Target Culture

When you set service targets and reward managers for hitting those targets, you create an incentive to fiddle the stats.

In some areas - say call centre response times, where x% of calls must be answered within y seconds, it's difficult (though not impossible- you can just drop a call to pick up another one, or you can be more innovative) to fiddle the stats unless you've got a bent IT guy.

In other settings you can be more creative. The NHS is renowned for its achievements in this area.

So, you think the staff and managers might be bending the stats ? Why not bring in an outside firm to test the systems anonymously? That's what Royal Mail did.

People sometimes say there's no initiative and invention in middle management at a large corporation. I wouldn't say that myself.

The unnamed source told Postcomm that several Royal Mail staff had found a way of cheating the supposedly independent system of checking mail delivery times, which was carried out by an external market research company... By intercepting the "test" letters, postal workers were able to hijack the performance assessment by making sure they were prioritised and delivered bang on time, giving an artificially high figure for the number of letters and parcels arriving on time.

Managers would note down the name and address on the envelopes, and in some cases illegally open the mail to find addresses of other volunteer panellists. The addresses would then be entered into computer spreadsheets, listed by postcode area. In sorting and delivery offices, panellists were known as “key customers” and given top priority to ensure their post was delivered in time, to hit the performance targets. In some cases individual pillar boxes were also earmarked to make sure they were emptied as late as possible, to ensure the panellists did not miss the last post.

In the Motherwell delivery office a notice pinned to the wall told staff to bring any mail addressed to two particular people to the attention of the delivery manager's office. One of the addressees was a panellist. Postal workers also learnt to look out for "suspicious" mail. In some cases postmen realised they were delivering "test" mail when they delivered driving licences to people who did not have cars.

Postcomm found that Royal Mail delivery office managers were “accustomed to looking for (test mail) and showing other colleagues how to identify items of test mail”. In some cases, managers photocopied panellists’ mail and sent the copies to other managers. One manager from Scotland is even thought to have travelled to Manchester to brief his colleagues on how they could get involved in the scam.

I imagine the fact that the monitoring was by outsiders also stimulated group cohesion and company loyalty (sort of) in the Royal Mail chaps - and I bet they were chaps. It could almost become a game, outwitting them.


Just shows what can happen when you get the incentives right ;-)


No steering group needing reports and minutes, no sponsoring senior director, no project plans and milestones, no internal auditing, no box-ticking to show how actions are aligned with the latest version of the corporate culture - just spontaneous, organic co-operation at all levels and the required outcomes are achieved. Almost like the Marxist vision of how industry would run itself in an ideal Socialist society. Fantastic.

Squander Two on Cameron

"I don't even care why Cameron has said what he's said and done what he's done in the last couple of days. He's right, and he's doing what's right. Sure, you've got to worry about how consistently a man with no principles can be right, but this thing's big enough for the rest not to matter so much. And it's also big enough to significantly shape the behaviour of the party. Overnight, the Tories have become the most principled party, and clearly not because they wanted to, but because they've been forced into it by Cameron. Well, OK, then. I'll take him as Prime Minister."

Discuss.

He's At It Again

Edmund Conway in the Telegraph on demography and pensions. The man's an idiot. Not only does he take the Dave Osler view of immigrants as tax-producing units and nothing more, he even thinks the chav mothers of the UK will help.

thanks partly to our relatively open immigration policy and partly to a rise in births, Britain's old age dependency rate is set to increase far less rapidly than that of any other major country between now and 2050, according to UN projections.

In and out of wedlock, babies are being born at a higher rate than for many years, and every new child represents another prospective taxpayer to help reduce that bill.

Teenage pregnancies may bemuse nonagenarians such as Gertrude Janeway, and they may cause hand-wringing among social commentators; but in economic terms, they may be the best hope we have for solving the impending fiscal timebomb.

The man's practically certifiable.

Firstly, the underclass kids will all be on benefits themselves in 18 years. The least-educated mothers are the ones having more kids.

Secondly, according to the ONS figures on unemployment by ethnicity, all immigrant groups have lower employment rates than the natives. Now you can blame that on the evil racist Brits, but you can't have it both ways. They can't be at once both poor victims of unemployment AND doing the jobs the natives don't want to do.

Thirdly, both immigrant and underclass members who are in employment are likely to be in low-paid jobs where they cost more in government expenditure than they pay in taxes.

Fourthly, and this is conjecture rather than established fact, I would be amazed if the tax take was the same for all ethnic groups, even when controlling for income. Those in cash trades, taxis, catering etc have far more opportunity to do things 'off the books' than someone working 9-5 for an FTSE100 company. I don't know if the Revenue have done any research (probably not - and if they have it'll be in a locked leadlined safe somewhere), but I would venture the suggestion that as time goes on and the composition of the UK changes, the percentage tax take per economically active person in the UK will fall.

It's a pity his prescriptions are so bloody awful, as his diagnosis is spot-on :

In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain went, via the Beveridge Report, from being a warfare state to a welfare state. We may take the current system for granted now, but it was nothing short of a massive economic experiment, one forged in the shadow of terrible suffering. Moreover, it is a system that has been in operation, in its full embodiment, for less than a lifetime.

Unfortunately, it has been an experiment based on unrealistic assumptions about Britons' longevity and their fecundity. Since the 1940s, life expectancy at birth has climbed from just over 60 years to just under 80. And fertility rates, which peaked at an average of almost three children per family in the baby boom era of the 1960s, have now seen a drop to below two children per family for three decades.

In other words, the cultural revolution kicked in and babies went out along with churchgoing and wearing a tie on weekends.

Until relatively recently, most funds were designed either as defined benefit schemes, with pensioners given a guaranteed payment no matter how much they paid in, or plain unfunded schemes, with pensioners paid from the current account.

Several companies suffer a hangover from large versions of the former British Airways and British Telecom being prime examples. Many insiders fear that before long we could see a major British company taken down by the burdens of its pension scheme.

