A bonfire of the QuANGO's?

A QuANGO is a Quasi Autonomous Non Governmental Organisation.

In principle, in their place they are no bad thing. For example they can be independent of government, albeit only to an extent. Only to an extent of course because those who run a QuANGO are usually picked by the executive and only really gain Independence when it is obvious that is likely to change, particularly if the head of said QuANGO decides now is a good time to give the existing executive a bit of a kicking.

As an example, we have the Office for National Statistics. This obviously has to be arms length and independent of government in order for there to be trust in the numbers it produces. However it is only as independent as its head, and he or she is only as independent as his next reappointment.

The ONS has given the government a bit of a kicking over things like immigration, but I personally suspect that is because the stench of death over this government is so clear you can smell it in Australia.

However there is another reason for creating an arms length QuANGO, and that is political cover for uncomfortable decisions. The Learning and Skills Council has crashed and burned in terms of setting up new collages and funding expansion of places (even here in Mid Sussex) but taken the heat for the calamity without it burning politicians.

You see, it gives political cover.

The Conservative party currently propose an independent NHS board to stop the NHS being a political football.

This is of course a fantastic aim, and is a bit like motherhood and apple pie (as our American cousins would say). You can't argue against motherhood and apple pie!

Except of course you can. The NHS consumes huge amounts of taxpayers cash. Enormous amounts of it. It will be something like £102 billion either this year or next.

Personally, I want to fire someone if they get that spending wrong. It is after all, a remarkably large amount of my cash.

And this is the problem with QuANGO's in general. They are a way of dodging political responsibility, generating headlines and pretending something is being done, whether it is or isn't.

The BBC has this.

State abduction of children and spam (Or unsolicited commercial email)

This may be two subjects where you can see absolutely no connection what so ever. Fair enough. There is though, and I will get to it.

I read in today's Sunday Telegraph, of the case of a man who because he had security concerns about his circumstances asked to pick up his daughter from inside the school gates. This led to social workers turning up, refusing to show ID, and then him getting arrested and for a while sectioned.

Read the article, I really suggest you do. You can also read this from Manwiddicombe from whom I have got the link.

Right. Read those?

Now cast your mind back to baby P, or rather baby Peter. I wrote at the time that knee jerk reactions were no good.

The problem seems to be this: That if children die at the hands of parents then social services need to be harsher or if children are taken into care unreasonably they need to be easier.

This is where the link to spam comes in. One of the things the company for which I work sell is an anti spam solution. I personally do a lot of work on it.

We can move the goal posts in terms of score at which emails are considered spam or not one way or the other, catching more or less spam as spam and generating more or less false positives as a result.

Surprisingly* this is frankly not good enough. The customer who does not want spam does not want to lose an important email because it now score high enough. What the customer actually wants is more discrimination between what is unsolicited commercial email and what is not, rather than some individual binning their email on an arbitrary rule change.

Our response has to be raising our game to write better spam busting rules. The question then is, why can't the state? The case of baby Peter is instructive. He had half a finger missing. All you need is a medic or social worker who can count to 10 and do fractions and they would have noticed something amis. No need for harsher rules, just better discrimination between those that need intervention and those that do not.

*Actually, it is not that surprising at all really.

Hitler got things done?

The Sunday Times have conducted an interview with Bernie Ecclestone in which he apparently laments weak leaders and says that Hitler got things done. He also says that Saddam Hussein should not have been overthrown because he was the only person who could hold the country together.

Oh dear.

Well it is true that Hitler got things done, one of which was to get Germany totally destroyed, and divided for 46 years.

He may well have made the trains run on time* but if it is a choice between punctual trains, and living in fear of a knock at the door in the middle of the night, frankly, I'll walk to work if that's all the same to Bernie.

The Saddam comment is also illustrative. He held Iraq together with nothing but fear. I would rather be free in a wreck of a country than live in constant fear in a "perfect" one.

*I have no idea if he did, but it is often said.

Remove the power of the Bank of England?

There is an interesting article in the Times, by Jamie Whyte suggesting that powers be removed from the bank of England rather than given to it.

Specifically the power to set interest rates.

As it happens I think that the Bank of England should supervise banks, and have the power to do so.

That said Jamie makes a very powerful case for removing the power of the Bank of England to set interest rates. The only comment I would make though, is that it has already lost them. Many banks are paying much more than 0.5% for savings and lending at much higher rates as well, and Libor is much higher than 0.5% as well. In fact what the bank currently does with interest rates is mostly irrelevant.

Are the BBC this technically illiterate?

Note the above picture in a question for GCSE technology on the BBC website. (Click to zoom in)

The part is correctly identified as an inverter although it could also be called a not gate. The text below says:

It's an inverter, which is an electrical device that converts direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC).

Oh dear. It is not that sort of inverter. Did someone technically illiterate at the BBC google it, or did someone setting the syllabus do that and the BBC not notice? Either way it amazes me just how ignorant journalists are.

Update 22:15

The BBC have updated the question to just say this:

CORRECT! It's an inverter.

Oh dear. You thought they could have looked up what sort of inverter that is!

Reform of MP's falling at first hurdle?

It is no surprise to me that the reform of MP's conduct of MP's expenses and conduct is falling at the first hurdle, as the BBC reports here.

I have no doubt that Labour government figures will blame people, particularly Conservatives, for being against this ridiculous bill on the grounds that they must not want either reform or MP's to be honest.

The reality is of course starkly different. When apologists for this bunch of liars turn up on the airwaves to lie, I will call them liars, just like Ed Balls is a liar.

