CentreRight

Breaking News: 6 people who were wrong 10 years ago are still wrong

If you visit the BBC News website today, you'll see a headline that might well surprise you. 

"Business leaders say Britain should still join the Euro".

Wow. That's pretty worrying, given the disastrous impact that joining the single currency would have on Britain.

It's also pretty demoralising for those of us who have been campaigning hard to build up opposition to Euro membership. If after all the evidence that has been gathered and all the effort that has been put into making the case, business leaders are still in favour, then we have a big problem.

Or rather it would be worrying and it would be demoralising if it was actually true. 

When you read the full story, it turns out the headline is simply, for want of a better word, a lie.

"Business leaders" suggests a number of things. First and foremost it leads the reader to think of business organisations like the Confederation of British Industry or the Institute of Directors. But it's neither of them.

Failing that, then surely the headline "Business leaders say Britain should still join the Euro" refers to a survey of senior business people? Nope.

So who on earth are these leaders who make up such an influential cohort.

Well, there are, er, six of them. Yes - just six. And "business leader" can apparently include people who were important ten years ago but have since retired.

Even worse, the story was based on an utterly biased survey of just eight people, all of whom were chosen specifically because they were high profile cheerleaders for the single currency in the past.

This is not a survey of business leaders at all, it is a ring round of eight Pro-Euro business people.

Essentially, the real story here is that if you ask eight people who were totally wrong about the Euro ten years ago whether they are still wrong, you will find out that six will say "yes", while one  will say he's changed his mind and one is undecided. The headline may as well be "Six hardcore europhiles still europhile".

There is no news hook for this report - someone at the BBC just decided to go out of their way to give this tiny group of people, who are utterly unrepresentative of business and the public, a platform, and then massively over-egg the importance of both them and their entirely predictable views.

As well as the biased premise for the research, the write up of the story itself is biased, not just misrepresenting the people questioned reporting "high profile campaigns both for and against entry" whilst failing to mention that the public overwhelmingly supported the No Euro campaign.

Can you imagine the BBC giving online and Today Programme coverage to news that six business people who opposed the Euro ten years ago still hold the same opinion? No - they would say it isn't news, and they'd be right. So why was this article ever written?

The Sunday Trading laws should be abolished outright

The Government rightly talk as often as possible about boosting the economy, creating jobs, helping business and returning to growth. This is an economic imperative and a political priority which is impossible to ignore. The rhetoric is there, but it concerns me that perhaps the dedication to helping the economy in practice is a bit lacking.

Now, I am more than willing to listen to practical reasons why particularly things can't or shouldn't be done. If a Minister believes that they simply couldn't find the spending cuts necessary to avoid the VAT rise, then I may disagree with them but I'll happily acknowledge that they have a practical case to make.

What I cannot understand or accept is why, given their public acceptance of the need to do everything possible to help businesses and the economy, any Government Minister would reject a proposal that would not only cost the Treasury nothing but would actually increase tax revenues by stimulating the High Street.

And yet - according to Harry Wallop of the Daily Telegraph - Business Minister Baroness Wilcox has done exactly that.

One of the biggest shopping days of the year, Boxing Day, will fall on a Sunday in 2011. Current Sunday Trading laws dictate that shops are only allowed to open for a maximum of six hours on the sabbath, which will mean Boxing Day opening hours will be drastically cut down from the 12 hours retailers would normally expect.

The retailers that survived the recession are understandably keen to seize every opportunity to do business, and the Christmas period is crucial to their sales figures. As a result, a wide coalition of business people - joined by Boris Johnson - have been campaigning for the Government to suspend the Sunday Trading laws to allow them to stay open on Boxing Day and make the most of the opportunity.

For some reason, Baroness Wilcox has rejected their proposal.

As a result, shops will be forced by law to shut their doors early even though there will undoubtedly be an enthusiastic crowd who want to continue spending money. This is heartbreaking for any business which has been through the last couple of years - they hated having to lay people off and shut shops, and they are keen to get back on with what they do best. Selling things.

The "Industry Awards" scam

As councils start to search for any and all possible ways to reduce spending, one prime candidate for cuts has reared its head - "Industry Awards".

To give a bit of background, this is a scam that has been operating for some years. Essentially, councils pay a fee to be entered for a given awards process - invariably described as "prestitigious" by the organisers - for one of their service departments.

Those councils who enter, and particularly those who are shortlisted, are then seduced into paying a fortune for tickets to the glitzy awards ceremony where they can all clap each other on the back about how they represent the "gold standard" of their industry, etc etc ad nauseam.

And the eventual benefit for the taxpayer who footed the bill for entry and tickets to the big bash? Nothing, zip, zilch.

Take for example an invitation which has just dropped into my inbox from the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management (which I assume was sent to anyone who's ever been in touch with the organisation):

"The 2010/11 Clean Britain Awards are open for entries until 31 August 2010...We are inviting all UK local authorities to take part in this prestigious programme and the winners will be announced at a gala luncheon on 1st March 2011 at the NEC, Birmingham."

