The purple scorpion

Green Spectator blog piece pummelled

2008-09-04T20:03:00.002+01:00

One of the Spectator's writers has produced a short piece entitled Global warming opens up Northwest Passage. Sean Martin comments that "the melting of the ice pack shows worrying trends in global warming", leading him to conclude that "the event serves as a prescient reminder to politicians that climate change is an ever burning issue".

Happily the commenters are having none of it.

Our petty bureaucrat masters

2008-09-04T14:47:00.003+01:00

Hurrah. Ross Clark writes this week's cover feature in The Spectator, titled "Labour’s punishment freaks are hounding honest citizens". Far from keeping our streets safer or cleaner, he says, the government’s new force of amateur policemen are ignoring the worst offenders and pursuing law-abiding innocents instead. (He could have called it The Petty Policeman's Ball - but perhaps that's me showing my age.)

He is highlighting one aspect of a worrying trend. Local authorities are becoming our uncontrollable masters rather than our servants, as we saw for instance here, when junior minister John Healey was encouraging then to increase parking charges in order to reshape our lives - something for which neither he nor they have a mandate, but never mind such niceties.

The Tories should start saying they will repeal these measures, and saying they hope Tory councils won't go down the route that Ross compellingly describes; they should also say they want weekly refuse collections, and an end to small-minded health and safety rulings.

This should be a big opportunity for the Conservatives, and I'm afraid Eric Pickles isn't grasping it.

Green superstitions

2008-09-04T09:31:00.003+01:00

Reporting on a carbon capture project, a Today reporter referred to

Carbon dioxide, which is officially said to be responsible for climate change.

Since no one, as far as I know, has claimed that concentration of carbon dioxide causes cooling, we are back to our old hobbyhorse, anthropogenic global warming - the BBC are smuggling it in under a blander label. But -

1. Atmospheric CO2 is rising, global temperatures aren't keeping pace

2. So the whole carbon capture project is an expensive red herring

3. In science there is no "officially" - only truth.

Meanwhile, the greenie Independent has plucked up its courage to report the view of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors that solar panels are one of the least cost-effective ways of combating climate change and will take 100 years to pay back their installation costs. The Telegraph's Jeff Howell had made a similar point a few weeks before.

Another superstition to add to carbon capture.

Stuff democracy, we are the rulers

2008-08-20T20:10:00.007+01:00

That's the view of Local Government minister John Healey (smiling on the left), who says that local councils should charge more for basic services such as off-street parking.

"Only one in five councils are using charging to the full potential. Not just to cover costs but to shape their area."

Mr Healey said that charging more would result in "reducing congestion, improving levels of health and exercise, encouraging the use of local shops".

Never mind that local voters elect local authorities and this may not be what they voted for.

Comment from Eric Pickles and the Taxpayers' Alliance concentrates on the stealth tax aspect. For instance, the TPA say

"The last thing taxpayers need is even more stealth taxes and charges.

"It's outrageous that Government ministers are going round in public claiming to understand the financial pressures people are under, but behind closed doors they are urging councils to squeeze everyone for even more money.

"Councils already raise far too much by charging for things that used to be included in return for council tax."

Ministers seem increasingly to be regarding themselves as unaccountable masters. No one voted for the national government to do this, no one has voted for local authority measures like this, except perhaps for the voters of Richmond.

Eric Pickles' line is that

"It is shocking that Whitehall is pressing councils to use parking charges as a cash cow to raid the pockets of public. You would have thought the excessive rises over the past decade in council tax would be enough.

"Ministers are calling on councils to use to squeeze more money out of the public who are already struggling with the spiralling cost of living."

But yet again we see Conservatives not calling on their councils not to implement these interfering central Labour government policies.

They should. Tory councils weren't elected to introduce such policies. Rather local democracy than Duce Healey.

Return to the green goddesses

2008-08-20T14:40:00.007+01:00

We've seen the Woodland Trust before. They look like a National Trust for woodlands, and they're largely paid for by taxpayers through grants from various bodies, but they also have a radical agenda which includes creating big new woods and fighting climate change. Subsidised eco-nuts in conservationists' clothing.

They now propose to create a new forest near St Albans, and are appealing for funds. But who's going to provide the £8.5m needed to cover land purchase, tree planting and management costs for the first five years?

Such schemes sound jolly nice. People tend to like the ideas, on the assumption that the money is somehow free. But it is not, dear taxpayer. The costs may be less visible as they are filtered through various bureaucracies we have never heard of. But it is still our money - or rather, it was our money until the state removed it.

Martin Thornhill, St Albans organiser of the Taxpayers' Alliance, is asking pertinent questions, reproduced here with his permission.

The plan of the Woodland Trust to turn ancient unforested land north of Sandridge into forest raises many questions about the sustainability of the proposed forest.

Having checked the website of the Woodland Trust, I can see no indication of how - or whether - the forest is going to be managed after its 12 years maturity, so there is no indication of what permanent annual expenditure - if any - the forest will require to keep it.

Moreover, the website carries no due diligence on the effects of the proposed forest.

It looks set to become the taxpayers' problem within 15-20 years.

In 2007, the Woodland Trust received about 13.2% of its gross income from grants - i.e. £3.697m - of which the majority comes from a variety of government- or parliament-controlled bodies, funded by the taxpayer. The Heritage Lottery Fund, the Forestry Commission, local authorities (probably county councils for the most part, they have the least democratic visibility), Department for Communities etc, European structural funds, Department of Environment etc, Rural Payments Agency and so on all contribute to the income of the Trust.

