A few things that have emerged about Ruth Kelly's plan to improve school food:

1. The money promised is mostly coming out of the existing education budget. It is not new money as was claimed at first.
2. The much-quoted figure of £280 million is misleading as a headline. I, probably like many people, assumed at first that we were talking about £280 million a year. In fact the money, or most of it, will be spent over three years.
3. The government carefully says that schools will be 'able' to increase the spend on primary school meals to 50p. But it is up to the local authorities whether or not this actually happens.
4. The extra money amounts to only 5p per meal.

The willingness of the Government to be misleading is breathtaking.

I would like to link to a strong piece in the Mail by Edward Heathcoat Amory but I cannot find it on the Mail website. Here is another good article by John Clare in the Telegraph.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education • Politics

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In today's Daily Mail, Quentin Letts describes one of the 'masochism sessions' which Tony Blair is going in for in the run-up to the coming election. He was on Sky News and was criticised by one voter after another regarding public services.

He waffled and made handsome noises of sympathy, with some Bill Clinton-style eye narrowing and shakes of the head.

The problem with these TV whip-fests he is suddenly doing is that no one ever says 'tax us less'.

The impetus, by the very nature of live TV, goes to the 'something must be done' brigade, with their lurid demands for more state spending. This suits Labour's philosophy but it underplays personal responsibility.

So when a whiny ex-con started bleating that the state was not doing enough to help him, no one told him to pull himself together. How one ached for a Norman Tebbit to tell the miserable little so-and-son to pull out his finger rather than making the rest of us pay.

Sadly it appears to be part of the nature of democratic government that appeals for the state to 'do something about it' get more of a hearing than objections that state interference in the past has done more harm than good.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General • Media, including BBC bias • Politics

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This is from a Sun online article about a Sky News question and answer session with Tony Blair about healthcare.

Mr Blair also defended the Government’s Private Finance Initiative, insisting: "We have got to work out how we fund this in a way that is sustainable for the future."

Hospitals used to be completed "over budget and behind time" but were now completed on time and on budget, said Mr Blair.

He added: "Since the NHS was created until just recently, over half the NHS stock was actually built before the NHS began.

"Within a few years, as a result of PFI, it’s going to be the other way round."

This is about as near as any government gets to admitting that the NHS depends heavily on the premises and land that were established before the NHS existed at all. In fact, of course, Mr Blair understates the case. Having expropriated an enormous amount of land and buildings from charities and municipalities, the NHS has sold off literally hundreds of hospitals.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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While more than 95% of NHS trusts had been judged to be meeting the four-hour waiting target for treatment, just 70 trusts - fewer than half - were achieving it every week.

From the BBC coverage of a new Public Accounts Committee report.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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The government has been shamed into having a stab at making school meals more nutritious. The main requirement is simply making more money available for schools to buy in higher quality food than you can get for 37p per child. But the government does not feel it has really intervened properly in a problem unless it does much more than that. So it is doing the usual things:

1. Set up an advisory body of well-paid professionals. This costs money. £60 million in this case, to be precise.
2. Arrange for inspections, in which well-paid professionals will go around schools demanding to know exactly what the children are eating. This costs money, too.
3. Impose centrally-drawn up requirements, requiring more well-paid people to have discussions, go to conferences, have secretaries and send out the instructions, and then insist that the headmaster (or perhaps other staff hired just to read instructions from various parts of the department) spends time reading and making sure the instructions are adhered to. This costs money, too, because the time of school staff has to be paid for.
4. Shift possible blame onto other people. In this case, create a 'toolkit' for parents (a subtle hint that it is all the fault of bad parents) and put responsibility onto governors of schools.
5. Spend money on (government-run?) training. This will require training the trainers, creating facilities and taking cooks away from their work in order to 'train'. This will cost money which will be inefficiently spent.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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The facts on social mobility are depressing. As the middle classes expanded after the war, there was considerable movement. But since the early 60s academic surveys tell us that mobility has declined. Studies show that for people in their 30s, the social class of their parents matters more than it did in the past.

Who said that?

Ruth Kelly in an article in today's Guardian.

