CentreRight

Telegraph Blogs gets it wrong

In his mystic post on Telegraph Blogs alleging that "CCHQ are too scared"  to allow their candidates to blog, Damian Thompson is referring to me. whilst I am gratified both at being described as "well-known" (read: uses Twitter) and an "ultra-Cameroon" (read: is not Gerald Warner), it is slightly mystifying that he could have got this one so wrong, since Holy Smoke is easily the best of the Telegraph blogs and as a Catholic (albeit a lousy one) I enjoy it immensely.

It's true that Damian asked me to blog for Telegraph blogs. He says I was keen, I was probably being polite, but OK. Like lots of candidates and politicians, I get offered media opportunities on a regular basis. And I suppose I tend to blog more than most. I like the conversational nature of Twitter. I have a Facebook account. I've blogged for ConHome for years in various formats. None of these things have ever been submitted to, or censured by, anybody at CCHQ. Nothing is sent to them in advance. This blog was not.

Blaming Gordon for the recession

One of the arguments in the election campaign is whether Gordon Brown can be blamed for the recession. Labour says he is blameless because it is a world recession. But Britain has been worst hit among the making economies and I've blogged before on why Brown has responsibility for making it worse in three ways by mistakes he made before it started. Firstly, presiding over an explosion of state borrowing. Secondly, moving bank regulation from the Bank of England too the Financial Services Authority. Thirdly, by changing the classification of inflation from the Retail Prices Index to the Consumer Price Index which ignored overheating in the housing market and obliged the bank of England to set interest rates lower than they should have been.

I think I should have added a fourth. Stephen Askins, who is the Ravenscourt Park Ward Chairman in Hammersmith and Fulham where I am a councillor, emails after canvassing:

A voter said to me you cannot blame it on Gordon Brown. My response was: Yes you can – the withdrawal of the Dividend Tax Credit destabilized everything, meaning that high risk was necessary to make the returns needed to pay the pensions meaning that banks and other were required to take higher risks and we are where we are. At least he remained as a Probable after that conversation - but it should be a national conversation not a local one.

There are a thousand different reasons for getting rid of this Government. But the heavy culpability of Gordon Brown for the recession is an important theme and within that his irresponsible decision to abolish the Dividend Tax Credit certainly merits more attention.

Warnings for the road ahead

Now that the dust has settled on a highly political Budget, it has become ever clearer that our nation desperately requires strong Conservative governance to put our national finances back in order. Whatever the remedies within our reach should we secure office at the imminent election, we will also have to keep a close watch on events in the global economy which will surely have a significant bearing on the British economy in the years to come.  There are already some worrying signals about the pitfalls ahead:-

Red Tories and the freshly painted door

J P Floru is a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute.

The soundest party activist in my ward recently recounted what canvassing was like in the eighties. When you went canvassing on a council estate and you found a freshly painted door, you knew what to expect. The family living behind it had bought its flat. And they would vote Conservative, absolutely. When you go canvassing on a council estate today, do the residents have an equally strong reason to vote Conservative – or any other party?

The Right to Buy policy did not just hand the flat to them, as say the winter fuel allowance hands over money today. The individual had to save money and had to decide to buy the flat. He had to make an effort to effect this change in his life. He felt that he had helped himself to climb the ladder. The individual was helped to gain a stake by his own efforts. Or as The Great Lady said: “Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation. We Conservatives are returning power to the people. That is the way to One Nation, One People.” When individuals participate and take decisions affecting their own lives the enthusiasm and drive is far greater than if they are given a mere handout.

These individualistic policies – the government retreating and allowing individuals to choose for themselves - gave the Conservatives four consecutive electoral victories. Perhaps for the first time “the little people” felt that they had an interest in voting for what until then had been considered to be the Party of the Top Hats.

Freeing freelancers

By Mark Prisk MP.

As someone who was once self employed, I know how infuriating the IR35 rules can be. They are designed to stop tax evasion, but were introduced in such a clumsy way by Labour that they have affected millions of people who are acting perfectly reasonably. The IR35 tax rules are part of a wider problem surrounding the taxation of small businesses by Labour.

Ever since 1997, Gordon Brown has aggressively challenged alleged tax abuse by the self employed and small businesses through a series of measures. These have included a botched attempt to encourage SMEs to incorporate; ‘personal service companies’; ‘managed services companies’ , s600A and the recently abandoned measures to tackle so called income shifting. The result is an over complex web of rules and regulations, many of which are case law based and therefore constantly shifting. The result is the worst of worlds for the self employed: uncertainty, unnecessary risk and unfairness.