So the taxpayers of St Albans are already substantially paying for the forest, even before it has started.

According to a leaflet from The Woodland Trust that local residents recently received, the Trust seeks to raise £100,000 from its local appeal. For the year ending 31 March 2007, St Albans District had 50,322 dwellings. A contribution from each taxpayer towards the £100,000 would thus be as follows: band A £1.11, B £1.30, C £1.48, D £1.67, E £2.04, F £2.41, G £2.78 and H £3.34.

Those numbers are small, but they represent only the £100,000 opening gambit. Because the Woodland Trust has no analysis of future costs, risks and externalities, it is impossible to gauge the permanent on-going cost that the Trust would somehow need to fund.

Until we know more about how the proposed financing of the forest's management, maintenance and protection over the next 20 years (at least), we should remain sceptical about the sustainability of the forest. I would like to see credible numbers that stand up to due diligence.

There are many reasons to support the project, ranging from a symbolic atonement for climate change to providing biodiversity that we need for our everyday lives (for example, a shortage of bees or other insect pollinators means the price of bread goes up. Yes, seriously. It does).

But if climate change has taught us anything, it is that we must measure every aspect of a man-made idea to ensure its sustainability. Any idea that simply sounds like a "jolly good idea" or "broadly right in principle" should be immediately suspect. Sustainability includes aspects environmental, economic and financial. All three must substantially prove sustainability for the proposal to count as sustainable.

A failure in any one of these aspects guarantees non-sustainability, meaning that we will have wasted resources in building something flawed that simply creates future problems (that we are too lazy to think about in the present). For this proposed forest, potential future problems will range from the effect on the local water supply to the incidence (or risk) of insect-bourne diseases not yet present in the UK. The planet is still going to warm up. Having used resources planting the forest and having spent as-yet unforecasted resources on maintaining the forest, will we in the future find that our cost of delivering water to local residents increases, or that the cost of more accessible medical treatments (once thought a preserve of exotic holidays) increases?

As the forest will be substantially a public good, how do we fund these likely future costs? Taxation? Exactly: that's my point. The population will continue to age over the next 20 years, meaning that there will be fewer and fewer people of working age paying tax to feed a state that continues to grow and spend and grow and spend more. There will be less private cash to bequeath to the Woodland Trust, making it more reliant upon grant funding from the state. A vicious, greedy, state-centric circle, a reality far removed from what you thought would be a "jolly good idea".

The solution is to press the Woodland Trust repeatedly until the numbers fall out. I would like the Trust can prove the environmental, economic and financial sustainability of the forest - without reliance upon any taxpayer or grant-issuing body - and show legal steps to entrench its sustainability, independent from government.

This blog is a global warming sceptic, but Martin's argument is well made. Indeed any proposed state spending should have to answer the Thornhill questions.

Would that were true. A lot of state spending would fail Martin's tests. That's probably why they're not applied.

Another question might be: could they raise £8.5m plus the other costs from a charitable appeal? If not, arguably there is not the public will for the spending to happen. If they could raise the money that way, let them do it!

What is Tory policy on fortnightly waste collections?

2008-08-16T11:22:00.005+01:00

Yes, I know the cold-eyed thug is threatening everyone around Russia and would happily see the EU shiver this winter to show it who's boss. But Derek Conway is still an MP, and day to day life goes on.

The Daily Mail reports on refuse collection in Huddersfield.

After industrial action left them without a rubbish collection for a month, the families of Birks Road were delighted to see the council lorry finally arrive.

But their relief turned to anger when the binmen announced that, while they would empty the households' wheelie bins, they would not take any loose bags which had piled up.

Two weeks later, they were still refusing to take away all the rubbish. And at this point, the quiet cul-de-sac in Huddersfield suddenly became a street under siege.

One man parked his car across the street, preventing the lorry from getting out. Others formed a human chain around the truck while a group of children sat in front of it and refused to move.

Finally, after a two-hour stand-off, the binmen agreed to take all the rubbish and tranquillity was restored to Birks Road.

Kirklees Council switched to fortnightly rubbish collections five months ago. It's Conservative.

So what brought this to a head? The council announced its workers were taking strike action on July 16. Rubbish was collected on July 2 but because of the intervening walkout it was July 30 before the binmen returned - and refused to take the loose bags that had built up.

Householders complained to the council, which offered to send a 'rapid response' vehicle to collect the extra rubbish but it never arrived, says the Mail. On Wednesday the lorry was several hours late. One resident said, 'When they arrived the three binmen refused to take our bin bags so we offered to put them in the back of the lorry ourselves but they weren't having any of it.'

Eventually, a rapid-response vehicle from the council arrived to collect the excess waste. Then 'a guy in a shirt and tie appeared and said, "To teach you a lesson we are not emptying the bins in the street", so we formed a human chain around the lorry'.

'Finally, one of the men said they would clear the rubbish if we moved, so we did and they kept to their word. If they had picked up the rubbish at the start it would never have come to this. This could have been resolved weeks ago if they had just been reasonable.'

A council spokesman said the binmen had acted properly (of course).

'The collection crews always do their best to collect everyone's waste.

'Individual residents can sometimes become agitated and frustrated, and the aim of the crew is to deal with such situations calmly, listen to residents' concerns and then get the job of collecting everyone's refuse and emptying everyone's bins done.

'This incident was quickly resolved, in line with what we would expect of our collection crews. All the refuse was collected.

'We always respond to any calls we receive from householders.'