But these bills are as nothing compared to the unfunded liabilities of the state. By even conservative estimates, the state and public- sector pensions liabilities could more than double the total national debt, causing far more damage than the current financial crisis. The situation is hardly any better in the US, where the unfunded liabilities for social security and Medicare health care for the old are more than $50 trillion.

For all the talk of waste in the public sector, of inefficiency and of profligacy under Gordon Brown, nothing that this Government has done to dent Britain's public finances can compare with the damage imposed by decades of this demographic disaster.

There's a word for financial schemes which take in money, promising a good return in the future, and use the new money coming in to pay existing investors. They're called Ponzi schemes. A characteristic is that they need to recruit more and more new investors to pay the outgoings to the current investors. When the supply of new investors dries up, the scheme cannot continue to pay out and collapses.

Or in Dave Osler's words "Either immigrants keep this country going, or it folds." For 'new investors' in the Ponzi scheme, read 'new taxpayers' paying for some old chap's pension and NHS treatment.

I have wondered for some years about our Government's attitude to mass immigration. Even white liberal guilt seemed insufficient motive for their determination to see the positive side - and not exactly ignore the negative side, but rather deny that there was or ever could be a negative side (and only racists would suggest such a thing).

Maybe they've just been looking at the sums all along, and see mass immigration as the only politically acceptable solution. After all, no-one's going to suggest that we stop killing 200,000 babies a year, are they ?

A Few Snowdrops From The Curate's Field

(photo by Ozier Muhammad for The New York Times)

A feel-good Obama story - while generally the Obamarama drives me nuts, and I hate the racism and inverse racism that gave him so many votes, you can still see why these guys, who I've blogged about before, would be chuffed.

Now in their 80s and 90s, most were frail and bundled up against the cold in wheelchairs. “All of the things that are wrong can get washed away,” Spann Wilson, 92, a Tuskegee Airman who flew P-51 fighters over North Africa and Europe, said as he listened to the Marine Band playing at the Capitol.

More Labour sleaze. No wonder the bankers aren't going on trial - the precedent would be too uncomfortable.

Baron Truscott of St James’s took a bite of his teacake before explaining to the two lobbyists in front of him just how much it would cost to hire a peer of the realm.

“Rates vary between £1,000 and £5,000 a day,” he said quietly, his voice almost drowned by the chatter in the House of the Lords dining room. It was a question, he agreed, of getting the right person rather than haggling over the money.

Truscott — a former Labour MEP who was a government minister until 18 months ago — made it clear he had exactly the right credentials.

In the course of their short tea-time conversation he agreed to help them amend a government bill that was harmful to their client, in return for cash. He said he had done similar work before. He said he had intervened on the Energy Bill — a piece of legislation he had been responsible for as a minister only months earlier. His fee was seemingly modest by peers’ standards, but probably not for most people outside the house. He charged £2,000 a day, which would have added up to £72,000 for the three-day-a-month one-year contract he later proposed ...

On Thursday, Lord Snape, a former Labour whip, also indicated he would be willing to help the reporters amend the bill for a fee of up to £24,000 a year. “Depending on who is on the Commons committee, if I had a chat I could see if I could get them to table an amendment in committee. It would be better if you could get a government person to do it, purely in political terms.”

He also offered to make representations to Healey. “I can approach him behind the scenes to say, ‘You know this is the purpose behind the amendment, look at it’.”

Lord Moonie, a former defence minister, also offered to assist in return for an annual fee of £30,000. Moonie said he would contact Healey and offered to identify people who could put down an amendment.

Moonie is a social friend of Gordon Brown and was ennobled in 2005. He gave up his parliamentary seat reportedly so that Brown could keep his in a boundary change.

The peer said the rules in the Lords were lax. “The thing with the Lords is that there’s virtually nothing they can do with you, unless you break the law . . . Even if you don’t declare, there’s nothing they can do but jump up and down.”

They're dirty dogs, aren't they ?

More anti-Christian activism - using taxpayer money as a weapon of culture war yet again :

A local authority has withdrawn the grant it gives to provide warden services at a care home because the residents have refused to answer "intrusive" questions about their sexuality. Pensioners living at the home in Brighton are supposed to be questioned regularly about their sexual orientation under the council's "fair access and diversity" policies. But the charity running the home has declined to do so, and nor will it use images of elderly homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people in its leaflets. As a consequence, the council has accused the charity of "institutional discrimination" and withdrawn its £13,000 grant.

Did you know that the top police officers lobby group ACPO - the Association of Chief Police Officers - is a limited company ? A limited company that's totally state-funded ?

So is a company I'd never heard of, Solace - which is owned by council chief executives and has a subsidiary which acts as a paid consultancy to local authorities - for headhunting chief execs and setting their salary levels !

No wonder you see senior officers leave in disgrace after some scandal only to pop up somewhere else on a similar salary.

More instances of taxpayer money being used to fund lobby groups - who then lobby for the policies the paymaster wants. They really are a corrupt bunch, aren't they ? Democracy is being hollowed out from the inside.

Earlier this month the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, announced that the display of cigarettes and tobacco in shops would be banned in England and Wales from 2011. He added that people wanting to buy cigarettes from vending machines would in future have to show proof of age to obtain a token to activate the machine, and machines could be banned altogether in the future.

Mr Johnson boasted that the display ban was favoured by an "overwhelming majority" of 96,000 responses to a six-month public consultation on the subject. Yet only a handful of those 96,000 respondents came from individuals submitting their personal views. Almost 70,000 came from those collected by pressure groups entirely funded by the Department for Health. Among the groups submitting block responses were SmokeFree NorthWest, SmokeFree Liverpool and SmokeFree North East, which were all set up by the Government to lobby against the tobacco industry. The finding has prompted critics to accuse the Government of spending taxpayers' money on establishing groups designed merely to back the Government line on public health issues. Ministers have effectively been accused of "astroturfing" - cultivating a fake grassroots movement in order to make a position appear more popular than it really is. The Government also published responses to a consultation on alcohol consumption earlier this month, in advance of a Policing and Crime Bill currently passing through Parliament, which proposes giving the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, sweeping powers to control licensing in pubs and clubs. The consultation attracted 2,336 responses. Almost 2,000 of these came either from a survey by Alcohol Concern, a charity which last year was given almost £400,000 by the Department for Health and raised nothing through fundraising, or postcards distributed by the Department itself, which posed the question: "Fed up with alcohol problems where you live?" Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the disclosures summed up Labour's "cavalier" approach to consulting the public. Mr Lansley said: "It will come as no surprise to us if the Department of Health has funded organisations that provide the responses to consultations that the Government is looking for".