Does she therefore conclude that state education, far from having improved social mobility, has damaged it and should be abandoned. Of course not, she concludes that she is capable of making changes that will reverse the course of the past 50 years and make state education a success.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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I find myself agreeing with the Independent:

Delegates at the NUT’s annual conference voted unanimously to send a team of union representatives into areas where new academies are planned to persuade parents and teachers to stop any new scheme from getting off the ground. The three main teachers unions are now opposed to the scheme. A leader in today’s Independent argues: “That the teachers’ unions have taken against city academies is not necessarily a bad sign. Indeed, it could be interpreted as a perverse kind of recommendation. At best, it is an indication that such schools are starting to offer parents a real alternative to failing establishments and that unionised teachers, notoriously averse to change, fear the competition for pupils from more innovative institutions”

From Reform's daily newspaper summary. The Reform website is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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The Conservatives have 'matched' the Labour promises on financial support and leave for new parents. They have added some elements of choice but essentially the Conservatives are accepting the Labour idea that the government should dish out other people's cash and impose extra obligations on employers when a couple have a baby. In their desperate attempts to morph a Labour plan which would subsidise care by people outside a family but not care from inside the family, the Conservatives have come up with the idea that grandparents should be able to take a course in caring for children so that they could then qualify for subsidy too. The idea of the government - which has shown itself incapable even of teaching children in its care how to read - telling grandparents how to look after children is grotesque.

The Conservatives have also implicitly accepted tax credits. But tax credits are an appallingly bad way of delivering benefits. A large minority - often those most in most need - do not go through the difficulties of applying and so do not get them.

The Conservatives should not have accepted these flawed, complex, anti-employment, high-tax, bureaucracy-heavy ideas.

The BBC coverage of the Tory proposals is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Politics • Welfare benefits

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A teaching union is worried that "educare" - the extended care of young children by state schools/nurseries - might not be of high quality. The research which indicates that nursery care outside the home is beneficial to children, always quotes "high quality" care as conferring a benefit. If the care is not "high quality", it can be damaging, instead. As the union is worried that the care will not be high quality, all of us should be.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education • Parenting

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With the Howard Flight affair, a Conservative campaign that was going very well has become badly unstuck. The most depressing thing today is an article by Rachel Sylvester in the Daily Telegraph. She is a clever, perceptive political reporter but this is her argument: that Mr Blair has "for the moment at least, won the argument on tax and public spending" and that "most voters would still, at the moment, prefer to see the public services run collectively, with their taxes, than to see people left to to fend for themsleves". This is even though the Government has "squeezed us all with stealth taxes and wasted at least some of the many millions of pounds it has spent on schools and hospitals since 1997". She reckons that "voters feel rich enough to give Labour's public spending experiment more time to work".

This shift of the public, to accepting a larger role for the state, is a legacy of Tony Blair, she say, "if anything is".

She then goes on to assert, "The Tories has not quite caught up". Michael Howard is "still trying to fight the election that Margaret Thatcher won in 1979. It is time for the Tory leader to flag down the nearest Tardis and move forward to 2005".

An unspoken assumption quietly intervenes in the course of this line of logic. It is that the Conservative Party should learn what the public thinks, accept it and change its policies accordingly. That is the sort of assumption a political reporter may be inclined to make since the job tends to make journalists think of the whole political process as a game in which winning the current match is everything.

Politics is indeed, on one level, a game. But it is not only a game. It is about the future of this country - its prosperity, its freedom and the character of its people. For the Conservative Party to give up, as a matter of tactics, the concepts of a smaller state and lower taxes, would be to give up things which are essential, in the eyes of its most politically committed, to the well-being of Britain. The purpose of being in politics at all would be removed. The county would be left on a path towards economic relative decline and a further absolute decline in behaviour and education.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Politics

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One of the greatest problems in persuading people that the welfare state is damaging is the difference in reporting experienced by the private and public sectors. When something goes wrong in the private sector, the fact that it is the private sector is particularly drawn to the attention of the audience. But when something goes wrong in the public sector, the same does not apply. You would never have a story starting, "A prisoner found hanged in his cell at a state-run Warwickshire jail...". But you would get the following, as revealed on the Biased-BBC website:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General • Media, including BBC bias

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I would be interested to know the source for the claim that men are four times more likely to cheat on women when co-habiting than when married, but I don't doubt its truth. This, like the previous posting, is from the Agape Press:

Dr. Janice Crouse, executive director of the Beverly LaHaye Institute in Washington, DC, says the information from several studies is clear: non-marital relationships are costly to women. She explains that the cost starts at the financial level. Women in such relationships, she explains, typically contribute more than 70 percent of the household income.