Here are a Tory council adopting an unpopular Labour government policy - which isn't even compulsory - and implementing it like old-fashioned municipal socialists.

Is this how Tories behave when they get into government? We accept that Huddersfield should not be a petri dish for Tory policies any more than London. But what is the Tory view of Conservative councils which do the Labour government's bidding when they don't have to - and make such a hash of it?

Mind the (energy) gap

2008-08-12T09:09:00.003+01:00

Booker's Sunday piece set out the looming problems of our energy shortfall. "After years of dereliction, when only a crash programme of measures could keep our lights on and our economy functioning, our policy has become so skewed by blinkered environmentalism and diktats from the EU that we are fast heading for the worst of all worlds - a near-total dependence on foreign sources of energy which will not only be astronomically expensive but which can in no way be guaranteed to supply all the electricity we need." Some scares are real.

Philip Stott suggests some policies.

First, there must be no politically opportunistic windfall taxes or Government scams using emission-trading scheme permits. At this desperate time, it is vital not to do anything that might increase costs, and thus prices, further. Profits are vital for urgent investment into new supply infrastructure;

Secondly, the Government must move urgently to increase our ability to store natural gas from the current paltry 13 days to figures more in line with Germany (99 days) and France (122 days). We also need to restructure our terminals so that extra deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) can be more easily accommodated;

Belatedly more gas storage facilities are on the horizon. Portland Gas has planning approval for a gas storage facility, while Petronas and Encore Oil have identified a large possible facility. The government seems to have been content to leave this strategic requirement to the market. Companies are responding, but later than would have been ideal.

Thirdly, we must ignore the increasingly irrelevant ‘green’ protests, and move swiftly to build new coal-fired plant like the two now planned for Kingsnorth near Rochester in Kent. ‘Green’ self-indulgence has had its day in the sun; it is now too dangerous for us to tolerate it with just a benign shrug;

This is key. He explains elsewhere how plentiful coal is. The UK still has more than 100 years of reserves. We need strategic action to reduce our reliance on volatile areas like Nigeria and the Middle East, and that cold-eyed thug Putin.

Fourthly, we must solve urgently the impasse with Électricité de France (EDF) over British Energy, and make a timely start on the programme for the next generation of nuclear power stations, but choosing one standard system for the whole country;

Fifthly, ministers must come clean on wind energy, admitting publicly the serious limitations and high costs involved for the consumer, especially with regards to the prohibitive problems of dealing with this intermittent source of energy on an aged grid, which will require a massive upgrading;

Sixthly, again ‘green’ waffle must be put aside, and the long-planned Severn Tidal Barrage should be embraced with Brunellian panache; and,

Finally, but most importantly, the Government must place energy right at the top of the political agenda, and establish a settled energy policy within which the utilities and businesses can feel confident about the commercial environment within which they are planning for the - for our - future.

This means not trying to smuggle out an energy policy bit by bit, so as not to frighten us. It means doing what government should do, and explaining openly what is needed.

It's questionable if we have global warming at all. If we do, is it caused by mankind's production of carbon dioxide? Highly unlikely. We can't "fight climate change". Every hubristic EU bigwig who says that, every hubristic Miliband who claims that, is talking nonsense. They need a lesson from King Canute. But all our political parties espouse greenery. So there is no political leadership about the energy gap. It is being left to commentators to raise public concern, which is a pretty fragile way to look upon one of our main challenges of the next decade.

Scrounging is fine, says Skelmersdale councillor

2008-08-11T12:53:00.002+01:00

24.55% of the working age population in Skelmersdale are claiming benefits. The government say their new social security proposals “will end the injustice of people being written off on benefits for life without any hope of getting the support they need to get back to work".

But we do need people to know that if they are not willing to take this help then they will lose their benefits. By doing that we can take away the benefit of not working at all.

However, this isn't good enough for Skelmersdale County Councillor Chris Cheetham. He makes the point that “in some cases people are better off being on benefits than working and they are going to lose out".

It is going to make life difficult for some people without making any gain for the country and innocent people are going to suffer.

Most people who want to work, can’t work because the jobs available don’t pay enough and haven’t got the right skills.

The gain to the country will be that the rest of us won't be paying Councillor Cheetham's constituents to live an idle life. 11.56% of Skelmersdale’s working age population are claiming incapacity benefit. And how much of that is fraudulent?

Why tax credits can't work - ever

2008-08-02T12:48:00.006+01:00

Following the previous post on the nonsense that is tax credits, a contact points out that not only are they unworkable, they offer huge scope for easy fraud. This is because they require timely notification of a vast amount of personal information to a central point which in practice is uncheckable.

For instance

Some changes in circumstance mean that your tax credit payments will go down, for example you stop working or your child leaves full-time education. You must tell us about such changes within one month, or you could get paid too much money and have to pay it back, and you may be charged a penalty of up to £300.
You have one month to tell us if:

you start or stop living with a partner
your working hours change
your childcare costs change
a child moves out to live with someone else
a child leaves full-time education
a child starts claiming tax credits in their own right
you or your partner leave the United Kingdom for more than eight weeks

Who would think this would work? - apart from a fanatical centralist devoid of imagination.

Of course, there's more.

Some changes in circumstance mean your tax credit payments will go up, such as having a baby. Although you don't need to tell us within one month, it's better to do it straight away as any increase in payments can only be backdated by up to three months. So if you had a baby on 12 June but you didn't tell us until 12 October, we could only give you the extra money from 12 July. You'd miss out on one month's extra payment.

