CentreRight

This election is about the economy

This election is about one thing: the economy.  Forget about fine-tuning the message, or looking for hunks of red meat; forget about the grid of daily policy announcements; forget about whacky alternative agendas like it’s all about local stuff or the nature of democracy. Politicians and journalists have to find something to say each day, but there’s just one solid issue that dominates this election, and it’s the same old one as usual: how secure do people feel about the future? How competent do the leaders seem for dealing with the hazards ahead?

As a pollster, I’m often asked who will win, as if maybe I have access to some secret numbers. There are no known numbers that predict the future, unfortunately; all we can see is that as some numbers move, others move in harmony, and we guess those are related. As confidence in the economy increased,  Labour’s perceived competence went up too, and the Conservative lead shrank. It seems reasonable to suppose one thing drove the other.

All the fuss about Brown’s bullying and Ashcroft’s millions have made no difference to the opinion polls.  This isn’t, I think - as Danny Finkelstein suggests - because people now have a different relationship to the political establishment: it has always been the case that the things which obsess politicos are barely perceived by the voters, and valued even less. Maybe people today are more cynical than before, but they’ve always been wise to the irrelevance of professional message-tweaking. It may seem an affront to those who spend every hour worrying about these things, but the political class has very little control over its world.

People feel the economy – the environment in which they daily struggle to stay ahead - got a little better but is still highly fragile. It makes them nervous; it makes them unsure whether they really do want change or not. Elections turn around stable heuristics, not complex analysis. Labour seems to have decided that the appropriate message is, “we are competent, the others are inexperienced and unreliable”. The Conservatives have plumped for, “If you do want change, we are safe, and you don’t have to hold your noses when you vote for us.” Seems sensible on both sides. There’s probably not a lot else they can do.

Well, there is one thing. While neither voters nor politicians seem too interested in having an enlightened policy debate, nevertheless the fact is that the winner will still have to have a plan for what they do after May 6th. I’m pleased by the growing evidence of behind-the-scenes deep thinking at CCHQ on the challenges ahead (readers of CH will know of my enthusiasm for the PBA stuff, for example), but don’t expect that to play much of a role in the campaign.

Unknown EU Foreign Minister Wants Her Own Airplane Now

The absurdity of appointing a never-elected, inexperienced, politically correct bureaucrat as the EU’s first foreign minister is slowly coming back to haunt Brussels. With less than 100 days in office, Catherine Ashton has fluctuated between Brussels’ laughing stock and its resident scapegoat. Criticized by even the most ardent of EU supranationalists, it has emerged that Baroness Ashton has received a letter from the UK Foreign Minister with some rather pointed advice for the world’s highest paid female politician.

Instead of knuckling down and getting on with her highly-paid job, Baroness Ashton has astonished even the greediest of Brussels’ bureaucrats by claiming she is being held back by not having her own airplane. Apparently, the Spanish EU Presidency thinks that Baroness Ashton should not have to share a plane with the French Foreign Minister, with whom she flew to an EU conference last week. She deserves her own Air Force I to compete with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Other EU elites are claiming that the European Commission is holding Baroness Ashton back by unfairly hanging on to resources and responsibilities in trade, aid and development. However, the Lisbon Treaty left the division of foreign policymaking responsibilities ill-defined among its actors, which now include five people who call themselves “President” within the EU’s institutions. It was entirely predictable that European Commission President José Manuel Barroso would attempt to control EU foreign policy by stealth.

It took eight years of tortuous negotiations, bullying and cajoling for the EU to formally pass the Lisbon Treaty which created the new EU foreign minister’s post. But it has taken just three months to unravel. And while completely out of her depth, Baroness Ashton is not solely to blame. The Lisbon Treaty has created several additional layers of EU bureaucracy to one of the world’s least efficient organizations, and added a twenty eighth European foreign minister for Washington to deal with. Rather than bring anything more to the table, the Lisbon Treaty has just created more headaches for the world to come to terms with and Baroness Ashton is just one of many.

The Guardian faces commercial ruin if the Tories win

Marc Glendening is Campaign Director of the Democracy Movement.

Never has a newspaper had such a powerful motive to destroy a political party.