The price for a council to enter themselves into this "prestigious" process? £650 + VAT per council. Happily there are separate categories for Cities, Towns and Districts, conveniently providing an opportunity to have a large number of shortlisted councils, thus increasing the number of local authorities likely to buy tickets to the "gala luncheon".

In 2008/09 63 local authorities entered for the awards - and if the same number were to do so this year that would cost over £48,000. And that's just for one set of awards covering one council function!

There are plenty more of these scams out there - such as the British Parking Awards, which this year had celebrity impressionist John Culshaw as the hostt and has in the past sold tables for their Gala Lunch at £1292.50 (incl VAT) a pop.

There's no need for any regulations or rules to put a stop to this - councils simply need to get a grip and stop squandering our money on such self-indulgent tripe.

The Bully State is alive and well

Despite the change in Government, it seems the Bully State is alive and well - in Romford, at least.

Given the commitments by both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats that they wanted to move Britain away from its recent obsession with pernickety regulations, intrusive policies and oppressive officials, one might have hoped that we had seen the last of police officers pushing photographers around for the heinous crime of taking photos in the street.

Sadly, it seems it will take time to rid elements of the police of these bullyboy habits - or failing that to rid the police of such bullyboy elements.

A disgraceful incident occurred in Romford on Saturday, at the Armed Forces Day Parade. A young photographer by the name of Jules Mattson (who, entirely coincidentally, snapped the TPA's Debt Clock in Westminster on Emergency Budget Day) was taking pictures of the troops on parade, including a contingent of military cadets.

Suddenly, Mattson was ordered by a police officer to stop taking photos. When he questioned their legal right to boss him about, the officer in question then proceeded to babble a barely comprehensible series of claims about child protection, public order and even anti-terror legislation, which didn't hold up in the face of someone who actually knew that he was perfectly within the law. Fortunately, the photographer had the good sense to make an audio recording of the incident which you can listen to below, illustrated with photos of what went on:

This occurrence is shocking because it shows the Bully State in all its glory - not wielding real, legal powers but simply throwing its weight around on the assumption that it should be obeyed regardless of the actual law.

Threatening, manhandling and, apparently, injuring Mattson does absolutely nothing for public protection and zero for law and order - instead, it further harms the public standing of the police, and undermines yet again the public's trust that the police are chasing real criminals, rather than harassing the innocent and law-abiding.

Castro and Chavez are "progressives" too

My Centre Right post on Friday, drawing attention to the apparent nostalgia for the USSR held by Compass Chairman Neal Lawson, drew some interesting reactions from lefties.

One commenter denied the link, saying "Any nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc is certainly not reflected in the democratic socialism of Compass", another said I'd been "watching too much Glenn Beck", and a visiting Fabian accused me of "insulting the millions of dead Allied soldiers - the Soviets and also their American and British allies - who gave their lives fighting against Far-Right tyranny". Meanwhile, over on Twitter a PCS Union official claimed I was erecting a "straw man" to "slur" Compass.

All that smoke led me to assume there was indeed the fire I had suspected. Then today, lo and behold, Guido Fawkes has the scoop which confirms my suspicions, reporting that propaganda for the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign was not just being given out at the Compass conference, but it was "included in the official conference packs."

So now we know - Uncle Jo Stalin is not alone in the Compass "Hall of Progressive Fame", he has the dubious company of brutal murderers Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, too. Compass certainly are going all out for the title of loony lefties of the year.

Stalin the "progressive"

It's long been a mystery to me what that ubiquitous term "progressive" really means. The Left seem to use it as a catch-all term to describe themselves without any actual definition, other than as a tag to identify things they think everyone ought to agree with unquestioningly.

Whether talking about child poverty, political correctness or introducing compulsory registration of innocent people on a state database the protective hand of the big state, "progressive" seems to be synonymous with "cuddly and nice" - for them, at least.

I've wanted for quite a while to do a proper analysis and skewering of the way the Left use the word, so I've started collecting examples of its use. Quite often the policies labelled "progressive" are contradictory, mutually exclusive and utterly flawed, but one example this week took my breath away with what I can only describe as its obscene immorality.

Neal Lawson, the Chair of Compass, wrote an article in the Guardian on Tuesday urging the British Left - and particularly the Labour Party - to rebuild a "progressive movement" in Britain. Lamenting the current state of play he wrote:

The collapse of existing socialism, east and west, means that these have not been fortuitous times for progressives.

Pardon me? So the collapse of socialism in the "east" was a bad thing for so-called progressives?

Precisely which aspects of the Soviet Union do British progressives identify with? The murderous police state? The mass famines? The crushing, grinding poverty? The racism or the homophobia? The censorship? The state-sponsored theft? The privileged, hypocritical elite robbing ordinary people to furnish their own lives of luxury? The genocides and deportations? Or maybe just the rubbish cars?

It's remarkable that a group as prominent as Compass, who are hosting the next Labour Leadership hustings tomorrow, are openly misty-eyed about the Soviet Union. Parts of the left have historically been admirers and apologists for communism in the face of all its wickedness, but in recent times they had become more marginalised. It is disturbing to see that such an influential group are apparently treading that same, sickening road.