Tell us straight away if:

* you have a baby
* your income goes down
* your childcare costs go up
* a child over 16 but under 20 is in full time education
* you start working 30 hours or more a week.

Of course there's more. Far, far, far more. I defy a clued up middle class couple with time on their hands to get all this right, let alone a harassed single parent who may be struggling with their literacy.

Even if the computer software were faultless, this intrusive system could never ever work in the real world.

Bizarrely, though

There's no need for you to tell us if you expect your income for the current year to be no more than £25,000 higher than your income for the last year. It will make no difference to the amount of tax credit you will receive for the current year although the increased income will be taken into account in the following year.

But woe betide you if you have to try to work out your income from employment. This takes you into a world of worksheets similar to a self-assessment return.

There is no chance that HMRC would ever pick up more than a tiny fraction of failures to notify changes in personal circumstances - or late notifications. Chancellor Brown's system is asking for a coach and horses to be driven through it. And no doubt the undetected fraud is huge.

The promising and the pathetic

2008-08-01T19:25:00.003+01:00

In what scientists are calling a "giant leap" toward clean energy, researchers at MIT have developed a way to store solar energy for use when the sun does not shine, paving the way to large-scale solar power.

Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the world's energy problems.

In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet's energy needs for one year.

Until now, however, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is both expensive and inefficient.

More

==========

A new poll has found that only 5% of people think the new, compulsory home information packs have delivered benefits. But, says Jim Pickard, the government always claimed Hips were necessary to meet the EU directive demanding that home sellers must produce energy performance certificates (EPCs) - which form part of the new packs. However, in northern Ireland, as of the start of this month, EPCs have been introduced; without Hips.

Step forward, Yvette Ballsup. Another triumph for the Ballsup family.

No comments thanks, we're environmentalists

2008-08-01T15:04:00.003+01:00

"UK 'deluded' over emissions cut" is the headline on the BBC report that

The UK has been living under a delusion over its claim to be cutting greenhouse gases, according to two reports that will shake the climate change debate.

They claim that the page was last updated on Thursday evening.

Not so.

This morning, Friday, they were soliciting comments. No longer.

Could it be I wasn't the only one saying that we don't seem to have global warming any more; if we do, there's no recent correlation between temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide; and the only scientific basis seems to be computer models whose predictions aren't being fulfilled; so in this instance well done the government for fudging the numbers, since the science is hopelessly inadequate to support the attempts of the fanatics to damage our lifestyle.

Of course there is is a big and serious issue, energy security. But this report isn't addressing a real issue at all.

Tax credits for the scrapheap?

2008-07-31T09:27:00.005+01:00

As Brown's authority drains away, the tone of discussion about tax credits is changing. Previous years' coverage has focused on the amounts of overpayment and underpayment, with assurances that things were targeted to improve. A junior treasury minister with nominal responsibility for the mess would be wheeled out to explain how things really were going to get better, while Chancellor Brown - the architect of the scheme - would be in his McAvity mode.

However, the large scale bungling continues. The Sunday Times reports that "Tax credits time bomb threatens to explode" and "the nation will face a bill for £2.8 billion". The pressure group Tax Credit Casualties is achieving more prominence, and The Sunday Times describes how Freedom of Information requests on disputed tax credit demands produce detailed records which "provide a snapshot of a system on the brink of chaos".

And that's a big problem for the government. The paper reports that HMRC now faces a backlash over its pursuit of 1.5m families to whom it overpaid tax credits (some of whom will of course have been hit by Mr Brown's cavalier abolition of the 10p tax rate).

Many of the documents show that errors previously blamed on the public were in fact the mistakes of tax credit officials and faulty computer software. The evidence means that significantly more of the billions of pounds in outstanding debt will have to be written off than previously thought.

And indeed The Sun claimed the next day that "Alistair Darling is set to write off nearly £3BILLION in a huge tax credits fiasco".

In this context, error rates become irrelevant if large numbers of poor families through no fault of their own are plunged into debt which they will have great difficulty repaying. The system has staggered on since 2003 with promises of improvement around the corner. But can it ever be cured?

While the great helmsman was feared, the tale that things would be all right eventually was not seriously questioned. But, as the invaluable Sue Cameron asks

With Labour all at sea and rumours of mutiny clouding round Captain Gordon Brown, is his old flagship, HMS Tax Credits, heading for the breaker's yard?

She says many in Whitehall now believe that this once-vaunted policy is unseaworthy - "so much so that insiders expect it to be scuttled by the next government". Insiders are now suggesting that tax credits were doomed to disaster from their launch five years ago.

Chancellor Brown "wanted to end the stigma associated with benefits and bring everyone into the tax system under his ever more powerful Treasury". So HMRC had to absorb work from the DWP. "I am told that senior people at DWP offered to advise but were turned down."

With no experience of dealing with the poor, at the end of the year HMRC started demanding money back from vulnerable families who had been overpaid in tax credits. Often people had no way of paying and found it next to impossible to appeal. Unlike DWP, which does not try to reclaim money when it has been at fault, the HMRC is reluctant to admit to official mistakes. By March this year HMRC was looking to claw back £2.8bn from claimants but £1.8bn of that is "in doubt", meaning it will probably have to be written off.

At the same time, Mr Brown had decided to merge Customs and Excise with the Inland Revenue. Sir Richard Mottram, former head of the DWP, described this as a "massive task of organisation and culture . . . and it was being done in parallel with implementing, in the case of tax credits, something that was of, well, doubtful implementability". The head of HMRC then agreed a deal with the Treasury involving rigid plans for cutting 24,000 HMRC jobs - more than a quarter.