The Devils Kitchen (parental advisory - toilet-mouthed posts) had a piece on the subject of these fake charities - and there's now a directory of fake charities to which you may add your own examples.

And finally .. that fine police blogger Nightjack is winding the blogging down for a while while he does his exams, leaving us with these thoughts on policing. Go read.

His back pages are well worth a browse too - he has a list of his most visited posts on the sidebar. I liked his take on the so-called "Children's Commissioner" Al Aynsley-Green (Laban's view here - note that Al has now reinvented himself as 11million.org.uk - cool or what ? He's another one of those tax-funded pressure groups at £3 million pa of our money) - he sees him as The Dad At The Disco.

Labour Boost For British Industry

The vitally important gambling industry, that is. Those of you who actually make things can swallow the latest National Insurance increase.

Gamblers will be able to bet more and win bigger prizes on slot machines in pubs, clubs and amusement arcades after successful lobbying of the Government by the gaming industry.

Prizes will double from £35 to £70 and the maximum stake will rise from 50p to £1, the second rise in two years, under the plan authorised by Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary.

The relaxation of gambling rules is expected to provide a boost to the industry in the downturn by generating an extra 20 per cent in revenue. The Treasury will also benefit from an additional £27million a year in VAT. However, critics fear that it will increase levels of gambling addiction.

Ministers were originally going to raise the maximum stake to 60p and the prize limit to £60 but ministers were told by the gambling industry that this would not be enough to reinvigorate the market.

Funny. Not every industry can tell the Government what they want and expect to get it.

There were questions last night about the morality of encouraging people to gamble more during a recession.

It must be that old-fashioned son-of-the-manse Old Labour morality I hear so much about these days. I didn't think it possible to despise this lot any more, but they retain the capacity to surprise. I wonder how the payback money's being routed to Party funds ?

Pity The Poor Banker

Robert Peston reports Bank of England deputy chairman John Gieve as follows :

"If we'd used interest rates to try and address this asset-price credit growth, we would have been holding down the level of activity elsewhere in the economy, in manufacturing, in other services, holding down the level of employment at a time when consumer price inflation and earnings were stable and reasonably low. And people would have said, you know, 'this is a wilful reduction in the prosperity of the country'."

In other words, they feared the political reaction to what they knew was the right thing to do, so they didn't do it.

So much for the political independence of the BoE, for which Chancellor Brown was given so much credit, and which seems to have left him with the power while passing the responsibility to the BoE.

And the kindest expression for the BoE personnel involved would be that they "fell below the level of events".

It's not "that the Bank of England does not possess the proper tools for dealing with incipient booms in assets and lending". It's that it doesn't possess the proper bankers. John Gieve sounds like one of those chaps who would have trundled through less interesting times without trace. Instead he seems to have a CV covered in red ink and blots.

BoE website :

Sir John Gieve was appointed Deputy Governor in January 2006. In addition to his membership of the Monetary Policy Committee, he has specific responsibility for the Bank's Financial Stability work ..

That's unfortunate. Financial stability seems in short supply ...

He oversaw one Home Office shambles :

Sir John Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor General wrote

To inform Parliament that the Home Office has not met the statutory reporting timetable in respect of its 2004-05 resource accounts;

[...]

I cannot form an opinion on the truth and fairness of the Home Office financial statements for 2004-05

[...]

That is as strong a condemnation of incompetent financial management as any auditor is likely to utter.

It is as astonishing as it is unacceptable, that a major Central Government Department like the Home Office cannot be trusted to account for the money it spends on our behalf.

If a private sector organisation had mismanged its financial affairs as badly as this, then the people in charge would be out of a job forthwith.

Will the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, whom in theory bears resposibility for this David Blunkett legacy, have the honour to resign ?

What about the "Sir Humphrey" , the Permanent Secretary and therfore the Accounting Officer of the Home Department at the time. i.e. Sir John Gieve.

Sir John is now the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, with a vote on the level of the Bank of England's official Interest Rates, which affect the entire UK economy !

And another :

Last week the 56-year-old career civil servant returned to Westminster for a grilling by the Home Affairs Select Committee about why more than 1,000 prisoners were not even considered for deportation after serving their jail sentences. "There were failings in the handling of foreign prisoners which I regret," Gieve told the committee. "I am not trying to excuse the inexcusable."

Gieve has also been criticised over the running of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and his failure to give a full account of how the nanny of Kimberly Quinn, David Blunkett's former lover, was given a visa.

In recent weeks, the Home Office has come under fire from several corners. Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, called the department "dysfunctional", while Clarke's successor, John Reid, recently judged it "not fit for purpose".

You have to be impressed with a chap who can preside over so much disaster and is still prepared to share his wisdom with us on prime time TV (tonight's Panorama). What's Hebrew for 'chutzpah' again ?

To be fair to Gieve and his colleagues, house prices were roaring ahead long before 2006. It was around 2005 that I started to get unsolicited invites to buy-to-let seminars at snazzy hotels, one of the signs that the market is heading for a peak. And doing the right thing would probably have cost the members of the Monetary Policy Committee their jobs. Instead it'll cost ours.

Gods of the Market Place

In my Amazon post I got comments from people who seemed to think I was a disciple of free markets. Up to a point, I am. As a general principle, free markets seem a pretty good way of 'making us better off' - although that phrase covers a multitude of sins and ideas - what exactly is 'better off' ?

But only up to a point. People are not always rational. What JFC Fuller called the myth of the Heroic Man is to a greater or lesser extent always in conflict with the myth of the Economic Man. Neither myth is terribly healthy, as we're not all one thing nor all the other.