Having consulted with both business tax professionals and freelancers themselves, it is clear that simply scrapping IR35 would not resolve many of issues around the taxation of small businesses. Indeed it would, on its own, be the same piecemeal approach which has failed under Labour. So instead a Conservative Government would undertake a fundamental review of small business taxation matters, including IR35. We would mandate the new Office of Tax Simplification to conduct this review, with the aim of creating a comprehensive and lasting regime.

Our aim would be to create a clearer, stable and lasting tax regime for the self employed and small businesses. I am pleased to say this has been welcomed by those in the know. Professor Anne Redston, at King’s College, has applauded our decision, “The tax system for small business is riddled with unfairness, uncertainty and risk.  An independent review is long overdue.  A sensible, stable tax system should provide a bedrock on which business can build, rather than the shifting sands of the current unpredictable regime.”

This review is part of a wider Conservative aim to free enterprise and small business across the UK. We passionately believe that our agenda of a simpler tax regime & lower tax rates, less red tape & fewer regulators, and cuts in National Insurance for employers will give business the confidence to start up, invest and grow. That’s the best way to help get Britain’s economy growing again.

Honour your father and mother

If a mother seeks welfare support from the state, but does not receive support from the father of her children, the state demands that the father pay.  We believe that that family bond creates a material obligation.  In the same way, I believe that we have a material obligation to honour our father and mother so that, as Exodus 20 puts it, our days may be long in the land that the Lord our God has given us.  This form of obligation is recognised around the world, across many cultures, and indeed in some parts of South East Asia (such as Singapore) has legal effect - children are, for example, expected (or required) to provide accommodation for their aged parents or to fund such accommodation.

In our society, by contrast, there are those that seek to nationalise these familial obligations, creating systems of rights not between family members but between us all and the state.  Conservatives should resist this on principle.  The state and our relationships with it have elbowed out traditional moral interpersonal relationships across vast areas of communitarian life, whilst withdrawing from those in which the state had a traditional role (such as marriage).  The state should not replace these moral relationships.  Instead, it should stand behind and enforce them.  It is not that the state has no role in how we deal with our aged parents, but that role should involve educating and reminding us of our moral obligations and, in the last resort, enforcing those obligations upon us in some limited form in some limited cases.

The expansion of the European bureaucracy

By Lee Rotherham of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

Cyril Northcote-Parkinson holds a special place of honour amongst essayists. Drop the first barrel of his surname, and despite the fifty years that have gone by since his popular writings first hit print, you are likely to recognise him as the author of a famed series of principles - or more accurately, satirical observations on human psychology. He was most famously the inventor of “Parkinson's Law”, which stated in simplified form that work expands to fill the time required for its completion; but his 1957 collection of essays (carrying a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh, no less) set out the first batch of several more.

A key feature of his baseline philosophy is in stressing the inherent nature of bureaucracies to expand, since it is in the interest of the civil servant to demonstrate and justify his activity by increasing the number of his subordinates (as opposed to rivals) and the quantity of material produced. Although the resulting paperwork may involve genuine hard effort, it is internally focused, typically self-generating and entirely self-fulfilling.

A review of the Court of Auditors' 2008 reports on the annual accounts of EU institutions and bodies demonstrates this principle is flourishing in the European Union, with a vast leap in Euro-quango staff numbers. Astonishingly, totting together the accessible data, we discover that almost exactly 900 new jobs (899.5 to be precise, net) were created in the EU quangocracies over a single year. Let's put it into the context of starting figures. That means that EU agencies increased in manpower terms by around 23 per cent over the course of just twelve months.

This figure obviously excludes figures for the 'mother quango', the European Commission itself.

It appears that some of these jobs are contracted in, and therefore likely to be on consultancy-scale pay rates. Those on the other hand which are in-house can naturally be expected to come under EU staff regulations. Our paper on EU Diplomats explores some of the allowances on offer to this category of employee, bewildering and generous in their variety and scope.

A free and democratic Syria is the best way to undermine Iran

By Ribal Al Assad, Director of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria.

Syria qualifies as an afterthought when discussing the threat of Iran. But to dismiss this country as a minor player in the region is dangerously to underestimate the significance of its links with Iran.

At the end of February the leaders of the Syrian and Iranian regimes met in Damascus.  This display of unity among the ‘resistance’ of the region came just as international community was beginning to believe that the Syrian government had seen sense and was moving away from Iran. However Syria and Iran reaffirmed their close links and announced a new policy to waive visa requirements between their nations.

