure was an early estimate. The project will bring many benefits which are currently not available.

Is it good value at the latest number of £1.4bn? Then it must have been astonishing value at a trifling £100m.

Of course there's a serious point here, and it's a big one. If an organisation can be so wildly out with a discrete project, would you trust it to calculate the many consequences of (say) large scale immigration? The effects on schools? Health provision? Housing? Hm, thought not.

If they did calculate it and didn't like the answers, do you think they would even tell you?

Yet this is the core of the case for big government - competence and openness. The government fails both these basic tests.

Also failing the competence test are local councils who face an equal pay bill of £2.8bn. Imagine the obloquy that would descend on the heads of a Tesco who found themselves in such a position. Yet if Tesco can get it right, why can't local councils? And if councils are so incompetent, do we want to buy our local services from them?

We are not starting from a doctrinaire philosophical position here. If government gets the smaller and easier things so badly wrong, can we reasonably support policies which require government to get harder and more complex issues right?

If they're so bad at it, there has to be a better way.

This money belongs to the people

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers' Alliance welcomes the arrival of USASpending.gov, "where Americans can see where their money goes". This appears to be a broad brush top down approach, but it is a big step forward in accountable transparency, a concept lauded previously on this blog. Accountable transparency is the new democracy.

Mark stresses the sheer amount of information that would be available easily to the public. At present Freedom of Information requests have to be made for each item, a process which can be laborious - and one, moreover, which gives the government notice of possible areas of concern.

The Freedom of Information Act has made the situation a bit better, and has shifted the balance of power at least a bit. You only need to look at the proportion of newspaper articles that are now based on information gleaned through the Act to see that it is making an impact. Even with FoI, unearthing public expenditure data remains a time-consuming activity at best and a pot shot hunting tool at worst.

Mark describes its limitations well.

So we can welcome the progress of accountable transparency in the USA. What now?

Trying to get the whole of the UK state sector to adopt accountable transparency in one big bite seems heroic. Maybe campaigning should start by trying to pick off outfits such as quangos and the BBC.

Whenever a new quango is created, or the life of an existing one is extended, this accountable transparency should be mandatory.

And campaigners should routinely call for accountable transparency from any state sector body which they suspect may be worthless. That includes the EU!

Then the idea will begin to seep into the public's consciousness. And after a while it will start to seem odd when there is no accountable transparency.

This money belongs to the people.

Priorities

"What's asylum?" asked the 11-year-old, when he saw the headline in The Telegraph

Asylum seekers' £4,000 'bribe' row

It claims that 23,000 people have been paid £36m to return home.

The most striking quote in a strange but only too predictable story is the justification.

Ministers say that paying failed asylum seekers to leave is cheaper than forcibly deporting them, saving money for taxpayers.

It's ministers' system, they should sort it out rather than bribing people with more of our money.

"And", said the 11-year-old, "they want our money for the Olympics".

If they got a grip of costs, maybe then we would not have to read a bad news story about lack of funding for treating prostate cancer.

A life-saving treatment will be denied to tens of thousands of victims of Britain's most common male cancer after a U-turn by the NHS rationing body.

Again it's the invisible National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which absolves ministers from having to take responsibility, and makes accountability shadowy at best.

Which should be our priority? Bribes for failed asylum seekers? The Olympics? Or treating British citizens' prostate cancer?

Labour's Black Tuesday?

This is the question bring asked by The Spectator's blog. Fraser Nelson writes that "people are pledging to shut down bank accounts and vote Labour out. They seem utterly unmoved by assurances that all is well, and no one is really at risk."

Certainly an unpolitical friend of ours walked in this morning and immediately started talking about it. It had clearly been a topic of worried conversation at home.

Fraser goes on, "En route to PMQs, I bumped into a minister and we got talking about this. "Who on earth are these people?" he asked."

The answer: the British public. People who live miles away from the Westminster village, who switch off when politics comes on television, the type who queued outside Northern Rock to withdraw savings because they did not trust a syllable of the reassurances uttered by this government. They are the people who celebrated the Queen's golden jubilee to the bafflement of the media and political class; the people who Tony Blair understood instinctively and spoke for so eloquently on the death of Diana ten years ago.