Unfortunately both major UK parties are full subscribers to the myth of Britons as Economic Men.

Labour see that 'you are what you have' - and it doesn't matter how you got it. Hence the idea that being poor is somehow in itself a stigma and disgrace - to be removed by state transfers of cash. Pretty much the direct opposite of their founding beliefs, that an honest working man, no matter how poor, could - and should - be able to look anyone in the eye. But it's a long time since Labour was the party of the honest working man.

Tories see that 'you are what you make' - and it doesn't matter how you make it. Wasn't David Cameron's previous existence spent doing PR for upmarket vertical drinking establishments ?

I'm more of Martin Kelly's mind (he's quoting here) :

"(Economics) has moved into the void left by the decline of religion and the moral consensus; and it is increasingly seen as the main preoccupation of public policy, a panacea for social ills, the source even of private contentment. From being a technical subject, explaining human society in the way that medicine explains the human body, it threatens to become an end in itself, laying down goals, motives, incentives."

Which, as he says, is how we end up with Billy Aitchison and Sonny Devlin.

It's not one or the other, it's more or less. Don't forget Heroic Man, don't forget Original Sin and don't forget Original Damn Foolishness - the unwise decisions of clever men are likely to impact us much more then the unwisdom of the stupid, because clever men will be in positions to make decisions which affect us all. Vortigern thought he was maximising his utility when he hired Hengist and Horsa, but it turned out they had their own ideas about utility.

The worshippers of the Gods of the Market Place should ponder the end that attended Gabriel Oak's dog George, shot in "another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise".

Trouble is, we may by then have suffered the fate of his sheep !

Enfants de la Patrie ?

I see that the French National Anthem has been dissed yet again by young Frenchmen of Tunisian heritage at a home soccer international - despite the singer (Grace Jones' little sister in a hoodie) being as street and multiculti as one could wish for.

It follows the dissing of the French National Anthem by young Frenchmen of Moroccan heritage at a home soccer international.

Not to mention the dissing of the French National Anthem by young Frenchmen of Algerian heritage at a home soccer international - such patriots that they invaded the pitch and stopped the game when France went 4-1 up.

There seems to be a problem here. Any native Froggie saying "these guys aren't Frenchmen" would be rightfully denounced by one and all as a hideous racist. Trouble is, the guys whistling the anthem would agree with him.

I don't know. It's not as if the French football team doesn't reflect the faces you see on the streets of Paris (if not of Sourdeval). After the 1998 World Cup they were hailed by the usual suspects as the fair face of multicultural France.

Reading the comments there seem to be a fair few people saying 'you deserve it for massacring x thousand people in 19nn'. I don't know much about France's colonial wars, except that the Algerian one was exceedingly dirty and unpleasant, apparently including torturing to death and dumping in the Seine (plenty of torturing to death on the Algerian side, too). Nonetheless, if there was so much resentment, maybe it was unwise of previous French governments to move so many resentful chaps across the tideless ditch.

Except that ... these aren't (mostly) the chaps who moved. They're the children and grandchildren. The chaps who moved were generally OK. But the interaction of unease, welfare, an increasing cultural vacuum (though not on our scale) and post-colonial guilt have bred people who hate and despise the country they live in.

Sarkozy responded angrily, saying that games would be stopped at once if it happened again. But they're already having second thoughts, having perhaps considered what would happen if they released 50,000 peace-loving and disappointed soccer fans onto the Paris streets without having first got the CRS into position.

Making threats that you can't back up generally doesn't intimidate, but emboldens an opponent.

So what, you may say. Why should we care about what happens in a far-away country of which we know little ?

Because their problems are ours. There's a terrible symmetry between the children and grandchildren of immigrants to France, much more radicalised, violent and discontented than their grandparents, and those to the UK. One can never be sure, but if there were national anthems at cricket matches is it not likely we'd see the same thing at England v Pakistan ?

"Upholding values which the market alone cannot generate"

Gordon Brown takes hypocrisy into hyperspace.

"My values - the values of the country - celebrate hard work, and effort, and enterprise, and responsible risk-taking ..."

Do they hell. The values of this government include rewarding irresponsibility and idleness, punishing hard work and self-sufficiency, and attempting to abolish risk in the guise of 'health and safety' - while completely ignoring moral hazard.

And the values of the country ? Hmm. 'Get, spend, drink, **** ?' Not all the country, but a substantial chunk. The son of the manse has done his bit to stamp on the remnants of a once-Christian culture.

For rewarding irresponsibility and idleness, see "child poverty" and the wider benefit culture. As the great Norman Dennis puts it in his 'Families Without Fatherhood', the State, through taxation, takes the consequences of a wrong choice of partner - " ...in sexual conduct the cast of mind is that I please myself, but if anything goes wrong, you must be responsible that my children come to no harm. In effect such a biological father is saying, "You must be a socialist so that I can be an egoist. My baby is the hostage through which I, who will not do my duty, will hold you to your duty."

Is it responsible to define smackheads and alkies as 'disabled', entitled to extra benefits ?

Gordo's plan to abolish child poverty, given the lack of will to do anything about the numbers of one-parent families, amounts to a blank cheque made out to the underclass and drawn on the taxpayer - those "hard-working families" he intends to rip off. Where else can he get the money from ?

"Effort" and "enterprise" will be taxed and regulated - and as we have seen, waltzing round both tax and regulation isn't too difficult for a large financial services organisation, but much harder for a metal-basher in Bloxwich - which is why our manufacturing is disappearing.

Looking at the calls all round for interest rate reductions, it looks as if the plan is to mitigate recession via inflation. Having destroyed half of private final salary pensions, he'll trash the value of the other half via inflation, which bears hardest on those on fixed incomes. Gordon, like Sir Ian Blair and co, have gold-plated, inflation-proof index-linked final salary pensions.

Poor Prudence was put on crack and onto the streets a long time back. Now she's a pathetic figure, prepared to do anything for a fiver and odds-on to soon be found dead in a bedsit.

God, I despise these people.