Iran is a major influencer in the Middle East. Its tentacles stretch deep into Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Iran’s aim is to manipulate and use proxy groups to exert greater influence and control in the region.

The Iranian regime, which is the leader of the ‘resistance’ has expansionist and destabilizing tendencies. In its southwest, Iran occupies the populous, oil and gas rich, Arab land of Al-Ahwaz. Also of its southern coast, Iran occupies three small islands, the Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa, which are claimed by the United Arab Emirates. The UAE's claim is backed by the Gulf Cooperation Council and other Arab states. Iran plays the sectarian card in creating an impression that it is there to help Shia Arabs in the region yet it oppresses and persecutes Shia Arabs at home in Al-Ahwaz. Furthermore it supports and arms Al-Qaeda groups in Iraq to kill Shia Arabs. The aim of this policy is to make Shia Arabs feel that they need Iran to protect them from Al-Qaeda.

Raising NICs Thresholds

So, the Conservatives plan to raise the threshold for both employers’ and employees’ NICs (£24 and £21 per week, respectively), paid for partly by a rise in the Upper Earnings Limit and partly by £6bn in net spending cuts (these cuts commencing in 2010/11).

Policy Exchange has previously argued that it should be feasible to achieve some £5bn-£10bn spending cuts in 2010/11, and that this would be more likely to promote recovery than to impede it and to limit the rise in unemployment than to drive it.  We thus obviously welcome this announcement as a first step.

Furthermore, Policy Exchange has argued that the rises in employers’ NICs were likely to be particularly damaging to jobs and growth in the short- to medium-term.  Employers’ NICs rises will, like rises in Employee NICs, eventually convert into reductions in real post-tax salaries.  But whereas employee NICs rises achieve this directly, rises in employers’ NICs first raise the costs to employers of hiring staff, which means fewer staff are hired, unemployment rises, and eventually salaries are bid down.  So the route to equilibrium proceeds via increased unemployment in the short term.  This process of returning to equilibrium might involve particularly significant increases in unemployment for a material length of time in an environment of low inflation and widespread salary cuts — as at present.

By raising the thresholds, the Conservatives would reduce the impact on jobs — particularly the impact on the jobs of the low paid.  Of course, there would still be an impact on the jobs of the better off, but few choices are appetising when the deficit is nearly 12% of GDP.

Thoughts on George Osborne's announcement

George Osbourne's pledge to partly roll back the hike in National Insurance announced by the Government, and pay for that tax cut with an attack on wasteful spending, is very welcome.  Some commentators may describe this as an unfunded tax cut but, as we show in our new book How to Cut Public Spending (and Still Win an Election), it is eminently doable.

National Insurance is a tax on jobs.  Following the recession ONS statistics show that 2.45 million people were unemployed at the last account.  Young people are particularly hard hit, with 715,000 18-24s unemployed at the last count.  And the true picture is probably even worse than those headline figures suggest, because it is obscured by people leaving the labour market and the big rise in unsustainable public sector employment.  Ensuring that there are as many opportunities as possible for people to find their way back into work should be a key priority for government.

Undermining people’s chances by making it more expensive for employers to take people on is a dreadful idea.  Analysis from a range of economic forecasters suggests it will increase unemployment.  Research for the Federation of Small Businesses by the CEBR suggests that adding 1p to Employers’ National Insurance Contributions will cost 57,000 jobs at SMEs alone.

The challenge is to pay for this eminently worthwhile tax cut while still taking credible action to deal with the deficit.  It will be easier as all those people not rendered unemployed will be paying income tax instead of taking benefits.  But that won’t do the job entirely.  The Conservatives are relying on pushing through greater efficiency savings than the Government, with the help of experts like Sir Peter Gershon.  Efficiency savings are a good idea, and they are right to look at IT projects as a big area where the Government has wasted money.  Our research suggests the average public sector capital procurement project goes over budget by a third.

However, there have been mixed results from previous top-down efficiency drives.  If the Conservatives really want greater efficiency then, as Mike Denham writes in our new book, they should look at fiscal decentralisation which is associated with more efficient public sectors internationally.  And they need to go beyond broad efficiency measures and look at cutting ineffective and non-priority spending.  Scrapping the Regional Development Agencies for example, could help pay for this cut in business tax which will do far more to help most businesses than their grants.

This is a good announcement from the Conservatives.  If they show greater clarity on spending cuts, this could be the start of an extremely credible package for jobs, growth and sustainable public finances.

Win or perish

It is very close now.  The dissolution, then the ecstacy of the campaign itself, and finally the exultation of victory on the one side and exquisite agony of defeat on the other.  Understand your options, Conservatives: victory or extinction.