Anyone with any background of managing anything at all could see that this was a recipe for failure.

You can see why Sir Richard would have doubts whether the system could ever work. Even if the software had been perfect - and clearly it still has major problems five years later - huge numbers of people now had to complete complex forms every year. Poorer people might find this especially difficult. When they claimed benefits, they could deal across the desk with someone locally. Not so with tax credits. Some poorer people are in and out of work, and their personal circumstances may change more often - requiring frequent changes to their tax credits. And how many people has the state education system produced over the past few decades lacking functional numeracy and literacy? How were they expected to cope?

Sue Cameron concludes that

Plans to transfer yet more benefit claimants from DWP on to HMRC's tax credits have been shelved (for good, according to insiders). The real victims of this gargantuan Whitehall mess are millions of hard-up families.

And taxpayers, who are continuing to pay for Mr Brown's rigidity and incompetence. Government is about delivery. Brown failed. Tax credits should be replaced by higher income tax allowances.

What is the state for?

2008-07-30T21:38:00.004+01:00

So called "public services" cost us a lot of money, but what do they provide? Four examples today should worry everyone.

First, the family of a man killed by a former employee he was due to give evidence against in court has lost its claim that police failed to protect him. He was a witness in a case, he told the police he had been threatened, the police did nothing, and the man shot him three times and killed him. Hertfordshire police - my police force, I'm ashamed to say - have appealed this to the Court of Appeal and on to the Lords, where they finally won.

The dead man's father said he was, "very, very angry" at the ruling and attacked the Hertfordshire Police case for being "morally and legally disgusting". He added: "The message that goes out from today is that it's all right for a catastrophic failure of public services to occur. Effectively there is no legal sanction for a victim if this happens. It's pure injustice." The family may take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Secondly, no one is to face charges in connection with the outbreak of Clostridium Difficile at Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust which left 90 people dead. Much hand-wringing among the bodies allegedly responsible, while the campaign group Health Emergency say

The decision not to bring charges over the catastrophic management failures at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells sends out a signal that no matter how many people die, those at the top can bail out without taking the rap.

It doesn't get any worse than 90 deaths and it's massive kick in the teeth to the friends and relatives of those who died that no-one will be properly called to account.

Third, the Taxpayers' Alliance pick up the revelation that climate change policies make up around 14% of the average domestic electricity bill and 3% of the average domestic gas bill. Climate change policies also make up 21% of the average business electricity bill and 4% of the average business gas bill.

By 2020 the burden of green policies will have risen to 18% of the average domestic electricity bill and 55% of the average business electricity bill. Will the parties highlight this in the debate about fuel poverty? I doubt it.

Lastly, the case of the overloaded wheelie bin - overloaded only because the dustmen had been on strike on the previous collection day. A council spokesman said: 'The joint trade unions would not give any concessions for catching up missed wheeled bins due to strike action, hence we have not responded to any such requests.' Hm. Who's in charge at Kirklees Council?

Or - to put it another way - what is the state sector for?

Why should we be worried? Because we pay for them and they seem to be a law unto themselves.

What's happening in Italy?

2008-07-30T10:35:00.003+01:00

You get a different slant on the country from different sources. The Guardian's recent Italy stories have been

Infernal row flares over Florence council's plans to pardon Dante [isn't that clever?]
Ryanair ignites Italian fury over 'unpleasant' website advert
Carla and her sister put Sarkozy on spot in row over terrorist
There is no excuse [about sexual assault trials]
Italian climbers rescued from Pakistan's Killer Mountain, Nanga Parbat
Roma face fear and loathing in Italy

You get the picture ... tabloid fodder for caring liberals. This is the sort of news The Guardian prefers to concentrate on. I particularly like the extended coverage of a trial which resulted in police officers and doctors convicted of gross mistreatment of detainees after the 2001 G8 summit being freed.

Armageddon Ambrose-Pritchard has a different agenda, of course, reporting today that "Italy is sliding into a deep structural crisis and risks being forced out of Europe's monetary union as the region's economic downturn gathers pace, according to a new report by Capital Economics".

Indeed some of the numbers are stunning. Italy has lost some 40% in labour competitiveness against Germany since 1995 (Germany did national retrenchment, Italy ... er ... doesn't). And Italy is now on the edge of its fourth recession this decade.

Armageddon does point out that other euro members are also suffering, which he suggests reduces the risk of EMU breakup, though it's not clear why this should be so. The Germans won't support loosening to assist countries with weaker economies. So is it merely comradeship in adversity?

He concedes "most studies on the risk of an EMU break-up conclude that it cannot occur because the costs would be too high". But, he counters, this overlooks that markets could set in motion a chain of events that forces a country to leave. One also wonders how long the citizenry of Italy will stand for this gradual decline. Their own north-south divide may have a role to play, especially as their government works towards fiscal federalism.

But none of this is glossy enough for The Guardian.

Tuesday titbits

2008-07-22T19:17:00.004+01:00

A Fistful of Euros has also picked up the Wolfgang Munchau article blogged here yesterday. He writes that

My view is that a substantial, but as of yet indeterminate quantity of money (possibly in the region of 300 - 500 billion euros) needs to be injected urgently into the Spanish banking system, either directly (by buying cedulas hipotecarias outright) or indirectly by buying up and closing down builders as part of a “restructuring programme”, and this needs to be done by the EU equivalent of the US Treasury (whatever we decide that that actually is) and not by the ECB.