Another 419 Fraud Letter

From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson

Subject: Request for urgent confidential business relationship

Dear Sir: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am minister of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of US$700bn. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. We would in exchange for assistance be prepared to pay you a fee of 1% of funds transferred - $7bn.

This transaction is 100 per cent safe. This is a matter of great urgency. We need the funds as quickly as possible. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as intermediary so the funds can be transferred safely to my country. Please reply with the following details and also re-confirm to me the followings

1) Your full name.

2) Phone, fax and mobile #.

3) company name, position and address.

4) profession, age and marital status.

5) Bank name and address, sort code and account number

As soon as this informations are received, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds and the methods of transmission to be used. Your payment will be made to you in a certified bank draft so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction.

Yours faithfully, Minister of Treasury Paulson, Nigeria, Washington DC

(via the Indie, first sighted at Lew Rockwell)

"Now we see the violence inherent in the system"

I don't pretend to be a student of Caucasian politics and strategy ... a few impressions of the current unpleasantness in Georgia :

a) you might think it's all about oil

Local police recorded 51 strikes. "I have no doubt they wanted to target the pipeline, there is nothing else here," said Giorgi Abrahamisvili, a policeman who witnessed the attack. "It was terribly intense, the smell of cordite spread everywhere. I had to abandon my car and hide in a ditch but the jets weren't interested in other targets."

BP operates the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which transports one per cent of the world's oil needs, or one million barrels a day from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean. A spokesman played down the impact of the strike, pointing out that pumping was suspended last week because of a terrorist attack in Turkey. "At the moment the pipeline is not running at any capacity, because there was a fire," the spokesman said. Georgia is a crucial link in a three country energy corridor vital to Western Europe's oil and gas supply. The £2 billion pipeline is the only major conduit for Central Asian resources not under Russian control.

b) but South Ossetia and Georgia were in conflict long before :

On March 15, 1918, the Ossetian peasants rose in rebellion and managed to hold off an offensive by a Georgian People’s Guard punitive detachment commanded by an ethnic Ossetian officer, Kosta Kaziev. The fighting culminated in the town of Tskhinvali which was raided by the rebels on March 19, 1918. Tskhinvali’s Georgian population was massacred and the town was looted. The People’s Guard regained the control of Tskhinvali on March 22.

On May 8, 1920, the Ossetians declared a Soviet republic in the Roki area on the Russian-Georgian border. A Bolshevik force from Vladikavkaz crossed into Georgia and helped the local rebels to defeat a Georgian force in the Java district. The rebellious areas were effectively incorporated into Soviet Russia. However, Lenin’s desire to keep peace with Georgia at that time and eventual military failures of the rebels forced the Bolsheviks to distance themselves from the Ossetian struggle. The Georgian People’s Guard under Valiko Jugheli crashed the revolt with great violence. The insurgents were defeated in a series of hard-fought battles. Several villages were burned down and some 3,000 to 7,000 were killed during the hostilities. About 20,000 Ossetians were forced to seek refuge in Soviet Russia.

c) A Fistful of Euros has - or had - some bloggers on the ground in Georgia.

d) I must confess I can't quite see the driver behind the push for surrounding Russia with NATO members. NATO was set up as a mutual defence pact aimed squarely at the old Soviet Union. While Turkey, on the borders of Asia, has been a member since 1950, the alliance was, as its name (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) implies, created to defend the democracies of Western Europe and to keep open the sea and air lanes between Europe and the USA. Georgia is a very long way from the Atlantic coast.

Russia thinks that NATO expansion is aimed squarely at surrounding and isolating her. Speaking without much knowledge, it certainly looks that way. Anyone know what's going on, if this is in fact true, and if so why ? After all, there's another former Communist state that's both expanding economically (and by extension, in military capability) at an unprecedented rate - a state that is also starting to project its power on a global scale. What's so dangerous about Russia ?

There is, IMHO, an inherent problem with expanding an organisation like the EU or NATO beyond what might be said to be its 'natural' borders. As long as you're using air power to zap an opponent without retaliatory capability - as in Kosovo and Serbia - no worries. Except for the people being hit. But when your opponent has the ability to give you a hard time, and you need to put boots on the ground, then questions about Pomeranian grenadiers become relevant. Although we may not have liked it, it was probably generally accepted that had Red Army tanks rolled across the North German plain or into Italy, we would fight. I'm not at all sure how people would feel about fighting for Latvia or Lithuania, who are already NATO members. Who in Western Europe, let alone America, is going to fight for Belarus or the Ukraine ?

e) it wasn't as if you couldn't see it coming. April 2008 :

Officials from Georgia are embarking on a major diplomatic offensive in Europe, fearing that Russia will do everything possible to destabilize the country before NATO membership talks can begin in December. David Bakradze, the Georgian foreign minister, who met Friday with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said his country was becoming caught in a bitter struggle between the West and Russia as it tried to anchor its political and security institutions solidly in Euro-Atlantic organizations and rid itself of Russian influence.

At stake in the coming months, Bakradze said, is whether the West will bow to Russian pressure and possibly trigger a domino effect or stand firm until Moscow backs down. "If you draw lines and give Russia a free hand here, it will never work," Bakradze said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune. "If Russia is given a free hand, it will extend to other parts of Europe. Russia thinks it still has the right to interfere. But we say to the Europeans, if there is any appeasement towards Russia over the way it deals with us, it will have repercussions for other countries."

f) from the same IHT piece, the baneful influence of the Kosovo settlement :

Germany, in particular, strongly opposed offering Georgia the fast track. In interviews at the time, Steinmeier said Moscow had already had a hard enough time accepting the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, whose unity Russia had supported.

Kosovo has had two repercussions. The dismemberment of a chunk of Serbian territory at NATO and EU behest - if not gunpoint - has both cheesed off Russia and given her a blueprint for intervention in South Ossetia and Abhkazia. After all, like Kosovo, the two territories contain lots of people who wish to leave the parent state, a minority of (if you like) loyalists, and a history of bad blood and ethnic strife. Russia can claim to be protecting the majority Ossetian community against the Georgians, just as KFOR protected the majority Kosovo Albanians against the Serbs.

g) so far the US /EU offers of NATO membership have given Georgia the great benefit of Russian invasion, and given the US/EU the great benefit of the third largest coalition force in Iraq - 2,000 men - being withdrawn. While the game is not yet played out, we can say that so far the process hasn't done much for either party - or their relationship. Is America going to do anything ?