And for the same reason, you others - you UKIP supporters, you Liberal Democrats, you anti-Brown Socialists - vote other than Conservative understanding what you do.  For, though of course Cameron is not perfectly what you would hope (what is, in practical life?) a vote for other than the Conservatives is a vote for the following scenario:

How to convince undecided voters in target seats on the economy

The election seems likely to be fought - at least on a national level - predominantly on the economy. However, it will be won or lost in the 117 marginal seats we need to win in order to gain an overall majority; and it will be won or lost on the decisions of swing voters in those constituencies.

So we need messages on the economy that will convince such people on the doors to vote Conservative, messages that are personal to voters own immediate circumstances.

To help those trying to win those 117+ seats I’d like to invite readers to make suggestions of simple one-liners that will be meaningful to ordinary people who are as yet undecided voters, many of whom will never have voted Conservative before.

I’ll kick off with two I tried yesterday morning in a Labour held target seat:

 "The first thousand pounds of income tax you pay - just goes to pay the interest on the debt the Labour government have run up."

and

"The entire amount of income tax paid by people earning £11,000 a year or less (such as teaching assistants and care workers) now just goes on paying the interest on the debt the Labour government have run up"

(For the record - interest on government debt is now £43 billion a year - which is more than our total defence spending of £40 billion and nearly twice our transport spending of £22 billion).

Please post your suggestions below - and indicate whether you have actually tried them among swing voters – thanks!

David Heathcoat-Amory: My response to Power 2010

David Heathcoat-Amory, the Conservative MP for Wells, follows Philip Davies and Daniel Kawczynski in responding to the accusation from Power 2010 that he is an MP who is "failing democracy".

Power 2010 alleges that I block democratic reform and attack civil liberties. This is untrue. I have constantly stood for personal freedom, limited government and parliamentary rights against rule from Brussels.

The Power 2010 campaign is exclusively funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, which has given nearly £5 million to the Liberal Democrats, and whose Director is contributing to a book called, Why Vote Liberal Democrat.

This campaign is therefore a front for the Liberal Democrats. If the campaign was really about democracy, it would ask why some MPs and parties broke their clear election promise to support a referendum on the EU Treaty. But of course that would embarrass the Liberal Democrats, so it is not included.

If Power 2010 really wants to reform politics, they could start with themselves, and end these negative, inaccurate and partisan attacks funded by a rich Foundation.

President Lula: a sorry embarrassment to Brazil

As a Brazilian, I raise a wry smile whenever I read the grandiose predictions of many commentators that the country is somehow on the verge of great diplomatic power and influence   This is, as we’d say in Portuguese, a “porcaria”.

The reason is fairly simple: the behaviour and foreign policy of President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva. 

Allow me to share with you some examples of the President's behaviour...

On a recent visit to the Middle East, Lula enraged Israeli government officials by donning a keffiyeh and visting the tomb of Yasser Arafat in Ramallah only hours after refusing to visit the grave of the founder of the Zionist movement Theodore Herzl.  He used the same trip as an opportunity to praise the "courage" and "bravery" of the PLO's leaders.

Last year, the former metal-worker took the time to share with Gordon Brown his theory that the global financial crisis was "fostered and boosted by people that are white, blue-eyed" and boasted of his intention to bring about a "spicy" G20 summit.

In the hours following the ousting of corrupt Honduran President Manuel Zeleya, Lula insisted he be given sanctuary in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa; a move which resulted in widespread violence and worst rioting the country has ever seen.

Having hosted red-carpet banquets at the Palácio do Planalto for the likes of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, Lula has now acquired a new best friend in the form of Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

Following a state visit last year in which Lula naively praised Ahmadinejad’s efforts to pursue the “enrichment of uranium to produce nuclear energy”, the President of the world’s fourth largest democracy has now unveiled details of a two-day visit to Tehran to take place in May.  His announcement has already rightly drawn criticism from the United States and many European Union heads of government.

Lula’s 2002 Presidential challenger and incumbent Sao Paulo Governor Jose Serra, commenting on Ahmadinejad’s visit to Brazil, put it right:

"Is this the President of the same country that tried to provide security and comfort to victims of the Holocaust extends honors those who trivialize the absolute evil? I am uncomfortable that Brazil has received the head of a dictatorial and repressive regime.

"After all, we have a past history of struggle against dictatorship and we enshrined the ideals of democracy and human rights into our 1988 Constitution.  It is one thing to have diplomatic relations with dictatorships but another to invite their leaders to stay in your home.