Having praised the original Evil Empire, Lawson then goes on to try to identify the "progressive" Left with the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars by titling their conference this weekend "A New Hope". To continue the theme, I trust their strapline will be "These are not the policies you're looking for".

Shareholder activism is a welcome addition to our democracy

So the Prudential's bid to buy AIA, the Asian arm of AIG, has collapsed. This is hugely embarrassing for the Pru, but it is good news for the future of the free market. The deal wasn't brought down by market fluctuations, board decisions or legal foul-ups, it was rejected by activist shareholders who didn't think the deal was a good idea - and used their votes to stop it going ahead.

It's often easy to forget (particularly if you're Polly Toynbee or spend your time in a tent outside Parliament) that a company and its shareholders are a democracy.

Whilst the marketplace of purchasers and products is a truly direct democracy, with each shopper holding a personal referendum every time they choose what to buy, companies themselves are normally a representative democracy, much like our own "elective dictatorship". Their boards are elected annually and they have a full constitution allowing directors to be sacked by the shareholders.

Indeed, if there's any difference from the way the country runs it is that companies are somewhat more democratic - requiring full referenda on major transactions that require shareholders to put up cash (which is what happened at the Pru), and ultimately giving you the nuclear option of simply selling your shares and bailing out. Sadly taxpayers don't get asked when new taxes are raised, and if you try to opt out you'll find the state kindly kicks your door in and takes your TV.

This is why Margaret Thatcher thought that being a "shareholding democracy" was so important. As well as having a vote on who governs the public sector, shareholding gives you a greater say on who runs companies and therefore how your assets and the economy are managed.

One reason all this is so often forgotten is that shareholders have long been fairly apathetic. Much as in politics, many felt they couldn't make a real difference, or that they would rather leave the thinking to a self-selected class of directors.

But just as leaving politicians unscrutinised leads to disaster for taxpayers, doing so in the private sector has led a growing number of companies to ruin. The most prominent example in recent years, and a major driver in the Prudential rebellion, was of course RBS' appallingly unwise takeover of ABN Amro, which ultimately drove RBS to the wall.

The ABN Amro catastrophe has led shareholders in all sorts of sectors to be more cautious about grand schemes from company management, and more outspoken in opposition to them. The vast reward packages given out in many companies have also encouraged shareholder rebellions, for example at Shell earlier this year.

This rise in shareholder activism is a welcome parallel to the drive for more direct democracy and accountability in the state. Fittingly, much of it is driven by new media and the internet providing a greater voice even for private individual shareholders as well as investment firms and fund managers - just as the web has magnified the voices of individuals and organised groups in the political sphere and involved more people in the democratic process.

I love capitalism and the free market - but that doesn't mean I have to love "big business", as the Left would suggest. There is nothing fundamentally free market, or conservative, or Thatcherite, in allowing business leaders to wield power unchecked - particularly when they do it with other people's money. Indeed, it is in all our interests to hold them to account - as the outcome of Fred Goodwin's rule at RBS demonstrated.

You can do that by regulating them tightly through even less accountable state quangos, or with Government legislation that is inevitably inflexible and behind the times, or you can do it by having an activist, involved, wide base of shareholders watching, voting and intervening where things are going wrong. The latter, to my mind, is far preferable - and the Prudential controversy shows it might well be on the cards.

From 9am to 1.21pm - working for the tax man

How long do you work for the tax man? This is the new TaxPayers' Alliance video that shows the amount of time an average man works each day just to pay taxes, compared to how long he works for himself. I hope you enjoy it - it's being released today in advance of the Adam Smith Institute's Tax Freedom Day, which falls this year on Sunday 30th May.

The very definition of "scum"

It was a disgusting crime: two 16-year olds wrote racist and obscene graffiti on prayer books in Blackburn cathedral and bent out of shape a "priceless" cross. Fortunately for the police, the morons also chose to write their names in the Cathedral visitors' book and were thus caught and convicted.

When passing judgement on any crime, the Magistrates have a difficult job to do in working out how to phrase their judgement in such a way that it is suitably explained for the public record and communicates strongly and adequately to the perpetrator the seriousness of their offence.

However, in this case the Chairman of the Magistrates - Austin Molloy - came up with the perfect summation: "Normal people would consider you absolute scum."

In that judgement he was absolutely right - scum he called them, and scum they are. These vandals could practically function as the very definition of the word "scum".

Despite his accuracy and strong justification, though, Mr Molloy has now been suspended from the Bench and is facing disciplinary action for using the word.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the mother of one of these scum has registered a complaint, but it is remarkable that it was Mr Molloy's own Court Clerk who urged her to do so. It is staggering that the authorities didn't throw the complaint straight into the bin and have instead chosen to suspend Mr Molloy for the grievous offence of doing his job and standing up on behalf of decent people against vandals.

Free speech has long been an important pillar of our historic rights - surely if anyone should be free to speak it is a judge or magistrate in their own courtroom?

