I Don't Get It.

This data protection scandal has left me confused about even more things than usual. First of all why is it Alastair Darling who is being blamed when the lax security procedures were clearly in place before he took over, shouldn't the blame be laid at the feet of Gordon Brown? Secondly why on earth did the government lie and claim that the disks were sent by a junior official rather than a senior official as appears to be the case? Surely if junior staff members had easy access to the personal details and bank details of 25 million people as a matter of routine then that is even worse than a one off blunder by a senior official.

Nonsense Stat Of The Day.

In the light of the England football team's inability to qualify for the European championships a lot of the press will be running stories like this one:

According to one study, by the Centre for Economic and Business Research, based on an examination of the impact of the 2006 World Cup and Euro 2004, the effect of non-qualification could be as much as £1 billion.

The report predicted England's failure to reach Euro 2008 would lead to a dramatic drop in advertising revenue for television companies, along with a sharp fall in income for betting companies and supermarkets.

Around £300 million was spent on advertising during last summer's World Cup in Germany.

Beer sales would also go flat - the last thing the brewing industry needs after it emerged yesterday that their profits had tumbled by 78 per cent between 2004 and 2006.

The CEBR suggested that a successful tournament for England would contribute to a boost of more than £285 million for pubs, clubs and off-licences.

This is utter bollocks because it assumes that people who would have spent next summer going to pubs, having bets* or watching television are going to curl up in a dark room for a month instead. Whilst it is obviously saddening to see the alcohol and gambling industries take such a hit, their potential customers will simply spend the same amount of money on different things, or on the same things but spread throughout the year. Perhaps someone might even spend some of that time and money teaching some English kids to play football, I mean there are quite a lot of Croatians over here now willing to work.

Ian Smith

The death of former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith is marked in todays Telegraph by David Blair, who was their Zimbabwe correspondent until the Mugabe regime expelled him. Blair, unusually for someone with that name, gets it right in my view:

Nothing can convey UDI’s monumental folly. Even in 1965, the reasoning behind Smith’s decision was obviously absurd. First, Smith assumed that white Rhodesians – a dwindling minority of four per cent in 1965 – could monopolise political and economic power into the indefinite future. "I don’t believe in majority rule ever for Rhodesia, not in a thousand years," he famously declared.

If UDI was to survive, Rhodesia needed allies, notably Portugal which then ruled neighbouring Mozambique. The two countries shared an 800-mile frontier which had to be kept secure.

So Smith gambled that Portugal’s African empire would last for another thousand years or so.

South Africa provided Rhodesia with oil and electricity. Smith assumed that Pretoria’s apartheid regime, dominated by Afrikaners with a deep suspicion of British settlers, would support Rhodesia forever.

Lastly, Smith presumed that Rhodesia’s black majority – 96 per cent of the population – would accept their status as second class citizens.

These assumptions were so wildly unrealistic that only a fantasist could have believed them.

.....

Thanks to Smith, white Rhodesia dealt with its most dangerous enemy at the moment when its hand was weakest. The outcome was a transfer of power to independent Zimbabwe in 1980 on terms far worse for the white minority than could have been achieved before UDI.

Far from preserving what Smith called "decent, responsible, Christian standards", UDI was the making of Mugabe.

Without Smith’s folly, Mugabe may never have come to power. It is impossible to avoid the verdict that Smith was the co-author of Zimbabwe’s tragedy.

Although Smith's personal qualities were in many ways admirable this seems an eminently fair summary of what he actually accomplished and is why trying to rehabilitate his reputation on the grounds that Mugabe and Zanu PF are far worse is not credible. As with the Tsars in Russia or the Batista regime in Cuba the fact that the successor regime is an order of magnitude worse does not diminish the old regimes failures but magnifies them.

Milking It.

Everyone, it seems, has already posted about Heather Mills McCartney's latest campaign to persuade everyone to switch from cows' milk to milk from dogs, rats and cats, so I don't have anything to add myself, but it does give me an excuse for posting this clip:



I suppose I might as well link to an old post of mine about Heather Mills and amputee sex as well whilst I'm at it.

Hot Swedish Model.