Everyone expects The Guardian to back Labour.  It is, after all, Britain's pre-eminent left-of-centre broadsheet.  Nevertheless, the paper's coverage of the party political skirmishing during this phoney war period is astonishingly partisan. No opportunity to attack and undermine the Conservatives is passed up.  No allegation is too crude or unfair to merit an airing.  This propagandistic approach has reached its apotheosis with the Ashcroft affair: all papers have dealt with the subject but, even after a week of banner headlines, the Guardian still leads on it this morning, willingly projecting Lord Mandelson's hypocritcal spin across the front page.

Why the hysteria?  The answer, I'm afraid, does the Guardian no credit.  The motive is money, as an article in the Telegraph last year made starkly clear:

"A change in Government after next year’s general election is likely to be disastrous for the Guardian’s revenue from public sector job adverts, on which it has long depended, as the Conservatives have strongly hinted they will save money by moving much of the advertising online."

Senior executives at the Guardian and its parent company, the Scott Trust, have long been aware of this threat to their financial viability.  George Osborne made clear his intention to end the disgraceful waste of public money on advertising jobs in newspapers as long ago as 2006.

The Guardian never ceases to point out that Murdoch-owned papers have a commercial interest in undermining the BBC.  Perhaps the same health warning should apply to the Guardian's coverage of the Conservative Party.

Harman's Equality Laws

So here’s a question; how many minority groups do you have to list in an Equalities Bill before you have listed everybody in the country?

And could one not cover it rather by writing a law or laws saying that you’re not allowed to discriminate unfairly against anyone?  A bit like what we already have perhaps?

Valuing women is not a feminist issue - it's a democratic one.

2020health.org has today, on International Women's Day,  published our Manifesto for Health. Called 'What Women Want' it features 17 female authors writing about their hopes for health from the next Government. They are all writing in personal capacities, but one GP who happens to be the President of the Royal College of GPs is featured in the Daily Mail today. Prue Leith writes about the importance of nutrition, Su-Anna Boddy writes as the fist ever mother on the council of the Royal College of Surgeons, Baroness Jill Pitkeathley writes about the importance of elderly care and physiotherapist of the year Nicola Hunter highlights what community based physio could deliver - to name but a few.

Publicly valuing the contribution of women is crucial to freedom and democracy. If freedom is to be sustainable it is not about having choice per se, but about making the right choices. And to make the right choices we need the full picture - which is partly enabled by having both male and female perspectives. Decisions then have an enhanced legitimacy and could well be more effective.

Some feminists have got feminism a bad name which is a real shame because who could disagree with the egalitarian principles of social, political and economic equality for women? Yet when it comes to policy, recent all-male or male dominated publications and events, inexcusable in a democracy, have demonstrated that women are still not being given enough opportunities to be heard. We hope this publication will go someway to redressing the balance.

Reducing the Public Sector headcount will not be economically inefficient

There is an interesting quote from Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian:

There was a fascinating analysis in a Compass report last autumn, In Place of Cuts, on how much money the government saves by axing a £25,000 public sector employee. After you've calculated for all the lost income tax and national insurance contributions, and then factored in all the benefits this sacked employee would receive on jobseeker's allowance, guess the grand total saved? Less than £2,000. And that is before one tries to put a figure on the wider social costs of unemployment – depression, rise in illness, risk of long-term withdrawal from the labour market. It's a no-brainer.

Such arguments are heard regularly in private sector settings.  For example, at the time of the withdrawal of BMW from the Longbridge plant in 2000, there were a number of arguments for government subsidy on the grounds that the cost of supporting workers in unemployment, the lost tax revenues, and so on outweighed the costs of subsidy.

But the claim is quite wrong, and fundamentally confused, nothing more than a classic canard.  For the key gain to the economy is ignored in the calculation, namely the value of the output the worker will produce if she finds new employment doing something that adds, rather than destroys value.  The same is true of the capital employed in the worthless enterprise – machines, plant, land.  By being re-directed from activities that produce less value than they use up, such capital can become productive again.

Many parts of the public sector are pathologically unproductive.  Public sector productivity actually contracted over the decade from 1997-2007, by 3.4%, whilst productivity in the rest of the economy rose by nearly 28%.  The scope for public sector staff to be redirected into more productive private sector activities amounts to the order of one half of their total output (public sector workers, if re-employed in the private sector, might produce half as much again as they currently do in the public sector, simply by working at private sector productivity norms) – a huge potential gain.