Why cuts must start from the top

There's some good news from this morning's Cabinet Meeting already - the new Government have all agreed that Ministers will take a 5% pay cut.

This is welcome for three important reasons.

First, it will save some money. Sure, it won't be enough on its own to tackle the £160 billion or so of deficit this year, but it's a start that taxpayers will welcome. Every penny counts.

Second, it is a step on the road to restoring public faith in Parliament. Although the new expenses scheme is fairly good, restoring Parliament's reputation requires the political class to make some sacrifices. There will be those in Westminster who deride this as tokenism but it doesn't do any harm to make a gesture sometimes.

Third, and most important, this is a crucial bit of groundwork for the essential spending cuts that must be made. Many quangos must be abolished, wide pay freezes must be implemented and many - particularly senior - salaries ought to be cut. There will undoubtedly be some strikes if the right decisions are taken, but can you imagine how much worse the resistance to cuts would be if Ministers refused to share any of the pain themselves?

This sends a clear message: spending must fall and we Ministers are leading by example.

More of the same, please!

What Whitehall really thinks about Britain

There was - understandably - a lot of consternation over the weekend about the leaked Foreign Office minutes suggesting that the Pope might open an abortion clinic or bless a gay marriage during his visit later this year.

More interesting, though, was the above chart which was leaked at the same time. Titled "Papal Visit: Stakeholders", it is a graphic representation of the various groups, institutions and individuals who might have a view on the Pope's visit. The various "stakeholders" are divided along two axes: Influential - Not Influential and Positive - Negative.

The reason this is particularly interesting is that while it was intended apparently to help the Government prepare their PR effort, it is extremely revealing as to how senior civil servants view Britain. For a start, the Influence axis betrays the bizarre set of priorities held in parts of Whitehall and Westminster.

The Positive - Negative axis gives juicier insights into the civil service's concerns about either the PR impact or even the religious views of various prominent national figures. (I should say at this point that the negative end of this axis appears to be a combination of people who simply don't like the Pope, such as Richard Dawkins, people who oppose the visit, such as many taxpayers, and people who are Catholic but pose a PR problem, such as Wayne Rooney. I leave it to readers to decided which criteria people have been judged by.)

Here are a few of the revelations the chart contains:

• Jim Murphy, the Minister who is personally in charge of the Pope's visit is listed as "Negative". Is this because he personally dislikes the whole idea or do his civil servants simply think he is a PR liability?
  
• Taxpayers are listed as one of the least influential groups in the eyes of Whitehall. The chart shows a clear bias to listing anyone who has a negative view of the trip as automatically "Not Influential", but even taking that into account the contempt in which taxpayers are held is clear - only TfL, Visit Britain and the City of London are rated worse.
  
• Susan Boyle is, in the view of these officials, more influential than the Queen, Government Ministers of the Archbishop of Westminster - head of the Catholic Church in Britain.
  
• The highly educated staff of the Foreign Office cannot spell the word "athletes" correctly.
  
• Despite the huge child abuse scandal, "children", "schools" and the Department of Children, Schools and Families are expected to have a positive view and/or positive PR impact on the Pope's visit.
  
• "Government Ministers", while expected to deliver a positive spin for the visit, are listed as "not influential".
  
• "Diversity Groups" and "LGBT Groups", whom the Government normally likes to boast that it has given a voice to, placed at the top of the agenda and works with closely, are magically "not influential" when it comes to this visit.

This is just one brief glimpse of how Whitehall views Britain - how interesting it would be to see these charts for all the other major events that are held.

The Debt Clock goes on the road

Today is an exciting one for the TaxPayers' Alliance - our UK Debt Clock starts its 1,300 mile tour of Britain, highlighting the vast scale of the national debt to taxpayers right across the country.

For many years now, there has been a clock counting up the USA's National Debt in New York, acting as a constant reminder to people how much the Government is borrowing for taxpayers to one day pay off. Inspired by that, we have built what we believe to be the biggest digital clock in the world to do the same for the UK national debt.

Seven metres long, and one metre tall, mounted on the back of a 14 metre lorry, the TPA Debt Clock drives home exactly how vast Britain's national debt now is. To get an impression of its size, have a look at the first photo of it here.

The national debt is run up by politicians in Westminster, but has a hugely damaging impact on taxpayers right around the country - as well as equating to a bill of over £30,000 per family, it is threatening to undermine our credit rating and destory investor confidence in Britain. Therefore we have made our clock mobile, so we can take the message to the people.

After its launch today in Westminster it will visit the Bank of England and then go on to the Millennium Dome before leaving London and travelling around the country. It will be stopping off at:

Oxford, Tuesday 13th April
Bristol, Wednesday 14th April
Cardiff, Thursday 15th April
Birmingham, Friday 16th April
Manchester, Monday 19th April
Edinburgh, Tuesday 20th April
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Wednesday 21st April
Hull, Thursday 22nd April
Peterborough, Friday 23rd April
Norwich, Monday 26th April

and you can get full details of each stop on the tour from www.debt-clock.org

Even if the clock isn’t passing through your neighbourhood, you can get your own debt clock to embed on your own website or blog. Our online debt clock counts up the national debt in real time at the same pace as its full size cousin:

To get your own debt clock widget, click here and copy the code to your own site.