"Democracy and human rights are indivisible and must be secured everywhere in the world. It is inconsistent to act as if these values lose importance depending on how far away from Brzil the country in question is.  Lula's actions dishonour the memory of those who gave their lives to fight the dictatorship in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and trivialise the sacrifices made by those tortured and condemned to death in Iran. 

"It is 25 years ago this month that we celebrated 25 years since the of the end of dictatorship and the beginning of the new Brazilian Republic.

"Ahmadinejad is known for being a notorious Holocaust denier; an event which brought about the evil extermination of millions of human beings just for being Jewish. Thousands were massacred because they were Gypsies, homosexuals and people with disabilities.

"Brazil is proud to have received many of the survivors of this heinous crime, which cannot be forgotten nor forgiven, much less denied.  The values of democracy, human rights and tolerance are embodied in our Constitution and are the authentic expression of will way of the Brazilian people"

Lula’s behaviour has consistently dishonoured and discredited Brazil’s standing in the international community – from his misguided foreign policy to his personal contributions to the endemic culture of corruption which grips Brazil.

The charge sheet against Lula is long and varied; from the Mensalão scandal in which Congressman were paid bribes of more than US$10,000 per month from the advertising budgets of state-owned companies to support government polices to the US$6,000 fine handed down by the Supreme Court on Friday for misuse of the President’s office for party-political purposes.

Having failed to find support amongst the political establishment for the removal of the country's eight-year Presidential term limit, Lula will finally leave office on January 1st 2011.

Jose Serra will face Lula's Chief of Staff Dilma Rousseff in the first round of voting on Sunday 3rd October.

Europe must feature prominently in the Election campaign

I know the Party hierarchy didn't want it to.  I know they (wrongly) regarded it as a distraction.  I know they hoped to rest on the substance of their excellent European policy, believing (vainly) that the Party would be patient with them and they wouldn't have to deal with the issue for five or ten years.  But now they are out of options and they are out of time.

Europe needs a new mechanism of economic governance.  That was always an inevitable part of the euro project, an inevitable stage in the development of the Single European State.  And that's a good thing, and a necessary thing.  The problems with Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and so on illustrate that the lack of economic governance mechanisms creates perverse incentives for governments and leaves the French and German taxpayer carrying the burden when things go wrong.  The Germans have now recognised and accepted this.  So we shall have a new Treaty.

Changing rising hours vs changing the clocks

Tobias Ellwood this morning floats that old chestnut about moving the clocks forward an hour permanently.  It remains as daft an idea as it ever was, for one very simple reason: the time tells us something about the light, and if he wants us all, permanently, to move our days forward an hour, then we should all just get up an hour earlier.

Gizza job!

Geoff Hoon was on the Today programme this morning.  James Naughtie set out the charge list against him:

• That, as a retiring MP, he knowingly and deliberately spoke to a company that approached him about the possibility of his doing some work for them after the Election. (How awful!)
• That he contemplated advising a foreign firm on taking over poorly performing European defence firms. (Appalling!)

• Worse than that, that the firm in question was a US private equity fund! (Wicked!)

• That he suggested in his job interview that his past experience might leave him well-placed to offer strategic advice concerning which firms might be best to take over and how their business models might be improved. (Incredible!)

• That he spoke in confident and decisive terms to his interviewers, painting himself and the relevance of his experience in a positive light and suggesting that he would be a committed worker - employing terms such as "[After the Election is called,] I'm yours." (I can barely write, I so shake with anger!)

• Worst of all, that he didn't seem to have been thinking, in a conversation he thought was private, about the possibility that voters might regard the actions above as reflecting an unacceptable interest in money when he should have been devoting every minute of his day to their needs without thought for his own return.  (<Rendered speechless>)

After such a dastardly set of acts, surely suspension from the Labour Party is far too generous.  Something more drastic might be called for...

Daniel Kawczynski MP: A response to Power 2010

Further to Philip Davies' piece this morning, Shrewsbury and Atcham MP Daniel Kawczynski responds to Power 2010's targeting him as an MP who is "failing democracy".

One of the most important advantages of elections is that they regularly stimulate debate, offering people the opportunity to learn more about issues which will affect them and their families.  Given the dreadful effects of Gordon Brown's recession, most people I meet on the doorstep are talking about jobs, training, education and their overall financial security, particularly in old age.  But other issues should not be neglected, which is why I welcome the interest an organisation called Power 2010 has shown in this constituency and my own views on three issues important to them: our electoral system, the House of Lords and trust in politics.