In recent years, Bush has lavished praise on Georgia — and the so-called Rose Revolution that brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power — as a model of democracy-building. The feeling was mutual: when Bush visited Tbilisi in 2005, the authorities estimated that 150,000 people showed up to see him. He famously climbed up on a platform and wiggled his hips to loud Georgian folk music.

Those exuberant days seemed very distant around Gori on Sunday, as people fled, leaving behind corn fields and apple orchards. A group of men tried mightily to push a truck with a blown-out tire, but it got stuck on the road, and they finally abandoned it ...

The grimmest among the Georgians were the soldiers, haggard, unshaven and swinging their Kalashnikovs. A group of them had piled onto a flatbed truck, crowding on in such numbers that some were sitting on the roof, their feet dangling over the windshield. One, who gave his name as Major Georgi, spoke with anger.

"Write exactly what I say," he said. "Over the past few years, I lived in a democratic society. I was happy. And now America and the European Union are spitting on us."

h) I don't see Russia as a major long-term imperial power as long as her demography is still pretty disastrous. While the number of births is rising, the number of early deaths is more than keeping pace - and those Russian citizens who ARE having babies tend to be, like the Chechens and Ingush, Muslims near the periphery of Russian territory - perhaps more of a problem than a solution to Moscow. Russians still abort more children than they give birth to each year. Furthermore, the culture of many educated Russians is becoming more ... individualistic ? European ? - well, whatever makes psychology students get purple hair and a stud in the chin. What I think we may well see are attempts to gather more ethnic Russians back into the Russian State. I'd be nervous if I lived in an ex-Soviet state with a large ethnic Russian minority - and there are a few of those.

i) where are the anti-war left ? I don't see them here in any numbers. Or here. Or here. Or here. Looks like those Georgians shouldn't have cheered for Bush so wildly.

Purely Creative Scratchcards

The scratchcards keep falling out of the newspapers, and I still keep getting hits for this post, so here's a link to an old Guardian story about the cruises you can win.

Mrs Staveacre's trip of a lifetime goes something like this. She must make her own way from Somerset to Glasgow, fly from there to Toronto, wait four hours, take a flight to New York, wait 17 hours at La Guardia airport, make her own way to the city and embark on an unnamed ship for a cruise, destination unknown, before returning by the same route a week later. Mr Staveacre is to fly from Bristol to Newark, a week earlier, catch a connecting flight to Baltimore and from there to Miami where he must wait 14 hours and then get himself to an unspecified dock for a boat to a mystery destination. "Tempting, isn't it?" he says. Furthermore, they must each pay £599 if, having accepted this alluring package, they decide to cancel, and yet Promo Travel and Let's Go, travel companies that organise the trip on behalf of Creative, can withdraw at any time ...

"The people behind this must have spent days working out this elaborate scheme to make the 'free' cruise so unappealing that only those desperate for adventure will take it up," says Staveacre. "Since this was the only prize offered by the competition, their profit margin must be terrific - thousands of £6 premium-rate phone calls and hardly any prizes to pay for."

The Greatest Population Explosion In Human History

I blogged a while back on the amazing population increases in the third/developing world over the last sixty years.

Certainly several of the traditional horsemen, war, famine and plague (HIV/AIDS) have been galloping around Africa for the last few decades - but the population keeps on keeping on. Look at the Congo, basket case of basket cases - yet with a six-fold population increase in 60 years.

As William Rubinstein put it :

These levels of increase are, of course, simply staggering. They are greater, both in absolute numbers and almost certainly in percentage terms, than anything known before in a relatively short period in human history. They have occurred despite losses in wars and civil wars, such as have occurred in India -Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran-Iraq, among other places, despite totalitarian mass murders as in Communist China, despite immigration abroad, and despite losses through AIDS and other illnesses. In just over sixty years, Brazil's population has increased by 318 per cent; Colombia's by 352 per cent, and Ethiopia's by 503 per cent - and so on, with, in general, the most impoverished of these nations showing the most unbelievable increases.

The causes of these vast increases are obvious enough: Western medicine, applied to the eradication of communicable diseases and epidemics and to a decrease in infant mortality ...

Kevin Myers isn't too pleased about it all - and that's putting it mildly ...

Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million: The equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.

So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country?

How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

Hmmm. I wonder if he was inspired by stories like this :

Scottish singer Sandi Thom has helped Oxfam erect an 11,000-litre water tank in Glasgow to highlight the growing humanitarian crisis in East Africa.

Ah, yes. Fight drought in Africa with water tanks in Glasgow. You know it makes sense - if it's all about us. I think what's bothering Mr Myers is that we chuck aid and technology at Africa - with the amazing population results seen above - while the recipients of our aid carry on 'as you were'. Here's Mr Myers' follow-up piece :

I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

Hmm. Certainly the Dark Continent doesn't seem appreciably lighter these days. Quite apart from some of the major unpleasantnesses, there are still plenty of stories like this little item, on the killing of albinos for their allegedly magical body parts, from Tanzania, one of the greatest of aid recipients in the days when Julius Nyere was every liberal's pin-up.

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa. Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century.

This terrible truth cannot be ignored.But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa.

Sanctimonious ginger-groups ?

Hundreds of bishops from across the world have marched in London to demand urgent action on global poverty. The Archbishop of Canterbury led the walk from Parliament to Lambeth Palace. Dr Rowan Williams called on governments to fulfil their promises on aid and development or see the world's poor suffer disease, starvation and death.

Otherwise known as "hundreds of bishops from across the world have marched in London to demand that somebody else take urgent action on global poverty". Hasn't the Church of England got any money left ? "Sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven".