This is useful as it puts a number on it. But it only emphasises the political point discussed here yesterday - where is the money to come from? The phrase "whatever we decide that that actually is" doesn't begin to cover it.

And his 300 - 500 billion euros is only for Spain. Think Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy ....

========

Yesterday I blogged that government is about delivery. Read, in this context, Philip Johnston's piece about tax credits. Huge fraud, and they turn out to be too complex for HMRC to implement successfully.

Johnston also lists some changes to social security.

Frank Field, the former welfare reform minister, once compiled a list of changes to the system made by the Kirkcaldy wizard: over a four-year period from 1999, the Government abolished family credit, introduced working families' tax credit, introduced the disabled person's tax credit, introduced a childcare tax credit, introduced an employment credit, abolished the married couple's tax allowance, introduced the children's tax credit, introduced a baby tax credit, abolished the working families' tax credit, abolished the disabled person's tax credit, abolished the children's tax credit, abolished the baby tax credit, introduced a child tax credit, abolished the employment credit and introduced a working tax credit.

This is not cost-effective government.

I don't know about you, but I am getting heartily sick seeing my hard-earned cash squandered on an almost daily basis without anyone responsible actually feeling any pain at all.

It's time somebody did, and I think we all know who. A reckoning is due.

And don't miss the glorious quote from Adam Smith.

"It is the highest impertinence and presumption in ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense," Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations.

"They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society."

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Has Ireland really benefited from EU membership? Not according to an Irish fisherman.

David Kirwan, who fishes out of Clogherhead in County Louth, highlighted the fact that while Ireland has 20 per cent of the EU's waters it only gets two per cent of the catch quotas set in Brussels.

"Ireland will vote No until we get fair play for our industry. Our government just pass the buck to Brussels," he said.

"Since we joined the EEC 35 years ago we have given away 200 billion euro in Irish fish to foreign trawlers. In the same time we got 50 billion euro in funding benefits. We have paid."

Irish boats are only allowed a catch of 2,128 tons - and guess what , that's eight times less than that allowed to the French.

That should do wonders for bully Sarkozy's popularity in Ireland.

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Finally, Mr Ballsup had to come to the Commons today (see below) to explain about SATs. He ridiculously claimed he had been told he could say nothing because of confidential commercial discussions. The withering fire from Michael Gove (Con) and David Laws (Lib Dem) was ample notice that this isn't going away. Ballsup did not receive one friendly question from the backbenches - if anything Labour backbenchers were more puzzled and critical than the Tories.

Mr Ballsup goes to ground

2008-07-21T20:08:00.002+01:00

Mrs Yvette Ballsup made a hash of Home Information Packs, and now along comes husband Ed Ballsup to continue the family tradition.

The SATS problems aren't likely to go away any time soon. More schools seem to report problems every day - and we are told that as many as a quarter intend to appeal, which should keep the story simmering for weeks. Meanwhile Mr Ballsup is on the receiving end of a withering broadside from Melanie Phillips.

Officials are said to be negotiating termination of the five year marking contract. "Negotiating"? If the company can't do the job it should be compensation for taxpayers, and the contract terminable at government's discretion. If any money is moving, it should be in our direction.

But there's more. Today an audit by the government's own architecture watchdog has revealed that the biggest school building programme in a generation is on course to produce billions of pounds worth of "mediocre" facilities. More waste.

Tricky this big government stuff. Did he think grandiose policies was all there was to it?

Fortuitously the Taxpayers' Alliance has been focusing on the government's almost complete lack of management experience, a theme expanded by Minette Marrin. This is not just a pity, it can lead to large bad decisions. Thus Margaret Beckett decided that the Rural Payments Agency would implement huge changes within what turned out to be a impossible timeframe, and cost the country millions of pounds in EU fines.

Ministers also don't understand that, once you've signed off on a project, you mustn't go tinkering with the requirements. The User Requirements must be sacred.

Ministers have never even worked in an organisation demanding this basic discipline, much less had to deliver anything.

Which is quite a disadvantage. While Opposition is about words, government is about delivery. But successful delivery involves having a basic understanding of how you convert policy to achievement. It means respecting the constraints on your ministerial freedom which your managers need you to respect if they are to have any chance of delivering successfully.

Mr and Mrs Ballsup thought it was oh so easy. Their education is costing us a lot of money.

Eurozone in trouble

2008-07-21T14:30:00.003+01:00

Wolfgang Munchau is a pro-euro commentator whose Monday FT articles are usually worth following. Today he concentrates on the strains in the “eurogroup” imposed by the different performances of various economies.

Separately we are told that “investor fears for the credit risk of eurozone countries with weaker economies have increased sharply this month ... prices of credit default swaps for Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland have all jumped”. Munchau focuses on Spain.

The divergence between Spain and Germany continues to widen. "Spanish wages are directly linked to inflation, while German real wages are still declining." And the Spanish property market is in deep trouble.

Do not be fooled by the fact that Spanish banks had virtually no exposure to US subprime mortgages. Being exposed to Spanish mortgages is probably worse.

Spain of course can’t control its interest rates or the price of its currency, so “most of the heavy lifting” has to be done by the real economy. "Spain is thus in danger of entering a decade of misery, with falling real wages."

However, says Munchau, Spain probably can’t deliver the required macroeconomic response on its own. But the eurozone has no mechanism for helping countries in trouble.

The economic shocks to be experienced by Spain, and by Ireland, will seriously test the eurozone’s see-no-evil-hear-no-evil approach to economic governance.