Identifying over-manning and cutting down on excess staff will obviously not be a pleasant experience for those that have to find new jobs, but it will not be economically inefficient in the way Compass and Bunting claim.

Andrew Lilico is the Chief Economist of Policy Exchange

The Conservative technology revolution

The Conservatives' technology revolution has been written up in www.wired.co.uk, although it is only available in the hard copy magazine. Written by James Crabtree, who is more usually to be found writing for Prospect Magazine, the article provides an interesting overview of the widespread changes that technology has made to Conservative campaigning. It reviews the effort the party leadership has put into embracing what technology can offer and the excellent CCHQ operation led by Rishi Saha and Sam Coates. It also looks at how this impacts on candidates in the field - which meant an interesting day of James following me around the Dover & Deal doorsteps!

 

Reading this, it makes you realise just how much things have changed in the last few years. We now have facebook, twitter, serious campaign websites, photo galleries, youtube and deep campaign outreach on the internet. Labour have been working hard at catch up, yet the early planning ahead on the Conservative side has paid off in harnessing technology for campaigning. It is predictable that Labour commentators like Progress' Jessica Asato and Labourlist's Alex Smith seek to belittle the Conservative efforts, yet a real achievement has been made. And on the "unofficial" side, the impact of the Conservative blogosphere cannot be underestimated - as we readers of this site know only too well. However, even with all this technology, there is no alternative to the foot slog of door knocking, leaflets and getting the vote out on the day.

 

The harnessing of technology in campaigning has been a transformation. Yet the Conservatives plan a technology revolution in Government. The "post bureaucratic age" agenda will have a dramatic effect on Government at a number of levels. This term is quite hard to explain on the doorstep! So I have taken to describing this agenda as Government for the people, by the people and of the people - where everyone can have more of a say in what goes on in their communities and on what Government does more generally. The response to this is enthusiastic. The people . . . really have had enough of hectoring Government and want to have more of a say about what goes on.

Repentance and reform are always possible

I declare an interest in Jon Venables.  For the first five years they were in prison, I prayed daily (aside from personal failures) for the welfare, repentance and reform of Venables and his partner in crime Robert Thompson.  They were eventually released in June 2001.  Venables is now back in prison.  At the time of writing, it is not public knowledge what he has now done - perhaps that will have changed by the time you read this.

Doubtless many people will suggest that if Venables is imprisoned once more (and especially if it turns out that he has committed some serious crime) that will prove that he should never have been released.  I do not propose to consider the arguments behind his release in 2001, or indeed to consider his case specifically at all.  My interest is slightly different.  I wish to dispute a certain thought that I believe lies behind some of this discussion, namely the idea that those that commit certain crimes prove that it can never be safe to release them.

Did the Today programme decide that day six of the Ashcroft story was a bigger story than day one of the military chiefs' attack on Brown for dissembling?

Iain makes a good point in the frontpage comments thread:

The editorial choice:

Which story does the BBC put in its prime slot at 8.10 am on the Today programme?

A Prime Minister accused by military top brass of dissembling, or the Ashcroft story that they have covered on the hour, every hour, of every day of the last week...?

You know the answer. Today did cover the military chiefs' attack on Brown but only after they'd flogged the Ashcroft story one more time in that 8.10am slot.

Re: Tax rises are inevitable - the debate should be about the least worst option

There are a few arguments I want to respond to in Lucy Parsons post about Reform's report on tax policy.

"Canada provides a good rule of thumb. The1995 Budget included CA$7 in spending reductions for every CA$1 increase in tax revenues.  The result was public support for the process of restoring the public finances – as the burden was on government getting its own house in order rather than placing the burden on taxpayers."

Canada has arguably the most decentralised system of public finances in the developed world.  Sub-central government accounts for over 60 per cent of spending against under 30 per cent here and that is largely paid for locally.  The real Canadian success stories in the mid-1990s were in the provinces.  For our upcoming book How to cut public spending and win an election (set to be published by Biteback on March 31st), Tasha Kheiriddin and Scott Hennig have written a superb chapter about the experience in Ontario - Canada's most populous province - and Alberta - the most populous and fastest growing of the prairie provinces.  They set out how robust governments "not only campaigned on a promise of tax relief, balanced budgets and smaller government, but delivered on those promises."