The Telegraph reports in a piece I can't see on their website

A new government register of every schoolchild in England will leave young people vulnerable to paedophiles, according to a survey.

ContactPoint, which will go online next year, will contain the address, medical and school details of all 11 million under-18s in England and will be available to an estimated 330,000 vetted users, including doctors and social services officials.

But children questioned by Ofsted, the education watchdog, said they were "very concerned" that the data would fall into the wrong hands and thought paedophiles would try to break into Contactpoint. They said too much information was being stored on the network, and there should be tighter regulations on those able to access it.

This computer system is to cost £224m. Would any parents now want such detailed information about their children collected on a single government database, let alone one available to 330,000 people?

And what is it for, this £224m computer system?

The aim is that social workers, doctors and schools will share information on young people to stop children falling into gaps between different services.

That must surely be affect a tiny minority of children. But all children are to be included and it is to cost us £224m.

And it is for England only. So it need not concern McBroon's constituents. It seems only English families are to run this risk.

P.S. Terrible coverage for Labour on BBC1's 10pm news. The copying and despatching is laid at the door of a (so far anonymous) 23 year old - and the BBC highlighted Gordon Brown's smirk during Prime Minister's Questions.

Much ado about very little

The government's trumpeted initiative to cut the 2.7m people on incapacity benefit - who cost us £12.5bn last year - turns out to be much ado about very little. As we blogged yesterday, they aim to cut the numbers on the benefit by 20,000 people each year.

That's because the new system will only apply to new applicants for incapacity benefit. Oh, and the new tests won't be introduced until next October.

The Financial Times provides a useful analysis piece. One expert blames Whitehall resistance for the long delay in starting to tackle the problem.

Civil servants pointed out that notes validating sickness benefit had been signed by patients’ GPs, and then assessed by another doctor reporting directly to the social security department. By questioning the high numbers of people going on to IB, ministers were in effect questioning the very efficiency of the civil service – a big charge for ministers newly in government to make.

Ministers also thought the numbers on incapacity benefit would fall as claimants retired. But no, a new generation picked up on it.

As Frank Field has pointed out, people aren't stupid. If they see a free meal ticket that suits them, they're unlikely to turn it down. It's government's job to design the system so that it doesn't operate like that.

Back to the validating process. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so society can't leave it to doctors to decide on an individual basis how many adults it is going to have to support financially. Standards have to be set. They have to take account of affordability. And so they are political.

Maybe we have to set a number that we decide to afford. People have to be graded, with physical disabilities taking priority. There should be charities which can help people who don't score enough points to make the cut-off point. Taxpayers could choose to make voluntary donations to them.

There has to be a limit to compulsory funding by taxpayers. The government is still not gripping the problem, only tinkering.

Taxpayers can't afford this incapacity benefit

The Times splashes its revelation that almost two thousand people who are too fat to work have been paid a total of £4.4 million in benefit, with other payments going for instance to fifty sufferers from acne.

Colourful though the details are, they obscure the main point. Around 2.7 million people currently claim Incapacity Benefit, which costs £12.5bn a year, as The Sun spells out.

There are around 29 million employed.

The key point is that some 9% of the potentially economically active population are on incapacity benefit. Doubtless this gives a warm feeling to officials who sign them off. Less so to taxpayers who are given no choice about contributing.

It beggars belief that so many people are too unhealthy to do any sort of work whatever. 9% is a huge number. The government are trumpeting that their new measures will see an end to sick note culture.

It will deny Incapacity Benefit to 20,000 claimants each year.

Which - as the numbers above show - is hardly touching the problem. 2.7 million people would be reduced to 2.68 million. Are there really even 1 million people who are too incapacitated to make any contribution to society at all?

So called "support payments" cost £4,000 per household each year. Many taxpaying households need that money.

The government's tinkering for maximum publicity.

The case against big government

The case against big government is simple and devastating.

Politicians have big ambitions, but low competence. This is not an issue of party political rhetoric, it is a matter of numbers.