But women in these types of relationships find themselves on the short end in other ways, she says. "Cohabiting males are four times more likely to cheat on their partners than are husbands," Crouse says. "And the mortality rate for women who cohabit is 50 percent higher than for wives."

Cohabiting women also suffer from the likelihood that they will be more involved in drugs, alcohol abuse, and suicidal tendencies. Traditional marriage, says Crouse, remains the best alternative for women.

The full article is here.

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An increasing number of black families in America are turning to home education because they are so disappointed with public (what we would call state school) education. The story is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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To sack Howard Flight as deputy-chairman of the Conservative Party was fine. To sack him as Conservative Member of Parliament was over the top. It smacks not of firm leadership but of totalitarian intolerance. Howard Flight expressed his ambition to cut back spending and taxes in a Thatcherite way. Yes, of course, he should stick to the party line as senior member of the party. But surely, once reduced to the positions of a backbencher, he should be allowed to want such a thing. Have we really reached the point where someone cannot be a Conservative MP for believing in low taxes?

Or is it because he has rocked the boat before an election? Is that his real crime. Even then, demotion should be enough punishment.

Labour - as intolerant a party as one could wish for - has put up with sniping from Dennis Skinner. For years it put up with the utterly old Labour views of Tony Benn. For the Conservatives to be less tolerant even than Labour is disappointing indeed.

The Times version of his sacking is here.

A quote by Hayek that I have just come across seems apposite:

The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.

The quote came from here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Politics

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Synopsis of The Welfare State We’re In.

‘Britain would have been better off without the welfare state’

That is the startling claim at the core of this controversial book.

Marshalling an extraordinary range of evidence and calling a kaleidoscopic cast of witnesses from Catherine of Aragon to Vinnie Jones, James Bartholomew summons into the dock each of the sacred cows of the welfare state and subjects them to searching examinations:

• Do welfare benefits cause unemployment?
• Has state education given better chances to the less well-off?
• Does the NHS do what was promised?
• What caused the failure of council housing?
• Does ‘broken parenting’ matter?
• Is a poor state pension better than none?

He begins his summing up with the key question:

• If the welfare state is so bad, why don’t we get rid of it?

The book will infuriate many and be applauded by as many again. But no one who reads it will ever view the welfare state in the same light as before.

* * * * *

“An indispensable and very readable guide to how – despite the best of all possible intentions – the welfare state has failed to keep its own promises and, worse still, has done substantial damage to British society. Essential reading.” Minette Marrin, columnist for The Sunday Times.

(From the cover of the book.)

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Synopsis

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Norman Dennis' posting on crime levels in London was written last December, but it is a useful aide-memoire in the run-up to an election when the Government is likely to be trying to get away with absurd boasts about its record on crime. I particularly liked this section:

Perhaps the most distasteful bit of responsibility-shedding by the Home Office has been the line that the fear of crime is as much the problem as the fact of crime. It's the populist and hysterical tabloids, stupid. It's the nervous old biddies, stupid.

The fact is that the totally reasonable fear of crime has undoubtedly been one of the main factors in preventing the crime figures being even worse.

The enormous rise in burglaries has been restrained by people making their homes into fortresses. Old people are mugged less than young people because they do not venture out into public spaces at night. Cars have been rendered much more difficult to steal than they were ten years ago.

The whole posting is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Walter Williams on proposals to raise the minimum wage in the USA:

The crucial question for any policy is not what are its intentions but what are its effects? One of its effects is readily seen by putting yourself in the place of an employer and asking: If I must pay $6.25 or $7.25 an hour to whomever I hire, does it make sense for me to hire a worker whose skills enable him to produce only $4.00 worth of value per hour? Most employers would view doing so as a losing economic proposition. Thus, one effect of minimum wages is that of discriminating against the employment of low-skilled workers.