It is because we constantly update that we remain reliably accurate

There have been a number of misguided comments recently about supposed ‘strange new weightings’ by YouGov: Anthony Wells of UKPollingReport and YouGov has just posted this detailed account for those of you who want to dig deep into the methodology.

I do wonder at some of the comments that have been made. Why would we do anything except to improve the robustness of the methodology? It’s worth pointing out: we are accurate precisely because, as a panel-based pollster, we are able to see exactly what’s happening to our samples and to make adjustments to our methods accordingly. It is because we constantly update that we remain reliably accurate. Remember, pollsters went horribly wrong back in 1992 because they refused to improve their methods in the face of change.

Stephan Shakespeare, CEO of YouGov.

Recognising marriage in the tax system is bad policy

By Dr Patrick Nolan, Chief Economist, Reform

Lucy Parsons has written on CentreRight explaining how, given the appalling state of the public finances, it is time to take a fresh look at tax policy. Tax rises are an inevitable, although unwelcome (as comments on her article highlight), reality – with revenues needing to increases to reduce the deficit and to remind the electorate that the reckless public spending increases of recent years have to be paid for. But, as Lucy notes, tax rises must be held to a minimum (indeed Reform argues that rises must be lower than those proposed by all of the main political parties, including the Conservatives) and should be coupled with reductions in the most harmful taxes (such as National Insurance and the 50p rate).

Lucy also criticised the Conservative party policy of tax breaks for married couples. This may surprise some readers of this blog as there is a view that the UK, along with Mexico and Turkey, is one of only three countries that makes no recognition of marriage in the tax system. But this claim that the UK largely stands alone among industrialised countries in not recognising marriage is quite simply wrong.

There are a host of other countries that make no recognition of marriage in their tax systems at all, including New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Greece and Hungary. Since the 1970s the clear direction of travel in tax systems has been to move away from family taxation. In relation to income taxes, for example, in 1970 it was possible to assess income taxes on a family basis in two thirds OECD countries, but in the 21th Century this has (quite rightly) fallen to around a third (and is continuing to fall).

Yet just because there is a growing international consensus against doing so does not automatically mean that recognising marriage in the tax system is wrong. It could be that this policy is right and governments in most industrialised countries are getting it wrong. But any rigorous assessment shows that this is not the case – plans to recognise marriage are poorly designed policy.

Lucy Parsons: Tax rises are inevitable - the debate should be about the least worst option

By Lucy Parsons, Senior Economics Researcher, Reform

Yesterday, Mark Hoban sacrificed breakfast to come and talk at a Reform event on tax.  For those readers unsure as to whether tax is something that would make them get out of bed early, Reform’s new report may give you a reason to think again.  The reality is that the scale of the public finances crisis is so great that tax rises are inevitable whatever the outcome of the election.

Indeed, taxes are already going up.  The Government’s proposals for the fiscal tightening are to raise about one pound in three from taxes.  George Osborne’s plans would mean around one pound in five.  Reform has argued for a smaller burden to fall on taxes.  Canada provides a good rule of thumb. The1995 Budget included CA$7 in spending reductions for every CA$1 increase in tax revenues.  The result was public support for the process of restoring the public finances – as the burden was on government getting its own house in order rather than placing the burden on taxpayers.  Applying this to the UK would mean extra taxes of around £12 billion, equivalent to £500 per family per year.

The honest debate that needs to be had is about how to raise this extra money.  The Government plans to raise £9.3 billion from the 50p rate and a 1 per cent increase in National Insurance Contributions from April 2011.  At a time when unemployment grew by 22 per cent in the last year, putting up taxes on labour is the most economically damaging way to go about it.  A recent CIPD/KPMG survey showed that one in eight employers was planning to recruit fewer staff because of the NICs increase.  FTSE 100 chairmen have described the 50p rate to Reform as the tipping point that stops the UK looking like a country that wants to attract business.

These are bad policies which should be abolished or reversed immediately.  The Opposition are wrong not to commit to doing this.  Tax policy is about choices.  There are far better ways that government can collect more revenue.

Lifting the Lid

Big Brother Watch has published new research today, revealing the rising number of microchips installed by councils in our rubbish bins, and why it matters.

The number of local councils placing microchips in bins has increased 62% in the past year, despite the fact that only one council has volunteered to trial the Government’s ‘pay-as-you-throw’ scheme.