When it comes to education the Swedish model* could make a big improvement into the standard of education:

When Daniel Lundquist and his wife Ulrika moved to Ingaro, 30 minutes' drive east of Sweden's capital Stockholm, they immediately started looking for schools for their three young children.

Like many British parents they worried that the local state schools were either too far away or not quite what they wanted.

However, rather than complaining or simply going private, the Lundquists decided on a route currently not available to most British parents - they actually set up a brand new state school themselves with other local parents and helped run it just how they liked.

I'm glad that the Conservative Party are considering this, although it is depressing to see that Cameron is so scared of the Conservatives' being seen as right wing that they feel the need to insert a needlessly meddlesome spanner into the works of their own proposal:

There is one big difference between the Conservative proposal and the Swedish system - profit will not be permitted.

David Cameron does have to appeal to the centre ground so I understand the some of the positioning that he has done, but being outflanked on the right by Swedish socialists is ridiculous.

* As Tim Worstall points out on his blog fairly regularly, commentators like Polly Toynbee who salivate over the Swedish way of doing things generally don't actually know what Sweden does, just that they have high tax levels.

The Hollywood Screenwriter's Strike.

It's an ill wind....

Self Esteem As A Substitute For Education.

In response to Tory proposals to test children's reading ability at the age of 6, Chris Davis of the National Primary Headteachers' Association claims:

"One of the worst things you can do with a very young child is give them the impression that they can't do something,"

I'd have thought that not teaching them to read is worse that giving them the impression that they can't read.

As far as I can see there are two possibilities as to why he says this both of which are pretty bad. The first option is that he is acting like a typical union baron who puts the interests of his members ahead of the children that they are responsible for and is cynically invoking the welfare of the children to protect his colleagues from scrutiny.

The other possibility is that he genuinely believes in the cult of self esteem. This basically means that it doesn't matter if school pupils are illiterate and innumerate as long as they feel good about it. As Squander 2 points out this results in the education system churning out legions of ignoramuses who are nevertheless utterly convinced that they are always right.

It isn't even as though there is reams of evidence showing that making children believe that they are good at something makes them so. If anything convincing them that they already understand a subject is likely to breed complacency as a quote I first cited back in May 2006 demonstrates:

an international study of 13 year olds found that Koreans ranked first in mathematics and Americans last. When asked if they thought that they were "good at mathematics," only 32% of Korean youngsters said "yes"- compared to 68% of American 13 year olds.

As I have said before self esteem is not a good thing unless it is deserved.

Quietly Querying Quango Quantity.

On the subject of Quangos, this report from the People, not previously known for it's right leaning political sympathies, is depressing:

Gordon Brown is creating NINE new busybody quangos costing £2.4BILLION.

That pushes the number of bureaucratic organisations interfering in our lives to 528 with a combined bill of £175billion.

The move comes despite Mr Brown vowing in 1995 that a Labour government would ABOLISH most quangos.

They land each taxpayer with a bill of £2,000 a year - even more if NHS trusts and the BBC are included.

The government won't abolish Quangos although they might occasionally try to create the impression of doing so by merging, splitting, renaming and reclassifying existing ones. I would guess that the Taxpayer's Alliance are probably underestimating the true total on account of manyof the Quangos being disguised as Non Departmental Public Bodies or as supposed Charities that just happen to get the bulk of their money from the government.

(Link via Wat Tyler at Burning Our Money, and original report by the Taxpayers Alliance)

You Say Potato, I Say 'How Much Is This Costing Me?'.

I was going to a post about Quangos but got bored. However whilst looking up something about my favourite Quango, The British Potato Council (you could say that I have a chip on my shoulder about them), I came across this story from 2005:

Potato farmers held a noisy protest outside Parliament today to get the term "couch potato" removed from the Oxford English dictionary, claiming it harms the vegetable's image.

A similar rally took place outside the offices of the dictionary's publishers in Oxford, with demonstrators carrying signs that read "couch potato out" and "ban the term couch potato".

The British Potato Council wants the expression stripped from the Oxford English Dictionary and replaced in everyday speech with the term "couch slouch". It says the phrase makes the vegetable seem unhealthy and is bad for its image.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "couch potato" started life as American slang. It means: "A person who spends leisure time passively or idly sitting around, especially watching television or video tapes."