For the most part, teenagers dominate the low-skilled worker category. They lack the maturity, skills and experience of adults. Black teenagers not only share those characteristics, but they are additionally burdened by grossly fraudulent education, making them even lower skilled.

Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment data confirms the economic prediction about minimum wage effects. Currently, the teen unemployment rate is 16 percent for whites and 32 percent for blacks. In 1948, the unemployment rate for black teens (16-17) was lower (9.4 percent) than white teens (10.2 percent). Plus, black teens were more active in the labor force.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Welfare benefits

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One of the purposes of the NHS was to improve the service provided by General Practitioners - making sure that everyone was included. The 1943 document in which the Labour Party proposed a National Service for Health went so far as to propose that people should readily have visits by consultants, let along General Practitioners. But the actual outcome of the NHS has been that we have among the lowest number of doctors per capita in the advanced world. One of the consequences of this is that visits to the home by doctors have dramatically declined. The percentage of GP consultations in the home has slumped from 22 per cent in 1970 to four per cent today. For the details in Social Trends, click here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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Some possible research projects which could be useful and which, as far as I know, have not previously been done:

EDUCATION

How many commercial and charitable schools were closed down between 1870 and, say, the the 1950s because of the competition from state schools which were offered free to the consumer? How many just closed down because they made losses, how many were taken over on the cheap by the state? How many of existing schools are effectively private and charitable schools which, over a long period of time, have effectively been expropriated by the state? How much of their inheritance – in terms of land and premises – has been sold off?

WHY? To reveal the rich inheritance of schooling that was destroyed and expropriated by the state.

PARENTING

The full story of how lone parenting became incentivised by government. This has never been written, as far as I know. When did lone parents first get priority for council housing, for example? How did that priority change and develop over the years? What about the various benefits that have come and gone. The ideal research result would be to create some kind of measure of how much lone parenting was encouraged at different times. It would then be a measure which could be applied to modern times. This measure could even become an important part of the political debate in Britain.

WHY? To reveal, conclusively, that the state created the lone parenting boom and the human misery that has resulted from it.

The NHS

1). We now have a shortage of doctors. To what extent is this due to the role of governments and the royal colleges deciding on how many people should be trained? In other words, do we have a shortage of doctors because the government is in charge of training? How was it that, in the first half of the 20th century, we did not have a shortage when becoming a doctor was an expensive, challenging business involving a great deal of hard work.

WHY? To show, if it is true, that, far from state control and “planning” leading to the right number of doctors being trained, it caused a shortage. To reveal and explain the paradox – that we had no shortage of doctors being trained when it cost the trainees far more.

2). How many people trained as doctors then give up the profession (ideally compared to the proportion in other countries or historically.) Why do they not practice? Would they practice if training to be a doctor was a more important financial and work commitment? Would they stay if conditions for doctors were not so bad?

WHY? To sort out the cause of the shortage of doctors. To what extent is it the failure to train and to what extent the failure to retain?

3). How many hospitals and beds were there in 1948. How many are there now? Document the land and buildings – the crown jewels of British hospitals – sold off by the state.

WHY? To bring home, conclusively, how the NHS has cannibalised the inheritance created by charity and commerce, as well as local authorities.

3). If the efficiency of healthcare delivery had not deteriorated, would it be more or less expensive than in, say, 1948? Some people say, “of course, healthcare is much more expensive that it used to be. You cure people, so they go away and come back again a few years later, then you cure them again and they keep on coming back. Then there are the new expensive drugs and new, expensive operations like heart surgery”. Yes, all this is true. But on the other hand – and what rarely gets mentioned – is that modern techniques have also saved a lot of healthcare costs. People used to stay in hospitals or long-term nursing homes for months on end with TB. There may be other diseases similarly. It was also the belief of the medical profession that staying in hospital for two weeks or more was a good idea when a woman gave birth to a child. Now you can be out on the street again within hours. It also seems to be the case that the most expensive thing about modern hospital care is just filling a bed. The operations are relatively cheap. Perhaps the drugs, too. It would be very useful to have study which answered the question, “Healthcare is more expensive than it was in 1948. But is that because the nature of healthcare has changed, or because it is delivered in a way that is so much more inefficient?” One of the inefficiencies, for example, is the shortage of doctors and nurses which means they have to be paid more. Doctors in private practice cost far more than in some other European countries. Another reason it is so expensive, of course, is the waste or resources and manpower.