My fear is that councils are waiting until the public aren’t watching to begin surveillance on our waste habits, intruding into people’s private lives and introducing punitive taxes on what we throw away.

Tell me what you think in the comments - but my feeling is that the British public doesn’t want this technology, these fines or this intrusion. If local authorities have no intention to monitor our waste then they should end the surreptitious installation of bin microchips.

Why the Conservative Party wants to be in charge - Part II: The Answer

What I shall offer is not what I'd have had as our positioning or our why.  But it is where we are.

Here's our pitch, our positioning, our call to the voters:

Change or ruin; transformation or despair.

Here's why we want to be in charge:

Why the Conservative Party wants to be in charge - Part I: The Question

In my next post, I intend to tell you why the Conservative Party wants to be in charge.  But first, in this post, let's understand what an answer to that question should consist in, and how it should arise for a political Party in the run-up to a General Election.  Here's how you do it right:  from "The Blair-Mandelson-Campbell playbook", written by New Labour.

School of despair

According to the Hackney Gazette, twelve Hackney primary schools

are lending year six pupils Nintendo DS consoles to play brain training games under a new Learning Trust pilot scheme.

So you're one of the most deprived boroughs in London, with one of the worst sets of educational outcomes, and the consequent blight on life chances. (Remember the Hackney teacher who had to put up with being called a Racist C***? I heard from her recently - she's moved to a 'nicer' area. Another talented teacher gives up trying to cope with this borough's educational 'leadership').

What do you (you being the local education authority) do about it? Do you get teachers to focus on the important basics of arithmetic and so on - you know, like we did at primary school? Seven sevens are forty-nine, seven eights are fifty-six...

No, that wouldn't be sexy enough in 2010. Instead you (the education authority) buy into a commercial company's astonishing love of its product - a games console - and hand that out to your borough's pupils. Because 'brain training' with a games console is a great way to increase SAT scores, apparently. As Tyssen head teacher Sue Windross explains to the Hackney Gazette:

It is vital children make the grade even at this early age because they are then more likely to get an A-C grade at GCSE level.

Trusting the professionals

With a wealth of top institutions and companies based in my seat, many of the people I speak to through my constituency work are leading professionals in their fields with unparalleled industry knowledge. Their insights as to the practical application of policy are invaluable to me.

One of the most striking things to come out of my meetings in recent months is the sense of demoralisation amongst those involved in vocational work. The unease is so deep that I am convinced that should we win office, we must set about fundamentally realigning the relationship between government and professionals.

Thought police in the playground

The front page of the Daily Mail carries a remarkable story today - pupils from the age of five upwards are to be entered on a Government "hate register" by teachers for playground taunts.

Big Brother Watch has a scepticism of databases per se but this one really takes the biscuit. As per the Mail, 

Heads will be forced to list children as young as five on school 'hate registers' over everyday playground insults.

Even minor incidents must be recorded as examples of serious bullying and details kept on a database until the pupil leaves secondary school.

As usual with these disgraceful things, the scheme didn't emerge through an announcement or consultation or, heaven forbid, legislation - that would be too honest and open - it emerged when the first family of victims to have found out that their child was on such a register spoke out about it. 

As the Mail says in an editorial,

Instead of being gently informed the words they are using (which most are too young to understand) are inappropriate or unkind, they are being placed on school 'hate registers' and formally reported to the Town Hall Stasi.

Thus, a 10-year-old's taunt may haunt him in later life.

This is the ultimate extension of the movement in education from the "short sharp shock" school of punishment to stigmatising young people for weeks, months, terms or even years for their behaviour, never allowing children to put their naughtiness behind them as they grow up - coupled with the enforcement of a political correctness agenda by the state, onto people at an age at which it thinks it can stamp its own worldview.

It is quite wrong.

The absurdity of Parliament

Whenever you think the Parliamentary authorities couldn't become more ridiculous, they exceed themselves.

As if it wasn't absurd enough to have the restrictions on protests and so on, they seem to have started cracking down on political literature being allowed into the Houses.

Today I was scheduled to speak at the Young Britons' Foundation event in Committee Room 10, hosted by Greg Hands MP. I took with me a sheaf of TPA leaflets, as you do when speaking to an audience who may want to know more or even join up, and at the request of the event organisers.

But when I eventually got to the security scanners, I was told "You're not allowed those."

"Why not?"

"You're just not. You could throw them everywhere."