As I have already pointed out, MP's guilty of making false claims could (and should) already be prosecuted for fraud, or obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception and be imprisoned for 10 years so why let them off with a maximum of 1 year?

The bill also seeks to reduce the privilege given to parliament, whereby a nothing that a member of parliament says can be used against them in court. Members of parliament who understand these things are needless to say against.

Then the bill has to pass the house of lords, where they will take one look at this fetid pile of excrement and throw it out only for the government to huff and puff.

Ed Balls is a liar!

There is no charitable way to put this, Ed Balls has been on the airwaves lying like there is no tomorrow.

Sue me Ed, if you dare.

As Fraser Nelson notes here, and then after the angry phone call here, Ed Balls has claimed that Alistair Darling's 2009 budget laid down plans to reduce the public debt.

Ed Ball's lied thus:

Alistair Darling in the budget set out plans which show the deficit coming down, national debt coming down.

The problem is that he is using a measure of debt most people would not use, and measured on a basis no serious economist believes.

The statement is true if you think reducing borrowing growth to a level where the economy is growing faster is reducing national debt. Basically if you imagine a household budget, you are still increasing your overdraft every year till 2017, but you will get pay rises every year till then of 3.5% and in 2017, the accumulated debt will look like less in percentage terms against your wages.

The problem is that this is still increasing debt in net terms, and the supposed real terms decrease on which the lie is based is founded on the idea that economic growth will start right now, be sustained, (no double dip recession) and then go on the serial above trend growth over several years of 3.5%.

It all comes unstuck there for two reasons. First of all most people would still regard continued borrowing as increasing rather than decreasing debt, but secondly and most importantly it relies on amazing growth figures for years to come.

That is not going to happen because overall debt (government, household and corporate debt combined) is running at 400% of GDP whilst real interest rates are near 5% (not what the Bank of England base rate actually is, but what lenders are actually charging for new loans) which means that this lot could cost us 20% of GDP every year. Quite a lot of that money is going abroad to foreign lenders. It drains money from the economy.

Whilst it is possible that there may be a strong bounce back in growth after a recession as inventories are built up, it seems utter fantasy land that such a bounce would last several years with this much debt.

Hat tip to Manwiddicombe for the links to Fraser's article.

Less UK born people in work now than in 1997?

It is, it has to be said quite some claim. That is that there are less British born people in work in the private sector now than there were in 1997.

All those jobs that were created went to foreign born workers apparently.

Fraser Nelson of the Spectator has this preliminary article and this one with more detail.

The implications are of course staggering. I have always thought that the Brown boom was built on hideous amounts of debt and immigration. What is more of a concern is that worklessness amongst those born in the UK has stayed at around 5 million and is now set to climb. We simply have not addressed that issue for over 12 years.

Now we need to.

Local homes for local people?

Well, it is kind of what people expected from local housing policy, at least for the most part. That is, that housing provided out of local funding would be primarily for people who had a connection with the local area.

As an example, a house in say Mid Sussex would be prioritised for a family with a good local link, not a family from say, Arbroath. The reverse is also the case.

Of course, if a family in Arbroath want to swap with a family in Mid Sussex, then there are (and always have been) exchange schemes available.

So now this is what this government is proposing.

What is interesting is how they, and the ridiculous left wing media treated this issue 10 years ago when Conservative councillors in Hammersmith and Fulham were proposing exactly the same thing. Now of course Donal Blaney would like an apology. He will not get one though, as he is dealing with mendacity at its best.

Labour promises 100,000 new teachers?

I heard this on a BBC Radio 4 on Friday, but could find no written information on it, but today the Daily Telegraph steps in.

In its article it suggest that Labour and in particular, Gordon Brown will try and spend his way back to number 10.

So, what about 100,000 new teachers? What will they do? Well apparently they are a part of a child's right to learn. So if they are not getting on well enough in English or Maths they get one to one tuition.

What will 100,000 teachers cost?

Well, if they cost £20,000 each a year that's £2 billion. If, as is likely they cost £30,000 a year (take into account paying them, employers national insurance, desk space and admin fees and that is a conservative estimate) then that makes £3 billion a year.

Where is this money supposed to come from? £3 billion, in terms of the amounts that has been thrown away by New labour over the years may seem like small beer, but it is still £3 billion that would need to be borrowed or printed by the Bank of England.

However, I personally doubt the veracity of the claim or its ability to achieve anything useful. For a start it looks like they are going to claim it is a right, which means only switched on parents will claim it, and those will have more successful children, and so the cost will be less.

Then again the idea is not wrong in itself. Had it been carefully proposed a number of years ago you could make a great tax saving case for it, but only if it was not a right of the pupil, but the duty of the state. (How are we going to work that out?)

Prisons are full to bursting with the thick, mentally ill and unemployable. If you could treat the failed education system, then surely that would reduce the cost of the prison estate and hey presto the scheme would over time pay for itself. However as we are talking about New Labour education, A level history students appear not to know what a despotic tyranny is, so it is somewhat doubtful what 1,000,000 new teachers would be able to achieve.

Meanwhile in other news..

Whilst it is sad that Michael Jackson has died, it has to be said that the way 24 hour news organisations cover this sort of thing is ridiculous.

If you were hoping to tune into something like BBC News 24 for catch up on such trivia as the death of Farrah Fawcett, continued demonstrations in Iran or the collapse of the UK economy, forget it.

The only news in town is the death of Michael Jackson.

Ridiculous.