WHY? To establish how far the much greater expense of medical care today is really because of changes in medical practice and technology, and how much it is due, instead, to inefficiency, cartels and state control.

Incivility and crime

In the book I argue that the welfare state has led to incivility and crime. I believe I credibly links between, for example, lone parenting and delinquency. But it would be good to try to establish more precisely what aspects of the welfare state are most powerfully linked to incivility to crime. This could be done in a number of ways. One would be to make a comparative analsysis of different kinds of welfare state around the world and different levels of crime and incivility. In Italy, for example, there is I understand, a low level of lone parenting (partly at least because the welfare state does not finance it so readily there). What is the relative level of crime and incivility there?

One could seek out the most extreme contrasts: countries with high lone parenting and low unemployment (care should be used to differentiate real low unemployment and official low unemployment). Such countries could be compared with those which have the opposite: low lone parenting and high unemployment.

WHY? To bring home to doubters the impact of the welfare state on behaviour. To make the analysis of the impact more precise.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Further research

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Did unemployment go down after the war because unemployment benefits were lower?

Despite the reputations of Beveridge and the Attlee government, as the table shows, benefits were lower after they had done their work than before the war. They were lower both after adjustment for inflation and after adjustment for wage rates.

The following figures show:
the year,
the price index of that year,
the nominal unemployment benefit rate for a single man,
that benefit after adjustment for inflation,
the benefit after adjustment for wage rises.

1938 16.5 85p 85p 85p
1939 17.1 85p 82.0p 84.8p
1940 20.0 85p 70.1p 75.3
1941 22.2 £1.00 74.3p 81.8
1942 23.9 £1.00 69.0p 75.3p
1943 24.8 £1.00 66.5p 72.3p
1944 25.5 £1.20 77.6p 83.1p
1945 26.4 £1.20 75.0p 79.8p
1946 27.3 £1.20 72.5p 73.9p
1947 29.3 £1.20 67.5p 71.3p
1948 31.2 £1.30 68.8p 73.3p
1949 32.0 £1.30 67.0p 71.1p
1950 32.9 £1.30 65.2p 70.3p
1951 36.1 £1.625 74.3p 81.3p
1952 38.0 £1.625 70.6p 74.8p
1953 38.8 £1.625 69.1p 71.4p
1954 39.5 £1.625 67.9p 67.9p
1955 40.9 £2.00 80.7p 78.1p
1956 42.9 £2.00 76.9p 72.3p
1957 44.3 £2.00 74.5p 68.9p
1958 45.5 £2.50 90.7p 84.0p
1959 45.9 £2.50 89.9p 81.5p
1960 46.4 £2.50 88.9p 79.4p
1961 47.7 £2.875 99.4p 87.6p
1962 49.4 £2.875 96.0p 84.7p
1963 50.3 £3.375 110.7p 95.9p
1964 52.1 £3.375 106.9p 91.4p
1965 54.7 £4.00 120.7p 104.2p
1966 56.7 £4.00 116.4p 99.2p

Sources: Benefit rates from Institute of Fiscal Studies web site from 1948 and from Social Insurance in Britain from 1938. Basic weekly wage rates (June each year) from Office for National Statistics. Inflation statistics House of Commons Library research paper 1999.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Additional resources and material

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JAMES BARTHOLOMEW trained as a banker in the City of London before moving into journalism with the Financial Times and the Far Eastern Economic Review, for whom he worked in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Returning to England on the Trans-Siberian Railway through communist China and the Soviet Union – an experience which influenced his political outlook – he subsequently became a leader writer on The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

He continues to write occasionally for both newspapers, as well as The Sunday Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Express and The Spectator on a freelance basis. But, for a year or two, much of his time is being taken up with home-educating his younger daughter.

He has made many appearances on radio and television, particularly since this book was published. Most notably, he put forward his arguments in a 45 minute BBC Radio 4 programme where he was opposed by four people including two professors of the London School of Economics and an MP. He has given talks on welfare state issues in America and Germany. He is currently the Earhart Foundation Senior Fellow in Social Policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The Welfare State We're In was the winner of the Institute of Economic Affairs' 2005 Arthur Seldon Award for Excellence.