And they were confiscated from me.

What a topsy-turvy world we now live in, where someone is forbidden from bringing political materials to a meeting of political activists and MPs in the building at the heart of our politics. Small wonder the public think that Westminster has gone mad - it increasingly seems that it has.

Escaping the poverty trap

Lawrence Kay is a research fellow in Policy Exchange's Economics Unit.

Apart from your wages at the end of the month, have you ever thought about what you get from having a job? Someone who’s unemployed will easily be able to tell you. They will say that being in employment means you get to keep your head up when someone asks you what you do for a living, that doing something is better than doing nothing, and that it’s nice to know that you are looking after yourself. Unfortunately, if you really do want to find someone who can describe these things to you, there are lots of people in Britain who you can ask.

This year we will probably break the barrier of having 6 million people on welfare. This figure covers a whole host of different benefits being claimed for reasons such as unemployment to being ill or caring. It is likely to keep on rising because it looks like the economy won’t perform well enough in 2010 to keep struggling firms from letting more workers go. As this happens, more people will be given money from the government to help them avoid absolute poverty. This is a good thing, but it raises a simple question: if someone is given money for not having a job, might they think twice about trying to get one?

In a report from Policy Exchange out today, there is an exhaustive answer to this question. Once we take into account the costs of work, the way that benefits are withdrawn and taxes levied as people on welfare try to start working, the financial point of looking for a job looks pretty small. For example, someone on Incapacity Benefit who receives £177.27 while out of work (a sum that incorporates money from Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit) will only make £30.46 extra after working for 40 hours at the minimum wage. I’ll save you the maths: that’s a wage rate of 76p per hour.

Thanks for the coal, WWF

By Roger Helmer MEP.

The World Wildlife Fund has just sent me a piece of coal.  It's a rather small piece of coal, in a little translucent paper sachet, and it's fixed to a card with a message.  The card is cleverly printed to look as if it's carrying dirty, sooty fingerprints, although in fact it's ink.  The message is simple, and short enough to quote:

"Today more than sixty new coal-fired power plants are being built or planned across Europe.  These investments push our climate goals out of reach.  What will you do?  Introduce CO2 standards for new power plants in the Industrial Emissions Directive.  Get dirty coal under control!"

Maybe they didn't know, or didn't care, that China is building a new coal-fired power station every week, with India not far behind.  We hear a lot about China's green technology developments.  Those Chinese know a good marketing opportunity when they see one -- and they know how to exploit Western angst and Western subsidies, under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism.  But they also know that economic growth requires electricity.  Lots of it.  And they know that the only way to guarantee reliable baseload generating capacity is with mainstream technologies like coal and nuclear.

What the Chinese are doing makes eminent good sense in economic terms.  And given the current collapse of the Great Carbon Myth, following the IPCC and CRU revelations, it makes pretty good sense in environmental terms too.

Soft on rapists?

In his speech yesterday at Reading Town Hall, Gordon Brown defended the retention of DNA samples taken from innocent people by citing the case of Jeremiah Sheridan, who raped a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy sufferer in her home 19 years ago and was last year convicted thanks to such DNA samples.

Next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan. Most of all remember the innocent woman he attacked.

It’s been suggested more than once that this is Cameron’s Willie Horton, the criminal to whom Michael Dukakis was so destructively linked by George Bush during the USA’s 1988 Presidential election.

There is undoubtedly a potential benefit to law enforcement from the retention of DNA samples taken from innocent people; in some cases, it will be a significant benefit. That, in and of itself, is no more than persuasive. It would be potentially helpful to law enforcement to have many things. A night curfew, for example, or a ban on alcohol. Both of these things would assist with the maintenance of general order tremendously – certainly, more than the retention of DNA samples from innocent people. Both such policies would drive down crime. And yet this government has not enacted them. Does this mean that Gordon Brown is “soft on rapists”?

I think not. I’d like to think that he and his government had considered such policies and discounted them, despite their potential crime reduction influence, because in their draconian nature their authoritarian cost outweighs their law enforcement benefit – because they are outwith the proper relationship between the individual and the state.

And so to DNA samples taken from people convicted of no offence.