He calls european finance ministers “a complacent bunch”. Economically this may be true, but it is born of political realism – they are actually national finance ministers.

Munchau calls for

A transfer mechanism to provide help for countries in severe distress. Of course, any transfers would have to come with IMF-style conditions attached.

But who’s going to provide the money? - and it's not just Spain that would need it. Germany, where real wages are falling? The French omnipresident? Italy can’t contribute; even if the UK were in the eurozone, its government’s finances are in a mess already.

As an economist, Munchau rules out assistance from the European Central Bank. But then where is the help to come from?

A call to Tories

2008-07-18T20:34:00.002+01:00

Not being a Tory myself - though I know some of my Umbrella Blog colleagues are - I don't know the correct label for an unGreen Conservative.

Tony Sharp filletted a Guardian report that many Tory MPs are "still" sceptical on climate change, and the anti-AGW Philip Stott has suggested that it is now "time to focus on the Conservatives".

As ever his argument makes perfect sense. But can Mr Cameron be persuaded to abandon his Greenie nonsense and focus on grown up issues such as energy security and cutting the tax burden?

Hertfordshire police's big achievement

2008-07-18T09:39:00.004+01:00

In drops our copy of Herts Beat, our annual newspaper from Hertfordshire police and the police authority. It's free. Er ... no it isn't, we pay for it through our taxes.

Is the main headline to do with crime numbers? No ... it's about our new Police HQ, the old British Aerospace building. "These 1920s buildings have been carefully restored and refurbished to retain their character and heritage." So we got them cheap, then. You can see an arresting image at the link above. Impressive, isn't it.

Spending in 2007/08 was £170m. The "sanction detection rates" were 12.9% for home burglary, and 12.7% for vehicle crime. Violent crime? Can't see a rate for that, but for all crime the detection rate was 29%.

Even for domestic violence the sanction detection rate was only 54.2%.

They measure the number of "notifiable/recorded offences resulting in conviction, caution or 'taken into consideration'. For 2007/8 they don't have the full period's number (though they can tell us the detection rates, see above) - they can only report 20,541 to January 2008, which is astonishingly poor for a paper sent out in July. This is evidently down on the full figure for 2006/7, which was 26,554.

What's the cost per detection? Even if we take the older, higher number, the cost per detection is a huge £6,400.

Crime may be down - if we believe the numbers - but there are surely more efficiency improvements to be had.

But well done for spending our money on a lovely new HQ. How much did it cost, again...?

P.S. A woman was violently raped in St Albans in 1996. No one was identified at the time, but police were able to match the DNA ten years later when a man was arrested in south west England for a motoring offence.

Mr Ballsup

2008-07-16T21:14:00.003+01:00

This is the man who thinks he can run our education system. He thinks he can design a play strategy for children.

His ministers tell us all the SATS papers have been marked. Read the teachers' feedback on this BBC webpage to see what a lie this is.

Bravo, Swindon

2008-07-15T11:56:00.002+01:00

Swindon Council is considering ending financial support for speed cameras. They cost the council £400,000 a year.

The fines go to the Treasury. Councils can then apply to central government for a road safety grant. The council’s view seems to be, Let’s decide locally how local people’s money is spent.

The MP for Swindon South has started a campaign, “Save Our Speed Cameras”. Amusingly, she is PPS to Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly.

The Daily Mail tells us

Nationally, around two million motorists a year receive a £60 fine from 8,000 speed cameras.

The Department for Transport said: 'Independent research has shown there are 1,745 fewer deaths and serious injuries at camera sites a year.'

That means a camera on average prevents one death or serious injury every four and a half years.

The website of the Wiltshire & Swindon Safety Camera Partnership is out of date. Freedom of Information requests have to be made in writing. The latest obvious financial numbers are an “Audit Certificate 2005/6”, which turns out to be their annual return for the year to March 2006. Fine income then was almost £3.5m. Costs were almost £3m, of which £2.2m was paid by the police.

In 2007-8, nearly 30,000 people in Wiltshire received speeding tickets, generating £1.76 million, £252,300 in Swindon alone. The Partnership now includes 30 fixed and mobile cameras across the county. If the DoT’s figures are reliable, that suggests 6.5 fewer deaths and serious injuries a year in the county as a whole. If the benefits to Swindon are proportionate to its share of the county's fine income, Swindon has only 0.9 fewer deaths and serious injuries in a year!

Swindon Council are surely right that they should be able to get more bang for less money. And slash the fines local drivers have to pay.

Reasons to despise MPs

2008-07-14T19:58:00.005+01:00

It's not just the expenses, especially the second home expenses of MPs who need only one home because their constituencies are within commuting distance of Westminster.

Sunday's Telegraph highlighted the unnecessary second homes of Bob Neill, MP for Bromley, Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton & Wanstead, Anne Main, MP for St Albans, and Jacqui Lait, MP for Beckenham (see picture, left). We pay towards them. These MPs see nothing wrong in that, though others condemned it.

If any state money goes to support an MP's second home, any profit when it is sold should go back to the state. That money belongs to the people.

But there's the bigger consideration that MPs just aren't doing their job, as Philip Johnson points out. MPs fail to scrutinise legislation properly.

The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act that will extend criminal-record checks to some 10 million adults was so badly drafted that 250 amendments had to be made at the end of its parliamentary progress, ensuring that it was not properly scrutinised.