The national debt can be a bafflingly large figure - particularly in an age when billions and trillions are bandied around so readily. To help put it in context, here are a few facts about the debt, which currently stands at over £781.5 billion:

- The Bank of England holds £21.669 billion in gold bullion and foreign currencies as the national reserve.  The Government borrows that much money every seven weeks.

- The Millennium Dome (now the O2) cost £789 million. That is equal to 1 day, 18 hours and 24 minutes of the national debt’s increase. 

- Using the existing debt you could buy some remarkably lavish things (if you so wished). For example, you could more than afford an exact replica of London's HMS Belfast, made of gold, at £673.3 billion. Similarly, building the whole Royal Navy fleet out of silver would cost £590 billion.

The message is clear - politicians must wake up to the scale of the national debt.

For more debt facts, information on the Debt Clock tour, media coverage of the clock and other information, visit www.debt-clock.org or follow the Clock's http://twitter.com/debt_clock.

Planes, trains and automobiles

Niche, sector-specific media is a strange world. In my time I've come across a weird and wonderful range of publications, many of which would not look out of place as Have I Got News For You guest publications.

This one really takes the biscuit, though. Doesn't it say everything about the bloated size of the state that there is now a whole magazine dedicated to "Public Sector Travel"?

Powerless parents

Sometimes a story comes along that is literally jaw-dropping. One of those is in today's Daily Mail. As part of a programme teaching children about the Holocaust, teachers at St Hilary's Primary School in East Kilbride took an unbelievably irresponsible approach to impressing the horrors of the Final Solution on their pupils.

Instead of presenting the class of 11 year olds with the facts, which are shocking and disturbing enough in themselves to communicate the grim reality of the Holocaust, they decided to subject their pupils to a traumatic experience of their very own.

The Deputy Headmistress, it is reported, announced that by order of the Scottish Executive some of the children judged to have "low IQ" were to be separated from their classmates and sent away - perhaps to an orphanage. They would never be allowed to see their parents again. She then went on to tell them that their parents had been made aware of the decision, too, implying that they endorsed it.

Understandably, the children picked out were worried and upset. An authority figure in their school had told them that she, the Government and their parents had agreed that they were to be separated from their families.

As a lesson, it is unlikely to be forgotten, but it is of no perceivable value. These young children were put through a wholly unpleasant experience, and humiliated in front of their classmates. The teachers in charge seem to have a low opinion of their own ability to communicate history through normal teaching, twinned with a reckless disregard for the well-being of their pupils.

This is not a case for crying "something must be done", or demanding central government produces a new set of rules banning teachers from scaring schoolchildren. In the best case scenario, such a move would produce irrelevant rules at large expense. In the worst case, the clause against scaring children would undoubtedly be used to clamp down on genuinely worthwhile activities such as outward bound events.

What we really need to stop teachers like these from pursuing such abject nonsense is for parents to be given real power over schools. At the moment, you have to pack your child off to school where the teachers can be as irresponsible, incompetent or downright harmful as they want and as a parent you have very little power to change things.

The parents of children subjected to this deeply unpleasant experience should have the power to gather the support of other parents and change the school's policy, get the person responsible dismissed or punish the school as an institution by moving their children elsewhere.

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.

Collateral damage

Politics is important. The size, cost and power of the State mean that no-one can afford to ignore or take lightly the question of who runs the country. However, politicians must also do their best to limit the collateral damage that occurs when they battle for supremacy.

There is a danger that the titanic battle of a General Election could come to resemble a fight between King Kong and Godzilla - that both sides become so engrossed in defeating each other that they fail to notice that they are laying waste to the city around them.

I fear that the latest furore around allegations of bullying in No 10 is just such a disaster. Something really important has been wrecked as a result of the political tussle.

Don't get me wrong - it is certainly important and deeply concerning if the Prime Minister has been bullying his staff. However, the decision of the National Bullying Helpline's Chief Executive to reveal that Downing Street staff have called the Helpline is a serious error that will do lasting harm to many people.

It is a fundamental principle of these helplines - from the Samaritans to University Night Lines - that they are utterly confidential. Only if people know that no-one will ever stand any chance of finding out about their call will they feel able to phone in. That confidentiality even extends in many cases to the phone operators themselves concealing the truth about their work or volunteer activities - lest a friend or family member be put off phoning for support for fear that they will be put through to someone they know.

The actions of the NBH's Christine Pratt have shattered this confidentiality with regard to her own organisation. She did not name the people involved, but she did just about everything else. Even if the callers can't be personally identified from her comments, it is safe to say that the boss-worker relationship is probably even more unpleasant in No 10 this morning than it was when the calls were originally made.

Worse, if anyone out there - in Downing Street or any other workplace - is feeling bullied themselves, they will now think twice before picking up the phone. The concern will now be live in people's minds that if one helpline can behave in this way, then others can do.