Kathryn Race, head of marketing at the British Potato Council which represents some 4,000 growers and processors, said the group had written to the Oxford English Dictionary stating its objections but had not yet had a response.

So the government sets up a pointless agency to lobby the government to do something that isn't within the power of the government to do. Just remember that the next time a minister starts scaremongering about how cutting taxes will lead to hospitals having to turf out their patients.


UPDATE: In more potato related news, (well I am an unenlightened common 'tater), I've discovered that 2008 is the UN designated "International Year of the Potato". No doubt much to the delight of the Irish.

Quote Of The Day.

"I have personal experience of this, having attended almost 30 schools as a child and now hundreds more as a visiting storyteller and diversity trainer."

~Richard R O'Neill at Comment is Free

Not A Terribly Interesting Post About Local Government.

There was a very good article by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian yesterday about the centralised state of Britain. On the subject of local government he is more insightful and informed than any other current newspaper columnist :

Each year new burdens are imposed on councils under statute, through targets and by centrally negotiated, usually inflationary, wage deals. This, coupled with an ageing population and soaring inward migration, imposes costs on councils that are well above inflation, hence the severe upward pressure each year on council tax.As the burden of meeting local spending has shifted to the centre (from 60% local in the mid-1980s to 25% now), the local share must be covered by an unbuoyant, fixed-band council tax.

The UK is one of the most centralised states in the world and would benefit a good deal from transferring power from Westminster to town halls throughout the country. There are many reasons for this:

• Public services are simply too large to be run well by anyone on a national scale. Even if the cabinet were populated by men and women with the vision of Alezander the Great, the judgment of Solomon and the management skills of Bill Gates then they would still not be able to do their job well. The abilities of the current cabinet are just a shade below that. To run an organisation the size of the NHS, the Health Secretary can either have a very flat management structure with few tiers of control between themselves and the frontline staff. This will invariably leave each manager too much to run to be able to the job well, they can have real impact on some of what they do but they can' possibly keep track of all their responsibilities. The alternative is for the cabinet minister to sit atop a very vertical management pyramid (something which many of them enjoy), in which there are many layers of control. This means that the management can keep track of their own responsibilities but what they do will have very little impact with what is actually happening to patients. In the absence of any real feedback the senior management will resort to setting targets for their subordinates to meet and the focus would no longer be on the patients, this is what happens currently.

• Electorates in different parts of the country tend to have different opinions and beliefs about how they want their public services to be delivered. As it is one party gets into power at Westminster and tries to impose their vision on the whole country, leaving many people unsatisfied. Take schools for example, instead of arguing about whether the country should have a comprehensive, selective or voucher system for schools just let local government have the final say and if the voters of South Yorkshire want comprehensives but the people of Hertfordshire want grammars then let them have it, instead of imposing policies in areas where they are not popular. Far more people would have services the way they want them if they are run locally.
  

• Comparisons between local services will encourage improvements everywhere. If instead on one government imposing one set of policies nationally there are fifty authorities trying new things and comparing the performance to each other then it can clearly be demonstrated which ideas work and which don't. At the moment there aren't any real points of comparison for public services that most people are familiar with, so governments can fob off objections to their system by misrepresenting the effects of the alternatives. If the alternatives can be seen to be working well a few miles down the road then this trick won't work nearly as well. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" as Mao once said, of course he then killed anyone who thought he meant it, but that is beside the point.

I could give more benefits of transferring power away from the centre, getting Parliament to focus on it's core duties instead of trying to micromanage people's lives, or the encouragement of civil society by persuading people to get involved in running their own communities (which would would have a side benefit for the parties of widening their memberships considerably). However one objection to local government has to be considered and this post is already dragging on a bit (congratulations if you're still reading this by the way).

• Local government lost power in the first place because the far left took control of them, often by entryist tactics and proceeded to run them into the ground. That was certainly the main reason that Margaret Thatcher stripped them of so much responsibility. Yet after she did that she essentially reinforced their obnoxiousness by preventing their idiotic behaviour from having any effect on the lives of the people who elected them. If voters know that electing lunatics means having to endure the consequences then they will be less inclined to vote for clowns like Derek Hatton or Ken Livingstone. If councils have to raise most of their own revenue themselves they won't be so keen to drive out the taxpayers, if there is one thing that socialists care for more than socialism then it is money. If electors still elect idiots despite the consequences then that is their choice.