It does look as if we've spent the last 60 years handing out fish while neglecting to teach the art of fishing - and the recommendation of the bishops is for more of the same. Maybe teaching a continent isn't the same as teaching a man. Maybe it can't be done. In which case we're apparently supposed to carry on sending the "food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules".

Self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed. It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.

Lordy. Malthus, thou should'st be living at this hour. But he has a point, albeit brutally expressed. The population of Africa is soaring. In two generations it's gone from millions of poverty-stricken people to billions of poverty-stricken people. Where does it stop ?

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what? I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that's an idea.

And by strange chance ... another news item so small that you hardly notice it. 30,000 Ugandan and Kenyan Asians in the 1970s, 90,000-odd German Jews over a five year period in the 1930s were major news items - and these were some of the most educated, intelligent and industrious people in the countries of their birth. They were also minorities in the country of their birth. I'm not sure any of the above neccessarily applies to the following :

About 39,000 asylum seekers in a backlog of 400,000 applicants have been allowed to remain in Britain by the Home Office ... The top four nationalities among asylum seekers were Somalian, Pakistani, Iraqi and Afghan.

Have a nice day. Our Government (of both political complexions), having wound down the nuclear industry over the last 20 or more years, is proposing to sell our remaining nuclear expertise to a French state-owned company (which continued to build reactors over that period), thus placing a strategic British energy interest in the hands of Paris. This kind of decision is so depressing, so destructive, that it's tempting to give way to despair - and rejoice at the total kicking Nulab were given in Glasgow, even while realising that it brings the breakup of Britain closer.

UPDATE - you have to ask - why didn't the UK carry on having eight or nine kids each after Victorian times ? Anyone who researches their family history will have noted the number of children in the nineteenth century - and the number of child deaths. I guess that when Western medicine developed from Victorian times onwards, its development accompanied a process of declining birthrates and a culture of fewer children. In Africa it's been parachuted in - literally in some cases - to cultures which haven't undergone those changes and show no signs of doing so.

Invalidity Benefit

Another day, another 'Labour gets tough on' announcement. While Chick Yog is horrified, Poll Pot expresses the eternal truth - that it's necessary to horrify the Yogs of this world in order to appeal to the poor dumb voters :

They were headlines to die for, everything that James Purnell had planned. "Labour blitz on dole scroungers" said the Sun, with "Get clean or lose your benefits, junkies told" from the Daily Mail.

I think I've read those headlines every few years for the last 30 years - no matter who's in power. I've got no problems with attempting to attack - probably the operative word - those for whom the benefit lifestyle is a comfortable alternative to work. What's going to be the usual shambles is the implementation.

Just pretend that some miracle occurred and numbers of smackheads and alkies, say, had their benefits removed. Let's say they turn to crime to fund their lifestyle - I know it's a far-fetched idea, but bear with me. Where are the 'extra' prison places for these people ? Because if the policy was actually implemented they'd certainly be needed.

You'd need some, too, for the able-bodied claimants - the modern equivalent of the Elizabethan 'sturdy beggar'. There are plenty of chaps 'on the sick' who do a bit of work here, a bit there - and there are a fair few places where the informal economy of cash work touches the informal economy of crime. Not all of these guys are going to buckle down to stacking shelves either.

If there's any effect, it'll be on the "honest disabled". Putting the job of getting claimants back to work into private hands, with a bounty for success, means that the private agencies will go for the low-hanging fruit - harassing some poor honest-but-fragile soul who they might just be able to bully back into an (unsuitable ?) job while avoiding the confident, confrontational criminal type or professional bludger up the road.


As usual, Poll Pot's comments are better than her actual piece :

The part of this plan which should strike fear into the hearts of any left-leaning person is the outsourcing of this to private companies. The private sector is excellent at making a profit, and only good at looking after people if this coincides with making money. People on incapacity benefit are the most vulnerable in society. It is those people with chronic persistent pain, mental illness and severe physical/learning disabilities.

Many of these needs are complex in nature. One physical condition may have led to another, they may suffer from depression as a result of chronic pain, their condition may deteriorate under stress or be exacerbated by work environments. Many conditions are cyclical in nature, one day or for three months someone may be relatively okay - the next day or the next year they may be terrible. On a good day you might pass an assessment but that does not make you employable to any private sector company. They want full-time or full commitment, not to come in just when you feel okay.

So what will happen? Well, the people who are faking it (and considering you get £60 a week and the stigma of being labelled disabled I think it will be considerably less than the tabloids may wish us to think) will just change their lies accordingly to pass the new assessment, whilst those genuinely ill will be bullied into unsuitable positions by private sector companies motivated by the bottom line.

While we'd disagree about the numbers of bludgers and their vulnerability, he has a point. And not just one for any left-leaning person, but for anyone who believes in fairness.

"the religion set forth by Her Majesty"

" ...outside London, the universities, and a few great towns, the average parson in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign was not an impressive figure. Sometimes he had kept his benefice by conforming under Edward VI, changing his creed under Mary, and finally accepting what a rural bench once described as “the religion set forth by Her Majesty” as the only way of earning a living" - from Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

The British government is to fund a board of Islamic theologians in an attempt to sideline violent extremists. The move will see Oxford and Cambridge Universities host a group of scholars who will lead debate on key issues such as women and loyalty to the UK. Under the plans, the two universities will bring together about 20 leading thinkers, yet to be named, to debate critical issues affecting Muslims in the UK. The Department for Communities is responsible for the government's strategy to combat violent extremism, known as "Prevent". It will provide funding and support for the project but maintains that the board's work will be completely independent of political interference. The board's work will focus on examining issues relating to Islam's place in Britain and obligations as a citizen.

Hmm. "The religion set forth by Hazel Blears ?"

Ms Blears said the department's support for the project emerged out of debate with Muslim communities who asked ministers for help in supporting the work of key thinkers across the UK. "We have made significant progress working with communities to build an alliance against violent extremists," said Ms Blears. "We have a responsibility to ensure that our young people are equipped with the skills they need to stand up to violent extremists and help them understand how their faith is compatible with wider shared values.

Hmm. As Lord Carey has said, we are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times. And this is our government's response.