It may have made some good headlines, but Ms Pratt's intervention has shattered something crucial to large numbers of vulnerable people. I can't help but feel she has burned something incredibly valuable just to warm up politics for a day.

No bail out for Greece: Sign the petition

Gobsmacking. Jawdropping. Farcical. Obscene. The idea that British taxpayers should be made to bail out Greece and the Euro are all these and more.

Greece currently faces a fiscal crisis brought by decades of bad spending decisions, and the failure of its political class to stand up to the country's militant union movement.

The resulting issues for the Eurozone are similarly self-inflicted. By binding such a disparate range of economies into one currency and interest rate, the scale of a Greece-style crisis was deepened and its impact was extended far across the Continent.

Given that the last people to blame for either of these problems are British taxpayers, it is staggering that the British Government is still refusing to rule out handing our money over to bail out the Greeks.

If, like me, you believe we have more than enough economic and fiscal problems at home without dishing out yet more taxpayers' money to Athens, please sign the petition against the bail out here.

For that matter please send the link on to friends, family and colleagues. We must not let taxpayers be ripped off yet again.

Libertarian Britain

There has already been some discussion here, both by Tim and Melanchthon, of the findings of the annual British Social Attitudes Survey, but I think there is a broader trend than those they identify. Yes, Britain can be said to be moving "to the right" to a certain extent, but in this Survey we see yet another sign that the simplistic terms "right" and "left" are actually becoming defunct. In fact, it shows Britain is becoming broadly libertarian.

In the traditional, stereotypical view of what "right" means, a right winger would be for the free market and low taxes in the economic sphere, and strict and moralistic policies in the social sphere. This is the assumption that the BBC, for example, tends to make.

In recent years the word libertarian has been adopted to identify a distinct ideology that is separate from this. As a libertarian, I believe in free market, low tax economics but on the social side I believe in individual liberty, and freedom of choice in terms of lifestyle, sexuality and religion. (It should be noted that there are some self-declared "Left Libertarians", who are more economically controlling but supportive of social liberty. They are however very rare.)

From Waziristan to Westminster

The turbulent extremist underbelly of Waziristan, Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, may be a long way from Westminster, but it seems set to bring the UK's fiscal crisis into sharp relief.

According to Lady Kinnock, the Foreign Office has a shortfall of around £110m this year - a problem exacerbated by the weakness of the Pound (and the failure of the FCO to effectively hedge against the possibilities of devaluation). As a result, the anti-terror effort in Pakistan has simply been left without the money it expected.

This is crunch time. The situation in Pakistan is far too serious to simply scrap our work there, given that the country's militants are explicitly linked with attacks directly targeted against Britain. There isn't any more money in the pot, nor can taxes be raised without doing huge harm to the prospect of economic recovery.  Therefore, if we want to maintain these crucial efforts then we need to cut somewhere else. This is the new politics, and the sooner our politicians get used to it, the better.

So, where to cut? Interestingly, the Lib Dems' Lord Wallace (no relation) made the case on the Today Programme this morning for the International Development budget to be cut. He made the very good point that economic and social development are rather difficult to do if your country is overrun with trigger-happy extremists. Of course, at the moment this option has been forbidden to Conservative Shadow Ministers by the current policy of ringfencing DfID's spending.

Alternatively, the British Council spent an impressive £209m last year. With such a pressing public finance crisis, their work looks more and more like a luxury that we can ill afford. Whilst well-intentioned, their programmes are often extremely costly and are really an indulgence. Foreign Office Ministers need to ask themselves: which is best for Britain and for Pakistan - defeating violent, organised terror plots targeted at Pakistani and British civilians, or organising sports exchanges between Rugby and Kabbadi teams?

Thus far, the spending cuts promised by the main parties have been either very small or very general. We all know that the need to get into the nitty gritty is inevitable, but the inhabitants of Westminster are still clearly nervous of being up front about that with the public. This is a mistake - and as the developing controversy over these anti-terror cuts shows, either they can choose to come clean soon, and on their own terms, or they will be forced to face up to it by circumstances beyond their control.

A Parliamentary Absurdity

Softball questions from the back benches at Prime Ministers Questions are one of those grim facts of life - like chewing gum on the pavement. They're a slightly sad waste of time, and don't even perform a useful PR function, as they simply annoy viewers.

Today, however, one Government backbencher managed to excel herself in producing a remarkably ridiculous example. I didn't catch the MP's name, and wanted to blog this without having to wait for Hansard to come out with the precise wording, but it went something like this:

"Does the Honorable Gentleman agree with me that the Child Trust Fund has been a great success?"

Gordon Brown, of course, did, and took the opportunity to wax lyrical about how much the Government cares about children - quel surprise. But how on earth can anyone know whether the Funds have been a success or not?

The Funds, which are given to every child when they are born, contain £250 of taxpayers' money. Parents are allowed to top them up with their own money as they wish. However, the scheme applies to every child born after 1st September 2002, and the money cannot be accessed until their 18th birthday.