I would agree with Guy Aitchison over at Our Kingdom:

am I the only one who finds Brown's references to the Sheridan case distasteful? As though the mere invocation of a horrific case such as this trumps any argument about privacy and human rights. We all know where those kind of arguments lead and it's not a road most of us would care to tread down. Consider also the rank hypocrisy of telling Cameron "you don't tackle the fear of crime by cultivating it" moments after raising the grisly Sheridan case. If someone can offer a better example of scare-mongering to deflect principled arguments, I'd be interested to see it.

(Emphasis on the rule by lynch mob point added)

I have written about DNA evidence previously on this site and elsewhere but, in summary (and putting aside the serious question about the “certainty” some people falsely think exists with DNA evidence, which is often wrong and is leading to fewer convictions as more samples are added), it is the hard but unavoidable side of my position that there will be some crimes that go undetected as a result of not using all evidence, however obtained. I accept that as the price of my position. Not because I like crime - of course - but because I'm honest about the ramifications of my position. Before the authoritarians weigh in with hyperbole, I accept the extremes that people sometimes like to play with in response to such statements, too - I accept that I or someone I love could be a victim of a terrible crime which goes undetected because of it. As Aitchison points out - scaremongering doesn't change the principle. Conviction rates would be much higher and we'd be "safer" if we had to report our whereabouts to the authorities every day – but we don’t think that that’s a reasonable thing to require of citizens in this, a hopefully still free country.

Because it suits him to, Brown commits the simple fallacy of considering the merit of solving the specific, small number of crimes he says can be solved by DNA evidence (and the potential of solving those which remain unsolved), without weighing against that undoubted merit the harm that comes from constantly monitoring a million or more people living in this country entitled to live without being suspected as criminals, the harm that comes from the surveillance of society en masse without end and from the forced surrender of the most basic aspect of ourselves - our genetic make-up - to the state, when we have done nothing wrong.

There is, of course, a practical point, too. Millions of man-hours wasted on maintaining the database and poring without benefit over samples cannot be portrayed in a neat anecdote, and neither can the budget it soaks up, but the inefficacy of law enforcement spending its time and money doing so ought to be apparent – and the logical result of that should be considered too – that many cases might have been solved if proper policing had been used during those finite man-hours, or bought with those pounds, instead.

But really, it’s a question of principle. It’s a question of where one draws the line. Ultimately, some crimes going unsolved is the price we pay to live in a free society.

Why is Cameron using the Tory B team?

A few questions.

Who would be a better and more reassuring candidate for Chancellor? George Osborne or Ken Clarke?

Who would be a more impressive candidate for Chief Secretary and the control of public spending? Philip Hammond or John Redwood?

Who would be a more powerful candidate to be Home Secretary? Chris Grayling or David Davis?

Who would be a better Justice Secretary? Nick Herbert/ Dominic Grieve or Michael Howard?

Who would be a more powerful candidate to be Work and Pensions Secretary? Theresa May or Iain Duncan Smith?

I'm told a reshuffle would look like panic.

I predict that the fallout would be a two day affair but we would have swapped our B team for our A team.  We'd go into the election without our key players on the substitute bench.

Clarke, Davis, Hague and Cameron are the Tory A team.

ONS blunder of political and financial market importance

Andrew Lilico is the Chief Economist of Policy Exchange.

Last Friday, the Office for National Statistics’ press release stated: “Services growth in December pushes up GDP estimate”.  This led to considerable excitement, both in political and financial market terms.  Market watchers expected the pound to strengthen.  There was speculation that Gordon Brown might call a General Election.

But the pound actually tanked, to some initial confusion.  This should not, however, have been a surprise, since GDP was actually revised down, not up.  The ONS press release headline was simply wrong.  The initial estimate for GDP in the final three months of 2009 was £315,845m as you can see here (cell G289).  This was revised last Friday to £315,712m as you can see here (Table C2).

The ONS had managed to confuse the level of GDP with the growth rate of GDP.  What happened was that (as has happened regularly during this recession) the GDP level in the previous quarter (Q3) was revised down quite a lot (things were quite a bit worse than previously thought).  So the change (the increase) between the third and fourth quarters was re-estimated up to 0.3% from 0.1%.  That is obviously a bad news story – the economy was worse than we had thought.  But the ONS headline managed to turn that bad news story into a (wrong) good news story.  Only the Telegraph ran the true story.

Given how politically sensitive GDP data is, and how jittery financial markets are at present, this is a terrible blunder for the ONS to have made.