While a "WANTED" poster featuring my picture may not fully set out their views on these subjects, I thought it would be helpful to share my views on each of them more fully. Their campaign has heartened me greatly as we have had so many calls from constituents rallying to our cause as a result of seeing their negative campaign. I don’t think that Power 2010 have realised that people are sick and tiered of negative campaigning but instead want to hear positive debating about what people believe in without attacking others for their views. This organisation is funded by Lib Dem activists in London and as we all know Lib Dems are not always the most honourable of opponents.

Power 2010 have not singled me out to campaign against after evaluating my local hard work for constituents or the hundreds of different causes I have promoted in Parliament over the last five years on behalf of my constituents. Instead, this London-based lobby group want local voters to throw me out because I am against an elected House of Lords and I am Chairman of the All Party group for the promotion of First Past the Post.

More for less in the NHS

By Thomas Cawston, Researcher, Reform

With perfect timing, the British Medical Journal devoted this week’s issue to ideas on how to cut the NHS budget.  Clinicians, managers and patients put forward ideas to save money at the same time as improving patient care.  The best ideas were:

• Keep patients out of hospitals, as a new report from Reform argued last week.  The poor management of patient referrals and slow discharge can keep patients in hospitals for weeks more than necessary.  This is expensive and bad for patients.  Professor Adam Timmis, a consultant cardiologist at Barts and the London Hospital argues that rather than keeping a patient in bed for four weeks waiting for a consultation from a social worker, the patient could receive the consultation at home: “every day spent in hospital is a disaster as patients lose their independence and are at risk of hospital acquired infections."  And according to Carl Heneghan of Oxford University “40 per cent of walk-in patients to accident and emergency could be seen and managed by GPs”

• Help patients help themselves.  Graham Rich, former Chief Executive of University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust,  argues that the NHS still makes patients dependent on doctors and hospitals. Greater focus on self care and patient networks is vital, especially for people with long term conditions such as diabetes: “A lot of people with chronic conditions, who are the heaviest users of the NHS, benefit from practical and emotional support from others about how to cope and live with their conditions.”
  

• Make clinicians accountable. Both Graham Rich and Jonathan Fielden, an intensive care consultant, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, make the case for service line management, where clinicians are organised into self governing units. This makes gives doctors autonomy to deliver improvements in quality care and make spending decisions transparent. Service line management can “improve consistency of care, decrease unnecessary treatments, and investigations and bring better value for money.”

• Use IT.  As many of the clinicians claim, waste is endemic in the NHS. Dr Smellie, a consultant pathologist at County Durham and Darlington Acute Hosptials NHS Trust, suggests that 30 per cent of NHS tests could be avoided. Many of these are repeat tests because results have got lost or patients have demanded to be retested.

• Cut the payroll.  As Phil Leonard, a Senior Manager at Ernst & Young,  recognises, the inescapable truth is that “the greatest cost in NHS organisations is people, and reducing the payroll has to be part of the response”. He goes on to argue: “Perhaps predictably in a large system like the NHS, the productivity of employees, including clinicians, varies widely. Many doctors, nurses, and other professionals work extremely hard; however, others do not. Almost every hospital at which I have worked has used internal benchmarks to analyse the work of professional staff. Without exception, they show differences in performance. A combination of pay related to performance, more reporting transparency, and focused training programmes should be used to ensure that the NHS, in paying staff more money, receives the benefits of a consistently high rate of output.”

Giving evidence to the Health Select Committee yesterday, Andrew Haldenby argued that the cost-cutting ideas are well understood in the NHS (which is why managers are confused by the Conservative pledge to ring fence the services’ funding).  He argued that what is left is to make managers properly accountable for performance and value for money (particularly managers in Primary Care Trusts who control most of the resources of the services) so that they actually implement those ideas.

He proposed giving patients choice of PCT as a basic step.  That would encourage managers to deliver on their responsibility for changing NHS services in the interests of patients instead of sticking with the status quo as politicians often urge them to do.

How much would cancelling the NIC rise cost?

By Dr Patrick Nolan, Chief Economist, Reform

Earlier today Jonathan Isaby posted on the cost of cancelling the rise in national insurance contributions (NICs). This follows news that the Conservative party may pledge to halt on the 1 per cent rise in NICs. Halting the rise in these taxes is a policy that Reform has previously supported; indeed we have proposed going further and cutting these taxes through eliminating the exemptions in the VAT base. As we noted in Reality check the NICs increase will be a job killer and this approach of raising taxes on jobs is astonishing given a rise in unemployment of 22 per cent in the last year.