Consider. The Taxpayers' Alliance has suggested that every household in Britain has £4,000 taken each year in tax and thrown away on useless projects and other waste by the government. More here.

And there are currently 5.4m people of working age who are not working but drawing benefits instead. And overall, we're spending over £100bn pa on "social protection" (excluding that spent on pensioners). That's about £4,000 pa per UK household. More here.

Is this a good way to spend £8,000 per household? Every year?

So the government has two redistribution policies. £4,000 a year from your money on "social protection" of people of working age. Then there's another £4,000 a year of your money. For all the good it does they might as well take it into a field and burn it. But in fact they redistribute it to expensive consultants and IT companies.

Did you vote for that?

This is not a party political point. Just as all the established parties favour state funding of political parties, so they all favour big government. They all have missions. That means missions at our expense.

So what political party is going to come out and say, We recognise that governments are institutionally incompetent?

But they are. That's why accountable transparency would be so important.

Sometimes the policies are barking, like the target of cutting Britain's emissions by 60% by 2050. And is the nation clamouring for "the government" to cut deaths and serious injuries on the roads by 40% by 2010 compared with the average figure for the mid-1990s?

So governments have some daft policies. They always will. Governing attracts tinkerers and meddlers and people who are sure they know better than you or me.

But it's very expensive. Take one recent example. The National Audit Office is to investigate the programme to buy £700m worth of private-sector care for NHS patients after it emerged that ministers had spent over £100m on the procurement.

This happens time and again. The Taxpayers' Alliance blog is a good source of material, but gets chaotic because instances of waste pile up so fast.

Take two core truths from this post.

1. Governments waste over £4,000 per household each year. And that's just what we know about.
   
   
2. The Opposition won't make this point, because they want their turn.

Wouldn't you rather have your money back?

Pouring money down urban drains

The Policy Exchange think tank calculates that government has spent over £30 billion on urban regeneration policy initiatives over the past ten years.

Yet over the last 10 years, and despite a doubling in funding levels, the very cities that have received these record levels of funding have fallen further behind.

Many cities in the north, says the report, have become marginalised.

The Telegraph suggests that this money has come from suburbs.

Yesterday, the leaders of councils that have had huge sums diverted from their funds to pay for urban regeneration reacted with fury.

Susan Williams, the leader of Trafford council in Manchester, said: "Middle England will not stand for it much longer."

Still, it's money for Labour councils and Labour quangos.

The government says

We will continue to improve the prosperity of these areas through the £2 billion announced last month through the comprehensive spending review.

More money from the suburbs.

The Taxpayers' Alliance has suggested that every household in Britain has £4,000 taken each year in tax and thrown away on useless projects and other waste by the Government.

This probably qualifies.

In further financial mismanagement, the Public Accounts Committee has reported that 36 completed schemes under the Highways Agency's Targeted Programme of Improvements cost some 40% more than the initial estimates. For the 67 Agency schemes still under development, estimates had increased by 27% from the initial estimates of £8,952 million to £11,410 million in July 2006. One in four schemes that should have started in 2005-2006 were delayed.

The Home Office wasted more than £29m on an asylum centre that was never built, says the National Audit Office.

And councils have been told they must cut their budgets for tackling foot-and-mouth and bluetongue this year because of a funding mistake by Defra, it has been claimed. Animal health teams are facing cuts of up to 12% because of a shortfall of more than £1 million between what councils were promised and the cash available.

Where your money goes (continued)

Gordon Brown foolishly wants the government judged on competence.

Benefits worth £500 million were paid out in error last year alone - in a decade, £5 billion has been lost through fraud and error. Over £1 billion went in benefits to those who had jobs and were not entitled. Other substantial sums went to students and prisoners.

How is enforcement going? There were 11,403 convictions in 2000-2001, but only 8,573 in 2004-2005 - a drop in the ocean. Fraud and error in the benefits system is estimated to cost each taxpayer about £100 a year.

11,000 out of the prison population of 81,538 are from overseas. Prisoners cost us £24,000 each a year. They should be a profit centre. The government hopes to repatriate foreign non-EU prisoners to serve their sentences abroad, in what The People engagingly calls "lag swap".