At the moment neither Labour nor the Conservatives have any intention whatsoever of relinquishing central power, which is probably detrimental to the parties as a whole but quite beneficial to those at the top of those institutions.

Selling For Prophet.

When I read that the Malaysian car manufacturer is launching an 'islamic car' my first reaction was that it seemed like a scam. The special Islamic features, a Koran compartment and a device for locating the direction of Mecca do bear some passing similarity to the glove boxes and GPS systems that are now common in most new cars. This is cynical and Islamophobic and there is in fact a significant gap in the market for Islam centred products. Here is just a small collection from my new Islam friendly range.

• Halal Cutlery Set £49.99. Ideal for eating halal related products and so much holier than infidel cutlery. Includes one knife and one fork.
  
• Islamic Prayer Chair £419.99. Have you always wanted a chair that was so advanced that it could be turned in order to face Mecca at a moments notice? Well wait no longer, our advanced team of technicians have created just the thing.
  
• Muslim Storage Unit $139.99. Top scientists at the Islamic University of Medina have worked for year to create a multipurpose device capable of storing Korans, Burkas and Islamic Cutlery. This is a limited time offer you must order now!!!

British Children Most Resistant To Brainwashing

A survey of ten countries has been done for the British Council which has found that UK school pupils are the least globally aware. From highest to lowest the countries were ranked as follows; 1-Nigeria, 2- India, 3- Brazil, 4- Saudi Arabia, 5- Spain, 6- Germany, 7-China, 8-Czech, 9- USA, 10- UK.

The survey was carried out only among internet users which explains why the poorer countries do so well, seeing as in those internet users will be less representative of the wider population In fact judging from my email account most Nigerian internet users are sons or widows of General Abacha and desperately need my bank account to put money into. Judging from the BBC report it isn't a particularly good survey as it asks vague self assessment questions that don't actually measure awareness of anything, but rather whether the children are likely to share the values of the people who run the British Council:

Asked whether they saw themselves as citizens of the world or their own country, most saw themselves as global citizens - except in the UK, USA and the Czech Republic.

Young people in Brazil were among the most likely to agree with the statement "it is a good idea for schools in my country to have links or partnerships with schools in other countries" but the least likely to be in schools that had such links.

So as surveys go it isn't much cop. Mind you there has been a proper survey of European and American adults that was conducted recently for "France 24" which suggests that as a whole we tend to be less interested in foreign affairs than most countries of similar economic development.

I Iz Klevur.

This "Blog Readability Test" that has been going around looks like utter nonsense to me. In fact I would suggest that an inherent weakness of the gizmo is that it actively marks a site down for clarity and coherence. For example this blog's result is:

Actually now I think about this test is an extremely valuable indicator of the bloggers worth and should be taken very seriously by everyone.

Why?!

I think someone has stolen my wheelie bin. Bastards.

From Bad To Diverse.

This week and last week on the BBC's Question Time programme the issue of whether Ian Blair should resign over the De Menezes or not has come up. My own view is that he is the very epitome of post MacPherson politicised policing who should never have been appointed, however you can't hold an individual in an organisation as vast as the Metropolitan police responsible for every operational failiure. The IPCC report on his personal wrong doing in obstructing their investigation is a legitimate cause for dismissal though.

On Question Time, Blair's principle defenders were Tony McNulty this week and former police Commander Brian Paddick last week. Both of them when giving reasons why Blair should remain in his post gave his commitment to diversity as the main reason he should stay. Both Paddick and McNulty brought up diversity before they mentioned his record on crime and terrorism etc. Coincidentally the police officer who led the De Menezes team was Cressida Dick who rose to prominence at the head of the Met's "Diversity Directorate".

Maybe this is all a coincidence but it does seem possible that (a) Focusing the attention of senior officers on crap like diversity comes at the expense of improving operational competence and (b) The kind of abilities of a person who can rise through the ranks based on their ability to promote the politically favoured theories of racism and homophobia are not going to be the most appropriate people to lead important missions that require good judgment and leadership skills.