In the last year of the Blair government, there were 4,609 pages of new Acts (compared to 720 in 1950) and 11,868 new pages of statutory instruments (2,970). And, Johnson remarks, "A lot of this legislation comes from Europe and is hardly even read, let alone scrutinised".

Sir Christopher Foster has set up the praiseworthy Better Government Initiative.

"There are problems both with the executive and the legislature, from the bottom to the top," says Sir Christopher. "Scrutiny of legislation is poor and any assessment of whether it worked is non-existent. Before legislating, ministers must explain why they want a Bill, what it is meant to achieve and to certify that they consider it to be practical."

Foster blames politicians rather than civil servants.

But if "the quality of ministers has been poor and the inadequacies go right to the top" in this government, are the prospects for a Conservative government any better?

Even if a new government encourages MPs to do what should be their job, would MPs be prepared to do the detailed work? Would many of them be able to understand the issues?

And - given the immorality of those clinging to their expenses on the ground that "them's the rules" - why should we trust their judgement?

Monday musings

2008-07-14T09:06:00.003+01:00

The radical extension of maternity leave and parents’ rights is sabotaging women’s careers, according to the head of the new equalities watchdog. She fears that plans to extend the right to request flexible working hours until children are 16 could hamper women’s employment prospects further. Women take more leave than men so "the effect has been to reinforce some traditional patterns".

The director of the Fawcett Society manages to combine political correctness and patronising talking down in one sentence. “The Government should both better protect pregnant workers and introduce paid parental leave that supports mums and dads to share care.”

Pity the person who wants to run a business. Pity the customers who get worse service. In her speech today Nanny Brewer will "ask why men should not be entitled to 12 weeks of leave on 90 per cent of their earnings following the birth of a child - the same as women".

She questioned the way in which the Government and opposition parties always tried to make a business case for each piece of family-friendly legislation. “Of course, there is a business case for these changes and many companies are going further,” she said, “but this is a social argument as well as an economic one. There may well be a cost [to business], but as a society we are already thinking in terms of wellbeing as well as take-home pay.”

I wonder what this nanny knows about economics?

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They just don't get it. When people's disposable incomes are being squeezed, the state should be looking for ways to make life cheaper for them, not dearer.

But now householders face a bill of nearly half a billion pounds after water companies have been asked to slash the amount of water they take from rivers and aquifers and find alternative supplies.

The price rises follow a review by the Environment Agency, which found widespread damage and threats to wildlife, including precious chalk rivers and wetlands, and other protected habitats for water voles, salmon and other wildlife.

Customers face price rises of up to £30 a year in the worst affected areas. Water bills could rise even further because the first round of licence cuts is only to help sites designated a priority.

Fewer people would need less water. Were you asked if you wanted to see net immigration of 2.3m people over sixteen years? This makes the economy bigger, but there's no evidence that immigration has made people who were already here better off. And there's the infrastructure to pay for - schools, new towns, water ... none of it planned or costed, of course.

And they think they know so much better than us. The lot of them.

MPs' snouts in the trough

2008-06-29T10:01:00.004+01:00

On a day when the news includes Mugabe's terror thugs breaking a baby's legs, it's almost obscene to write about anything else. But what new is there to say about that bloodstained despot and his regime? It seems only the appeaser Mbeki can bring him down.

A quick gallop, then, through the storm which is quite rightly brewing about MPs' expenses. The Mail picks up the resignation of Scottish Labour MP John Marshall, suggesting it is not entirely due to health worries "after rumours swept Westminster that he was about to be engulfed in a row over expenses payments to family members". In one of the poorest constituencies in the country this will not play well.

Caroline Spellman's crafted image of a puzzled parliamentary novice trying to understand the expenses rules gets flakier and flakier. She fired Georgina Perry and Sally Hammond after spectacular fallouts. Surely it is time for her to be resigned, to devote herself to combating the allegations. She adds no visible value. A bad choice by Cameron.

Meanwhile, the Mail points out that what is an MP's second home for expenses purposes can be their first home for tax purposes, so when the MP sells it the profit is free of capital gains tax. The proposed reforms don't address this. Nick Harvey, a member of the committee which is proposing the new expenses system, confirmed the existence of the loophole and admitted that the proposed changes would not close it. But he feebly denied it was a major problem, saying: 'It is very unlikely that it happens on a widespread basis.' Which is hardly the point.

MPs should not be able to keep any profit on their second home.

When all MPs' expenses are published later this year, we shall no doubt see some filth in our public life. Which is probably why MPs want to get the new system in place before they have to face the public's revulsion.

Bring on the accountable transparency. That money belongs to the people.

Get away with it in Scotland

2008-06-23T19:30:00.004+01:00

Hard on the heels of Louise Casey's survey telling us the public feels cut off from the justice system, The Herald reports from Scotland that serious and violent criminals have avoided court and a criminal record under a new Scottish Government initiative introduced to deal with low-level offences.

Thousands of offences, including serious assaults, have been diverted from court and treated with fiscal fines under reforms to the summary justice system that began in March. Scores of other crimes, including sex offences against children, have been downgraded to summary complaints which carry a lesser sentence.

Cases downgraded to be heard under summary complaint carry a maximum prison sentence of 12 months, which would in practice be three.

A list of these cases seen by The Herald at Airdrie Sheriff court alone, includes: l lewd and libidinous conduct against an 11-year-old girl; l assault to severe injury and permanent disfigurement; l lewd and libidinous conduct against a victim with cerebral palsy; l lewd and libidinous conduct against a 12-year-old girl.

Whatever happened to public justice in open court?