Reform has estimated the cost of cancelling the NIC rise and these follow (the estimates below are static only, so do not account for behavioural changes, and are thus likely to overstate the costs of halting this increase). These estimates are based on the Reform tax calculator which, unlike the Treasury’s ready reckoner, allows the revenue effect of changes to both rates and thresholds to be calculated. This is important as the government’s proposals are to both:

• Increase the employee primary rates (of 11% and 1%) and the employers’ primary rate (of 12.8%) by 1%; and
• Increase the primary threshold (currently £110 per week) to around £135. PBR 2008 proposed increasing this threshold to around £125 per week (equivalent to the level of the personal allowance) and this was taken further in PBR 2009 to help offset the increase in national insurance contribution rates for lower income workers.

Taken together these proposals are estimated to increase tax revenue by around £6.7 billion, not the £10 billion noted by some.

Thus, any proposals to halt the increase in national insurance contribution rates also need to consider whether to change the primary threshold (the income at which these contributions start being paid). Keeping the primary threshold at the current level of £110 would mean that halting the increase in the contribution rates would be more affordable, but would also mean that some lower income workers would face a higher overall national insurance bill than under current government plans.

This discussion highlights that governments have choices when it comes to setting different tax rates and thresholds – and when evaluating these choices it is important to see how the system as a whole impacts on families and government finances. Using the Reform tax calculator you can develop your own plans for reforming the income tax and national insurance system – so, if you think that taxes on jobs should be lower, how would you approach this reform?

Broken Records

Big Brother Watch has released new research today which shows that that there are at least 101,272 non-medical personnel with access to confidential medical records in 140 NHS Acute Trusts in Britain and Northern Ireland.

Fifty-four Trusts (predominantly the larger ones) failed to provide an answer to our Freedom of Information request, suggesting that the final figure could be as high as 140,000 NHS workers who are able to access records but are not directly involved in patient care.

I accept that some of these people will sometimes need access to some of our records, and that some loss of privacy is innate to the medical process. But those responsible for our health also have a responsibility for the protection of the private information accrued during that provision. The Department of Health (rightly) states that only those directly providing patient care should have access to that information - the Trusts are interpreting that widely enough to give access (without reference to the patient or doctor) to admin staff, porters, IT staff, receptionists and secretaries.

Everyone knows that the NHS wants to introduce the "Summary Care Record" which would make access to our files easier to people with an NHS pass across the nation. Figures like those we've revealed today will hardly fill people with confidence about that.

Their administrative convenience must not be allowed to trump our privacy.

TPA Post-Budget briefing and book launch

This morning, we held our first Post-Budget Briefing and the launch for our new book How to Cut Public Spending (and Still Win an Election).  The presentation and a brief guide to what all the eight speakers had to say is available over at the TPA website.

The big picture is that the Government have utterly failed to set out a credible plan to deal with the crisis in the public finances.  If you want to find out more about how politicians can cut spending and deal with the deficit, then put down the Budget report and read our book.  You can download the Powerpoint on our site, with plenty of interesting graphs to get your teeth into.  Here are just a few of the interesting findings:

Breaking down the Operational Efficiencies Programme

William Norton's analysis shows that the areas making the biggest savings are the Department of Heath and the NHS, local government and education.  So much for the idea that you can't cut spending on schools and hospitals.  But, despite all the material out yesterday, he also finds that more than half of the mooted £11 billion savings still aren't identified:

Lebedev buys The Independent - will he make Greg Dyke editor?

It has been confirmed this afternoon that Russian billionnaire Alexander Lebedev has bought The Independent and Independent on Sunday to add to the Evening Standard, which he purchased last year.

It was rumoured several weeks ago and I am hearing the suggestion as loudly this afternoon as then from Fleet Street sources, that the new owner wants to install Greg Dyke as editor of the paper, which would raise potentially interesting questions over the paper's editorial line.

Dyke did of course publicly join the Lib Dems in the afternath of the Iraq war, having been a Labour GLC candidate in the 1970s and donor to Labour in the 1990s, before he joined the BBC as director-general.

However, his anti-Conservative feeling should not be under-estimated: he lives in Vince Cable's constituency of Twickenham in south west London and told me before he joined the Lib Dems that he had been voting for them for years as he was voting tactically against the Conservatives in a seat where Labour had no chance of winning...

> Earlier in the month Tim wondered whether The Indepenski would give the Tories a fairer deal

Alistair Darling on reducing the deficit

On 29 July 1997, Alistair Darling said: “The Government have also introduced measures to begin a programme to reduce the deficit—the massive debt—that we inherited because of the outgoing Conservative Government's mismanagement of the economy. It is necessary to reduce debt if we are to secure the stable platform that the country needs to build for the future.”