How We Saved The Estate

Poll Pot thinks we need to throw a few more tens of millions at it.

Nightjack thinks that won't work.

However, he has an "evidence based", "what works" solution of the kind beloved by pointy-heads everywhere. I think. Read the whole thing.

Moron Shall Speak Unto Moron

The BBC gets more educational by the day :

"The scheme follows the psychological principle of rewarding good behaviour" announced the newsreader on Radio Four's 6 pm news last night. She was explaining to the poor ignorant masses the sound science behind the new scheme to pay smackheads not to take drugs.

Drug users are to be offered vouchers for things such as gym membership and to pay utility bills to encourage them to comply with treatment programmes.

The National Treatment Agency in England is piloting the incentive scheme at 15 sites starting this week.

It will be the first time incentives have been used in such a way.

The first time, eh ? That's not what Mark Easton was reporting last year (when the incentives - wait for it - were vouchers or drugs), but no matter. Nor does it matter that the anonymous BBC editor seems to be rehashing the NTA press release.

The point is that the BBC's message just doesn't seem to be getting through. Let's take the reactions of a typical household - the Tall family of Weatherbury in Dorset, gathered round the tea table.

"The scheme follows the psychological principle of rewarding good behaviour"

All : "No it doesn't ! It rewards STOPPING bad behaviour !"

Middle : "Where's the reward for OUR good behaviour ?"

Youngest : "Dad ! Why don't you do heroin for a while, then stop ?"

Alas, despite the BBC's best efforts to share the insights granted to our betters, the Great British Public remain mired in ignorance.

Post-Christian entertainment

In a Johnny Vegas stylee. In fairness, I must say I've seen one or two highly embarrassed chaps get rather worse treatment at the hands of 'lady entertainers' at the works football dinner. They just had to grin and bear it.

Politics As Usual

"A new dawn is awakened ... yet nothing has changed ..." as Gregory Isaacs put it.

"Dangerous criminals are being placed in low security open prisons due to overcrowding, at "massive" risk to the general public, the BBC has learned."

A new (to me, anyway) type of crime - kidnapping back in the old country.

Bradford businessman Mohammed Zaman, 55, said: "Kidnappings in Pakistan that resort to ransoms demanded from relatives in England are all too common. I cannot praise the police enough. What are words in a matter like this?"

The police operation's inception has an air of the old country about it, too.

Zaman defied the gang's threat to kill his brother if he contacted the police. He contacted a family friend, Jawaid Akhtar, who is an assistant chief constable at West Yorkshire police.

23.3% of primary school children are now classified as 'ethnic minority', up from 21.9% last year.

The share of pupils in England's schools speaking English as a second language has risen to a record high, government figures show. Some 14.4% of primary school pupils spoke a language other than English as their first language in 2008 - a rise of 0.9 percentage points on 2007. It was 10.5% in 2004, the year before the main European Union expansion, and has almost doubled since 1997.

In secondary schools, the proportion rose from 10.6% to 10.8% over 2007-08. The latest figures translate to some 470,080 pupils in primary schools and 354,300 pupils in secondary schools whose first language is thought not to be English.

Man commits suicide after his daughter loses in the Brighton schools place ballot. I can't help thinking the need for a father comes before the need for an education, but you can understand his distress.

Steve Don, 43, threw himself under a train after telling his wife that if the local education authority would not listen to him while he was alive, “perhaps they will if I was dead”.

A little ramble through the Matthews (as in Shannon) family tree.

Her forbears, though, were the footsoldiers of industrial Britain. Some of her parents' generation even worked in the last factories, mines and mills - relics of West Yorkshire's status as an economic powerhouse. Today, heavy industry has moved on to other, cheaper and more productive parts of the globe. Only 40 people are now employed in weaving in the whole of Dewsbury. The original workforce and their descendants, however, have been left marginalised, often suspicious of growing immigrant communities. Indeed, 13 per cent of Dewsbury's population is of Asian origin - who bring their own traditions and entrepreneurial drive.

Other traditional foundation stones have also shifted. The powerful family cornerstone of marriage no longer exists, nor in many cases does the nuclear household and the maternal bond. The result has been disastrous. At least 13 of the children in the latest generation related to the Matthews family do not live with their mothers, for one reason or another. Several are being looked after by others. One was put out for adoption. Another is serving a life sentence in prison.

What would Grandpa Matthewman have made of it all?

The EU appear to be making it unlawful to hold illegal immigrants in detention for more then 6 months. Apparently illegal immigrants are 'modern slaves'.

He said there would be a six-month limit on detention for most people and a readmission agreement would have to be struck before they were sent home.

And failing that ? You're out and you vanish until the amnesty.

You said it, man !

Commenter osho on a Poll Pot thread :

I came to Britain from India in the early 90s. It became obvious to me early on that the easiest way to appear an 'intellectual' was to claim to read the Guardian and to blame Mrs Thatcher for the appalling poverty of human spirit that I saw in the council estates. The same week that Peter Lilley committed political suicide by claiming that young women were getting pregnant to jump the housing list, I met just such a woman who had indeed done precisely the same and was amply rewarded by the state for doing so. I have since watched with a mixture of amusement and horror as the likes of Polly Toynbee have led the debate on issues that strike at the very heart of a civil society.

Polly I salute you and your kind. To have reduced a country that once ran an empire to a place where victimhood rules, the reciprocal relationshsip between effort and reward, crime and punishment, rights and responsibilities has been dismantled, and a third of the population still wishes to vote labour is an enormous achievement. I wonder if sometimes you have moments of insight at what damage you have wreaked and how you deal with these. I suspect that any such moments would cause so much cognitive dissonance that you probably climb the moral ground a little higher, prepare some more sanctimonious outpouring for the Guardian readers, and pat yourself on the back. But one day, surely, your work will come back to haunt you.

Meanwhile I think Britain is stuffed. I say this with no relish, my Children are British as now am I. We are well and truly stuffed. Like the protagonist in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, we will spend our fading days imprisoned by the almighty state in learnt helplessness.