As Mark Steyn has said "The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures", similarly despite all the efforts by the police to promote racial sensitivity and awareness of 'institutional racism', the leading exponents of this stuff are unable to spot the difference between a white Brazilian man and a black Ethiopian.

Building Buzzwords.

A big rise in shared home-ownership deals for young people will be promised by ministers today, in a move to give local councils in England more control over providing affordable housing for key workers and first-time buyers.

The phrases that I've bolded in this Guardian report of the government's housing policy are ones that seem to have been accepted as neutral terms by the media when they really are not. They originated, or gained popularity at least, when John Prescott was in charge of planning, (and I don't mean planning how to fit groping his female staff around his croquet schedule).

Anyone trying to sell unaffordable housing would quickly go out of business, so presumably "Affordable housing" is not meant literally so it presumably means "cheaper housing". The presumption behind the phrase is that the current high prices are the result of property developers and planners having decided to build sumptuous palatial residences for the rich whilst neglecting to provide for everyone else. In reality the problem with the UK's housing situation is that that there are not enough homes period, it doesn't matter whether the new homes are aimed at the higher end of the market or not, if 2 million new penthouse apartments are built it will have pretty much the same effect on house prices as building 2 million Noddy boxes. However artificially intervening to force developers to restrict the value of new houses will simply achieve exactly what de facto price controls achieve anywhere, to reduce the supply.

"Key workers" is the other buzz phrase that annoys me. First of all who decides which workers are "Key Workers"? From what I can tell the chosen few are exclusively public sector workers. Apparently the private sector consists of work that is essentially trivial to the functioning of the country, so whilst Social Workers, Bus Drivers and Diversity Consultants are "Key Workers", those that work in the manufacturing or service sectors of the economy will have to damn well learn to commute. Rather ironically the builders who are supposed to be erecting all this "Affordable Housing" aren't "Key Workers" whereas those employed at the council planning office creating obstacles to development are.

Secondly we are supposed to believe that there is a tremendous problem in retaining "Key Workers" in some parts of the country. This may well be the case but surely it would be simpler to raise the salaries. This isn't an appeal for even more public sector pay inflation, but rather to ask why public sector pay doesn't take account of local conditions. At the moment central government operates national pay scales in many of the sectors where shortages of frontline staff exist, pay rates that are very attractive in the North East of England where the cost of living is lower are less appealing for someone in the South East. The only reason this situation exists is to appease the public sector unions who have correctly come to the conclusion that local pay scales would result in a large majority of their members being paid less.

Anonymous Abuse Found On Internet- Hold The Front Page!

Much of the established media dislikes the blogosphere intensely viewing it as some kind of competition, in reality most blogs don't aspire to compete with the core functions of the press, such as news gathering, but they can fact check lazy journalism and present viewpoints as cogently as the op-ed sections. Which possibly explains why the Belfast Telegraph has run and incredibly dishonest and misleading account of an exchange that occurred on the blog "A Tangled Web", which is run by the Northern Ireland resident David Vance.

On the 21st of October David posted about the murder of a young man by the supposedly-no-longer-murdering-anyone-anymore, IRA after he was involved in a dispute with some of it's members. The post was clearly expressing anger at the murder of a young man, and the likely lack of consequences his killers would face. Most of the posts which followed displayed similar sentiments. On the 25th of October a troll going under the alias of "Local" insulted the dead man, and the small number of number of people who were still paying attention to the thread after 4 days took the writer to task.

Now you're probably nodding off by now because this story amounts to "Troll found at popular Blog!". Which is to say something that occurs thousands of times across the world each day. Not to the Belfast Telegraph who devoted a whole article to it:

New agony for Quinn family as sick abuse appears on net

Abusive comments about murdered Cullyhanna man Paul Quinn are being posted on the internet.

Web users are utilising a popular UK political commentary site to insult the 21 year-old who was beaten to death by a gang in Co Monaghan almost two weeks ago.

Not only is it a smear to imply that A Tangled Web condones such comments, almost no one would be aware of the abuse if a couple of comments left on a dorment blog thread weren't hyped up to ludicrous proportions by the major newspaper of Ulster in the first place.