So no-one knows how the Funds will turn out yet - and nor will we know until the early 2020s when the first tranche of Funds mature with the 2002 generation of children. It might be prove successful, or it might turn out purely to be a way of tying up vast amounts of taxpayers' money for decades.

Prime Ministers' Questions is there to allow the representatives of the people to scrutinise the Government and hold the PM to account. As the Speaker mentioned again today, there is never enough time to fit in all the MPs who want to ask questions. Isn't it time for the Speaker to insist that MPs place probing questions rather than adulatory puff pieces?

Definitions of freedom

A small forest has already been cut down to print the column acres of analysis of the abortive Hewitt-Hoon plot last week. Nonetheless, I'm going to indulge in a little bit more.

This isn't really a bit of Kremlinology or speculation on who was behind it all, but rather an insight into the way the Left thinks.

Hewitt and Hoon's letter was not, as it is generally characterised, the announcement of a specific leadership challenge, but a call for a vote of no confidence. In its own way, that was quite a clever attempt at avoiding the pitfalls that wrecked previous challenges to Brown's authorit.

The anti-Brown rebels on Labour's benches have typically hit two major obstacles in the past. The first is that the potential challengers, such as David Miliband, have proved too cowardly to put their heads above the parapet. The second is that even if you have a willing challenger, the Labour Party's constitution requires them to get the fairly high number of 70 Labour MPs to publicly support the challenge for it to become official.

The idea for a vote of no confidence sidesteps both of those issues - no need for a challenger as a figurehead, and no constitutional requirement for a set number of MPs to back you. Of course, the plot fell down on its own in-built walking pitfall, Geoff Hoon, but their tactic did have some logic to it.

It was the reaction of Brown's allies and the Party authorities that was particularly revealing, though. They simply declared that the vote of the Parliamentary Labour Party proposed by the plotters was "unconstitutional" as there were no provisions for it in the Party Constitution.

This illustrates the fundamental philosophical difference between Right and Left. Whereas the Right generally take the view that you are allowed to do anything unless it is explicitly forbidden, the Left assume that you can only have rights that are explicitly granted by the rules. For the Right, your freedom was born with you and can only be taken away by rules and regulations, and for the Left, what freedom you have is given to you by the powers that be.

We must fight this last battle to clean up MPs' expenses

Whatever you do today, please, please, please respond to the final consultation on MPs' expenses.

When, on 4th November, Sir Christopher Kelly delivered a popular, coherent and firm manifesto on how to clean up Parliament, it was widely assumed that his decisive action meant that the expenses problem was going to be sorted out.

After all, they were a solid set of practical reforms built on a foundation of massive public demand and issued by an authoritative source. Kelly's proposals also had the unequivocal backing of all three main political parties.

They had, however, forgotten something. Back in the summer, when MPs lived in fear of being phoned by a Telegraph journalist, the Commons rushed through a new Act that they hoped might deflect some of the criticism by demonstrating a willingness to reform the system. In doing so, they created IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority - the quango which is now charged with designing and then running the new system of MPs' expenses.

By virtue of the Act that created it, IPSA is now legally bound to hold one last consultation which will produce the eventual system of MPs' expenses.

This is undoubtedly frustrating. After all, the Kelly inquiry was popular, attracted plenty of evidence submissions and produced a set of recommendations that would have done the job very well. Now, with IPSAs consultation there is a danger that the public will begin to feel that, EU-style, the establishment intends to keep asking the question until they get the answer MPs rather than the public prefer.

That may or may not be IPSA's intention. Many IPSA staff whom I have met seem to just want to get on with implementing Kelly's proposals. Sir Ian Kennedy, the IPSA Chairman (whom I haven't met), has been widely reported in the media over recent days to have sympathies that fall far short of the public's views, particularly on the employment of family members and the number of MPs who should be able to get free London accommodation.

What is certain that a determined and hard-bitten bunch of MPs are engaged in a coordinated campaign to use this final consultation to so drastically water down and fudge Kelly's proposals that they will be allowed to carry on with business as usual.

This is why it is crucial that the largest number of people possible respond to IPSA's consultation to insist that the reforms must be firm and clear. Kelly has demonstrated that a transparent, modern, and honest system is perfectly possible - and it is now down to all of us to insist that his proposals are adopted.

At the TPA blog we've published a question by question guide to the consultation, which may well be of use and interest to you all when making your own responses. You can find our guide to the consultation here.

The Goose and the Gander

It's safe to say that MPs Elliott Morley, Jim Devine and David Chaytor have never displayed the best judgement. Certainly their expenses claims could have done with a bit more attention (and honesty). However, their latest desperate attempt to escape justice over the expenses scandal may well be their most impressive blunder yet.

The Thoughtless Three are apparently trying to invoke the 1689 Bill of Rights to claim immunity to prosecution, on the rather dubious claim that filling out expenses forms is one of the "Proceedings in Parliament" that the Bill of Rights sought to protect.

In their straw-clutching, they don't seem to have considered the implications of arguing that the Bill of Rights is still an active and enforceable piece of legislation.