James Bartholomew's previous books were The Richest Man in the World: The Sultan of Brunei and Yew and Non-Yew. He lives in London.

HOW THE WELFARE STATE WE’RE IN CAME ABOUT

The preface in the book tells the story of its beginnings. What it does not describe are the many obstacles that existed between the idea and the book reaching the shelves.

The individual who published James Bartholomew’s successful first book, literally screamed at him when he heard the idea for The Welfare State We’re In. He was a socialist who was appalled. He shouted “You can’t really believe that!” It was almost as if the idea was either a) sacriligious and b) not to be permitted.

Various synopses were written and re-written. The publisher of James Bartholomew’s second book (which also was very successful) was approached. She, too, turned it down. It was pointed out to the author that the head of her large company’s UK operations was a friend of the Blairs.

It soon became all too obvious that the publishing world in Britain is dominated by those who are either passionately Left-wing or ‘moderately’ Left-wing. Either way, they were offended by the idea behind The Welfare State We’re In. In any case, it was thought that there would not be a big readership for the book. Time passed and the author had to continue earning a living. His agent tried various publishers. The synopsis was re-written.

The author sought out publishers who had published free-market-oriented books before. Synopses were sent. It was claimed that another journalist was already writing a book saying the same thing. Meanwhile, as the months and years slipped away, a change was happening. The ideas which seemed almost wild in 1993, began to seem less extraordinary even to those of the “centre”. The failings of the NHS became better known. The idea that it was “the envy of the world” began to fall into disuse. The author got close, or so it seemed, to being commissioned by first one small publisher, then another. Both fell through. (One of the publishers went bust.)

Then Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph at the time, agreed to recommend the book to his own publisher, a senior figure in the Penguin group. A synopsis was sent. A commission was not ruled out. But more information and data was wanted. Meanwhile the publisher Politico’s was approached. Iain Dale, then in charge of this small publishing house, was reluctant. The author asked Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute and a friend of Iain Dale to try to persuade Iain to see the author and consider the idea. A meeting was arranged. The author threw himself into trying to convince Iain Dale and finally succeeded. But there was no advance for the author at all.

Considering the amount of research involved, the lack of an advance was a fairly serious matter. It was then that it occurred to the author that perhaps he could get some sponsorship. It seemed an outlandish, unlikely and even greedy idea. But he came to realise that think tanks and political parties all rely on sponsorship. The Welfare State We’re In had the potential to influence the political debate in Britain and there were some wealthy people willing to help the author achieve that end. So a number of people kindly contributed to the cause, as described in the acknowledgements in the book.

The writing of the book took far longer than the author had expected (or budgetted for). Iain Dale became infuriated by the delays. Then, finally, the book was delivered and there came the worrying wait to see if Iain liked it. Thankfully he was full of praise. His lieutenant at the time, Sean Magee, was of a different political complexion, which made his approval even more significant. His treasured response was “It is well argued – as it had to be”.

Even then there were obstacles. The original concept was for a book that was readable and approachable. Part of that meant pictures – and not just a ghetto of pictures in the middle but pictures integrated In the text. That meant a higher quality of paper must be used, a picture researcher must be hired and a designer would have to do a lot of work. All that cost money – and for a book which might sell only 1500 copies. The publisher was unlikely to wear it. But meanwhile John Blundell, director general of the IEA, had seen the first draft and become an enthusiastic supporter of the book. After various discusssions with Politico’s and the author, the trustees of the IEA agreed to “get behind” the book. They would buy 2,500 copies and send them free to MPs, active members of the House of Lords, teachers of economics and supporters of the IEA. This bulk purchase put money into the hands of the publisher which was therefore able to put more into the production (and promotion) of the book.

Still, the contract said that the author was responsible for paying for the pictures. So the hat went round for more support from friends and fellow believers. The author also went out and took some photographs himself and tried, wherever at all possible, to get permission to use images without a charge. Those sympathetic to the book could help it along simply by not demanding payment for copyright.