The People calls Alison Goulding "the mother of all scroungers". In essence she thinks she has the right to raise her large and increasing family in comfort at the state's expense without working. She shouldn't be able to.

And in the nationalised health service, most nurses spend more than a third of their week filling in forms, while one in five said that over half of their time was tied up by NHS red tape, according to a survey.

Governments just don't give taxpayers value for money.

Send them vainglorious

What makes ministers tick? Probably a combination of vanity and ignorance.

They have thrown huge amounts of our money at nationalised schooling. But despite dumbing down, results haven't improved in proportion.

They have thrown huge amounts of our money at the nationalised health service. Yet we have plague hospitals run by managers who reject unfavourable information. The media report today that a quarter of hospital trusts in England are failing to meet new standards on infection control.

The state takes citizens' money and uses it to disempower us. The staff at Maidstone could not raise their voices about what was going on at their hospital, and it's hard to see how local people could have brought any pressure to bear.

Yet the Stalinist vanity of ministers knows no bounds. They also think they should tax us and hector us about global warming. That is even though

• It hasn't been happening lately. For example, the southern hemisphere had a cold winter.
• Even if the earth is warming, it's not clear it's caused by humanity.

Now Philip Stott has picked up a piece in The Times headed

China’s drive for wealth means end of our low-carbon dreams

Stott summarises the argument thus. China aims to make every citizen twice as rich by 2020. So it will need ever more raw materials, especially coal.

What does this mean? Put bluntly, it means that the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions is dead and so is any prospect of persuading Beijing to bind itself to other curbs on carbon emissions.

Our politicians' attempts to convert to a low carbon economy are

1. Pointless - "the UK accounts for only 2 per cent of world energy demand, a figure that will fall to around 1.4 per cent by 2020".
2. Threatening our future prosperity. China and other developing countries will need ever more oil, gas and coal, forcing their prices up. But we have no economic substitutes. "If the West weakens its investment in oil and gas, and fails to adopt a new generation of nuclear power, it will be in grave economic danger", or as the writer in The Times puts it, “The feeble intellectual response of Europe and America to this energy challenge is becoming a matter not of concern but alarm”.

The army, the schools, the hospitals, the floods, foot and mouth, drinking hours, road pricing - it's hard to think of something this lot has got right. But they still preen themselves that they can preach on green morality.

And their opponents are just as bad. There seems to be a politicians' mindset. Vainglory all round.

No great expectations

The Taxpayers' Alliance picks up a report from the Financial Times that on public services generally, those who believe things will get worse outnumber those who believe they will get better by 22 percentage points. "That is chiefly due to expectations over the future performance of the National Health Service declining from a net score of minus 14 to minus 19".

However, the Financial Times adds that

A mere 20 per cent are confident that the government will manage immigration well, 23 per cent that they will do the right thing on pensions and 23 per cent that crime will reduce over the next few years.

The public are more optimistic about education and transport.

The Taxpayers' Alliance want politicians to "get themselves out of management".

The problem is that unaccountable management boards would create a democratic deficit. This just leaves the option of actually giving citizens choices of providers on the ground - for instance, giving parents vouchers and letting them choose a school (though this is even harder than it sounds).

But politicians are sure they know better than the electors. You only have to look at Brown and Cameron to realise how deep their conceited conviction of their superiority runs.

They'll be highly reluctant to let go. And so many schools will continue to fail our children, and political interference in the Nationalised Health Service will continue to kill people.

More money down the drain

Let me put this as simply (is that too long a word?) as I can.

For some reason, the government commissioned a study into the writing styles of celebrity chefs. This was paid for, dear reader, by you and me.

The study, carried out by the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, looked at 35 recipes published by five of the most popular celebrity chefs and assessed their readability and writing style.

The study found that Nigella Lawson's recipes are tricky to follow. Her recipe writing style was found too 'chatty' by some - the long sentences, complex measurements and complicated words mean aspiring chefs must be equipped with GCSE standard reading and numeracy skills in order to understand them.

What is wrong with that?

And why is the government spending my money on this?