The granting of Parliamentary Privileges, such as free speech in the House, is only one of a number of protections that the Bill of Rights provides. One of the others, which applies to all citizens rather than just MPs, is:

That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void 

That means, arguably, that vast numbers of fines that are currently being dished out by police officers, council staff and others without conviction in a court of law are illegal. Most notably, as the redoubtable Neil Herron of Metric Martyrs fame has long argued, since the Road Traffic Act 1991 most parking fines have been "decriminalised", making them just such a "fine and forfeiture".

I'm not one of those people who attempts to dismiss things like the Bill of Rights as irrelevant or unlawful simply on the grounds of its antiquity. Far from it - indeed, it is this Bill that laid down many fundamental principles of our Consitution and that gave us crucial protections against the power of the State and the Crown.

However, I do dislike it when such laws are cherry-picked for the benefit of a privileged few, and ignored when it comes to the rights of the many. Why should Morley, Devine and Chaytor get the protection of the Bill of Rights, but the other 60 million of us be refused that very same protection?

It seems pretty unlikely to me that Morley, Devine and Chaytor's dodgy dealings will come under the protected heading of "Proceedings", but that will be because their activities were not protected by Parliamentary Privilege. The Bill of Rights itself still stands - for all of us.

Now that these Westminster triads have drawn attention once more to this lynchpin of our constitution, the Bill of Rights 1689 should be enforced properly and billions of pounds of on-the-spot fines and parking fines should be cancelled.

What's sauce for the goose is, as they say, sauce for the gander.

What to buy for the right winger who loves to gripe?

I wouldn't normally plug a book on CentreRight, but I'm going to make an exception for two reasons. First, the book in question is an unusually good one that I think Centre Righters will enjoy, and second, we are only a few days away from Christmas, so I thought it might come in handy as inspiration to those still hunting for gifts. For those organised souls who have got their Christmas shopping done already - please forgive me!

It's a difficult question: what to buy for the grumpy right winger who loves to gripe? Feel good film? Nope - soppy nonsense. Gadget? Not a patch on Meccano, why don't schools teach engineering properly like they used to... Sponsor an obscure species somewhere? Cue muttering about hippies. No, you need a gift that will go with the grain and channel the fury, rather than encouraging it to spill out over the Christmas dinner table.

The answer lies in a book all about how politicians, companies, advertisers, quangos, "experts" and broadcasters lie to us, every day and in a remarkable range of ways: Complete and Utter Zebu by Simon Rose and Steve Caplin.

The title derives from a classic example of the deceit that the book skewers so well. A Zebu is a bovine South American mammal, whose meat was found being widely sold as "British Beef" in pubs and supermarkets. Zebu, then, is shorthand for trickery, lies and BS.

As the book's blurb describes it:

We are subjected to a daily barrage of deception so pervasive that we barely notice it any more. Although the big lies still make the headlines, it's the small, everyday half-truths that really drive many of us to distraction.

'Ice cream' with no cream, 'chocolate flavour' with no chocolate, 'customer service' with no service. You have won a prize . . . Your call is important to us . . .

Lies, lies and more damned lies. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

And there is no area that escapes their ire - from EU food regulations to estate agents' dubious patter, from polimen's bluster to politicians' nimble language. As well as having successfuly researched a remarkable range of examples, some of which you will have heard of but others will certainly be new to you, the authors treat the topic with just the right mixture of humour and genuine, spitting outrage.

Angry presents for angry people are a difficult thing to get right. As an example of how not to do it, a not-very-political friend of mine once bought me a Michael Moore book because of a very mistaken idea of my views. The result? In the spirit of Christmas, I tried to read it, leaving me with soaring blood pressure, a new dent in my wall and an unfinished book. Complete and Utter Zebu, though, is bang on target. It confirmed my fury at the amount of Zebu sloshing around, informed it with new evidence and left me laughing out loud.

You can buy it here - or if you'd like to read more, they run an excellent blog here, highlighting more examples of Zebu.

The Guardian should praise Philip Davies' quango scrutiny, not smear him for it

Today's attack piece in the Guardian against Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, is many things. It is certainly a lazy attempt to smear a decent man as a racist. It is potentially a worrying bit of political campaigning by supposedly impartial public servants (of which more later). Most concerningly, it is an attack on the very idea of parliamentary scrutiny of quangos.

Mr Davies' crime was to write 19 letters over 21 months to Trevor Phillips of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, querying the EHRC's work and requesting clarification of what the MP saw as inconsistencies in the implementation of politically correct rules and laws.

The EHRC is one of Britain's most prominent and controversial quangos. It acts as an educator, a political campaign and a prosecutor in one of the most contentious areas of public policy - equalities and political correctness. It spends millions of pounds of taxpayers' money and is charged with regulating the behaviour of millions of people.

It is not just legitimate for an MP to be scrutinising such a body - it should be a requirement of anyone sitting in Parliament! Philip Davies was doing his duty and his job in querying the Commission's work, and the real scandal is that so few of his colleagues follow his lead.

We have 1,152 quangos in Britain, and barely any of them ever have to account to elected representatives of the people about the work they do in our name and with our money.