There was, over the years in which it was written, much debate about the title. But nothing better than The Welfare State We’re In was discovered, so we went with that idea (Iain’s) even though the author was not keen on the fact that it was derivative. The cover was a problem. The book deals with many fields of human life. But a cover showing a collage of images would be weak. Other concepts were thought of, tried and discarded. Eventually Sean Magee asked if any suitable image had come out of the picture research. Two possibilities were looked at: a cartoon about a doctor not being at his surgery but leaving an answering machine to see patients, and the second, the image of two youths hanging about on the street. The latter was chosen and much played about with. It is a strong image and one which suggests one of the central themes in the book: that Britain is a less civilised place than before and that this is because of the welfare state.

From idea to book was a long but, in the end, satisfying journey.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in About James Bartholomew

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The Institute of Economic Affairs: free market think tank which has produced many important publications over the years such as Reinventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare without Politics and Before Beveridge: Welfare before the Welfare State. It has also republished the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. Director General: John Blundell.
http://www.iea.org.uk/

Civitas: The Institute for the Study of Civil Society. David Green and Robert Whelan and their associates have done important research work which helped provide some of the foundations for The Welfare State We’re In. Strong on parenting, charity, education and health.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/
http://www.civitas.org.uk/blog/

The Adam Smith Institute: Active, lobbying free-market think tank. Director: Dr Eamonn Butler.
http://www.adamsmith.org/
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/

E.G.West Centre. About education without the state in history and across the modern world. Professor West wrote some key works about education, some of which are available on this site. Professor Tooley has been around the world, looking at non-state education, usually for the poor.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/

Bumrungrad Hospital. A commercial hospital in Thailand. It is worth the time of anyone who thinks that only America has commercial hospitals to have a look at this site. (Declaration of interest: at the time of writing the author has shares in this company.)
http://www.bumrungrad.com/en/about/overview/factsheet.asp

The Heritage Foundation. Major US think tank.
http://www.heritage.org/

The Libertarian Alliance http://www.libertarian.co.uk/

The Institute for Fiscal Studies. This is normally billed as being an institute which is expert in the study of taxation and is “independent”. Is there any such thing as independence? Viewed from a libertarian perspective, the IFS isn’t independent. It starts from the assumption that public spending is a good thing and sometimes - like many of the governments it has influenced - seems to neglect the impact tax has in shaping behaviour. For all that, it is a useful resource.
http://www.ifs.org.uk/

Pensions Policy Institute
http://www.pensionspolicyinstitute.org.uk/

Friendly Societies Research Group.
http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/fsrg/

National Center for Policy Analysis. US think tank.
http://www.ncpa.org/newdpd/index.php

Walter E. Williams. American academic and columnist.
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/

Black Alliance for Educational Options.
http://www.baeo.org/home/index.php

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I had difficulty for a while finding a long-run history of social security so I was glad to find England’s Road to Social Security by Karl de Schweinitz. Despite its pro-welfare state bias, it also describes very well those people who opposed state welfare over the centuries and the important, international dimension of the early history of welfare. I doff my cap, similarly, to The Five Giants by Nicholas Timmins. It explicitly starts from the belief that the welfare state is a good thing but is an excellent, highly-readable account of the politics of welfare since the second world war

The Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for inquiring into the administration and practical operation of the Poor Laws 1834 is an extraordinary document, quite unlike any modern government report, bringing to life the welfare state of that time through real stories. I bought an original copy on the internet - the beginning of a small collection of welfare state memorabilia. Another treasured original document I have acquired is a copy of the Labour Party pamphlet arguing for a National Service for Health published in 1943 - a cleverly argued case but one which reveals, without intending to, just how little was wrong with the old system.

No single author has been more important to me than David Green. Again and again, his work has provided the vital evidence. Reinventing Civil Society (IEA 1993) showed how important friendly societies were before the welfare state hammered them. His essay in Re-privatising welfare: After the Lost Century (IEA 1996) on voluntary (or charitable) hospitals showed how signficant they, too, were. Subsequently he did much to expose how the NHS compares badly with other countries in its results and how it discriminates against the old.

In Re-privatising Welfare is also an essay by the late, great E.G.West who described how well education was developing without the state in the 19th century. His book, Education without the State, is a classic. His description of how politicians are tempted to do things that are unnecessary and meretricious is clinically devastating. In modern times, the work of James Tooley has been very important in showing that independent education can be for the poor as well as the rich.