How wrong he was back then on reducing the deficit and how times change. As David Cameron made clear yesterday – in 1997, debt was £350 billion – now it is getting on for £860 billion. In 1997 Labour inherited a £6 billion deficit – today it is £167 billion. In 1997 we were ranked seventh in the world for competitiveness – now we are 13th. Gordon Brown once said he’d abolished boom and bust, but has actually given us the longest and deepest recession since records began. This Budget was a nonsense.

Body scanners are not a panacea for airport security

The Commons Home Affairs Select Committee has just issued a report lambasting the government for its timid stance on airport body scanners, which the committee says are essential to fighting the threat of terrorism. The report accused ministers of taking a laissez-faire attitude to security and 'waiting for terrorists to demonstrate their new capabilities before implementing improved security measures.'

The danger of terrorist attacks against commercial airliners is omnipresent. This was demonstrated again last Christmas when a Nigerian extremist tried to blow up a flight from Europe to America. The urgency – some would even call it hysteria – that surrounds the debate about keeping us safe in the air have further fuelled calls for body scanners to be used at airport security. However, I'm not convinced that they are the panacea that many claim them to be.

At the moment there are two types of body scanners available for walk-through in airports: the millimetre wave scanner that uses terahertz radiation and the backscatter system that uses X-rays.

As a former NHS doctor I am well aware of the risks of regular exposure to X-rays – particularly for pregnant women and children – and I cannot see how such scanners comply with the public authorities' duty to avoid causing harm to people. I also believe such scanners may violate EU law under the Euratom treaty, which forbids the use of compulsory ionising radiation for non-medical purposes on humans. Certainly the European Parliament has rightly resisted attempts to introduce body scanners on an EU-wide basis.

Meanwhile, the effects of terahertz radiation, although non-ionising, are less well-known but potentially no less damaging. These scanners create a full image of the naked body, thereby potentially violating a citizen's right to privacy under EU law. On the same day that the select committee's report was published, newspapers reported that an airport worker had received a police warning and faced disciplinary action for ogling a female colleague as she passed through a body scanner.

Moreover, scientific experts have expressed concerns that repeated exposure to terahertz radiation may significantly affect the natural dynamics of DNA, and thereby influence intricate molecular processes involved in gene expression and DNA replication. You don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to understand how serious that could be when an entire population is being exposed.

Personally I believe that airport body scanners should not be introduced until more research has been done on their safety. We should also wait until scanners become available that do not use electromagnetic radiation but instead rely on much safer ultrasound technology. Body scanners remain potentially an important tool in the fight against terrorism, and no-one more than me wants to see that fight succeed. But it's unlikely that terrorism will ever be completely defeated, and we know how resourceful these fanatics can be. They will start to ingest or insert explosives in their back passages!

One particularly alarming development I read about was the case of a Saudi prince who narrowly escaped being blown up by an al-Qaeda terrorist who had swallowed a tiny amount of explosive and was able to detonate it with a mobile phone. This demonstrates the chilling reality of terrorism, whose proponents will always find new ways of killing. How long before their cunning renders body scanners obsolete?

To my mind, the safest way of checking an airline passenger at security remains an individual full body search (i.e. more than a pat-down if necessary) by a security officer. When I say I think it's the safest way, I mean that it's the safest way for the passenger and also the most likely way in which anomalies can be discovered and acted upon.

Body scanners, if proven to be safe and legal, could be a voluntary option alongside the alternative of personal body searches. Perhaps passengers could be processed through security more rapidly if they voluntarily opt for a body scan rather than a personal body search. But we should always have the option of whether to enter a body scanner: they should never be compulsory. Passengers should be informed of the theoretical small risks associated with body scanning. The government's outrageous no-fly policy for those who refuse a scan should be categorically rejected.

The Conservative Party in recent years has sought to position itself as the party that defends civil liberties. Personally speaking, I hope that if we return to government at the forthcoming election we will manage to retain a sense of proportion about body scanners, and that we can hold up this issue to scrutiny from perspectives other than that adopted by the select committee.

Finally, notwithstanding concerns about civil liberties, we should be prepared to adopt a more realistic and less absolutist approach to the idea of intelligent profiling and full risk assessment of passengers. This rigorous method has been proved to be effective and is employed by El Al, which, despite being a major target for terrorists has managed to avoid an attack for several decades. A Conservative government might wish to reconsider this option.