Losing Ground by Charles Murray has been a seminal work in suggesting that a welfare state can damage a society, written in a dry, logical, compelling way by a first class brain. Aneurin Bevan, by Michael Foot is superbly written in a quite different style – with passion and even love. The only problem, of course, is the author’s blindness to the disaster the NHS became.

Frank Field, Molly Meacher and Chris Pond wrote a very important book in To Him Who Hath. It revealed something which has become even more true subsequently: that the poor are highly taxed. That, as they remind us, was not the original idea.

I rather dreaded reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell but the book surprised me by being brilliant and inspiring. Orwell was a socialist but his honesty and intelligence as a reporter meant that he sometimes revealed the failings of the welfare state in a particularly penetrating way. It would be wonderful if someone in modern times could get close to the lives of low-paid people as he did and report them so well.

Alexander Fleming by Gwyn Macfarlane, despite its name, is an extended demand that Howard Florey, not Fleming, should get the main credit for bringing penicillin to the world. Penicillin – perhaps the most important drug of the 20th century – was discovered and developed in Britain prior to the creation of the National Health Service.

Life without Father by David Popenoe is a persuasive account of the importance of fatherhood and marriage to children.

The remarkable thing about Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Wilmott is the honest responsiveness of the authors to what they found. They set out to research one thing and then when they discovered something else that was interesting, they changed the whole focus of their work.

All these books and others can be bought second-hand through Abebooks.com or new and sometimes second-hand through any of the Amazon.co.uk links in the left-hand column.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Recommended reading

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The system that destroyed civility
(Filed: 09/01/2005)

Peter Lilley reviews The Welfare State We're In by James Bartholomew

Twenty years ago a radical critique of the war on poverty was published in America. Its conclusions were unacceptable to the liberal intelligentsia. They were rejected by all political parties. Its author was vilified. But, ultimately, it became one of the most influential books on social policy of recent decades. It sparked off a wave of welfare reform that even Bill Clinton had to endorse. That book was Losing Ground by Charles Murray. It catalogued how the war on poverty, far from reducing it, had helped to generate an important new source of poverty – fatherless families.

James Bartholomew's lucid, well-illustrated book reaches equally unacceptable conclusions. It will probably suffer similar treatment by the liberal media, but it may prove just as influential in Britain as Losing Ground was in America.

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Why did crime rates fall so dramatically during Victoria's reign? Why is the fact that crime fell so little known? And why do some very clever and well-educated people decline to believe it?

The fall in crime in the second half of the 19th century is an astonishing, little-known story throws light on how government welfare policy may influence crime levels ('the causes of crime'). Crime levels, in turn, probably reflect more general standards of behaviour.

Here is an excerpt from Dr Jose Harris's excellent Public Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914 which gives us some of the facts from which to start:

One of the most striking features of British society betweeen the 1860s and the First World War was its continually diminishing rate of recorded crime - a phenomenon that was historically quite unusual by comparison with both earlier and later periods in British society and with the experience of other industrialising societies in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In spite of increasing concentration on imprisonment as the sole form of punishment for serious crime, the prison population in all parts of the United Kingdom was proportionally much smaller in 1914 than it had been in the 1860s, while sentences for penal servitude were one-fifth of the level of fifty years before. Recorded crime and conviction rates are clearly a somewhat elastic measure of actual criminal behaviour, and public definitions of what constituted 'crime' were no less fluid in this epoch than in any other. But as legislators thoughout the period were constantly extending the boundaries of crime and as police were increasingly active in its apprehension, it seems scarcely credible that falling crime rates can be ascribed to mere transient social perceptions.

This point could be demonstrated much more forcefully than I have space for here; but the point should be made that a very high proportion of Edwardian convicts were in prison for offences that would have been much more lightly treated or wholly disregarded by law enforcers in the late twentieth century. In 1912-13, for example, one quarter of males aged 16 to 21 who were imprisoned in the metropolitan area of London were serving seven-day sentences for offences which included drunkenness, 'playing games in the street; riding a bicycle without lights, gaming, obscene language, and sleeping rough. If late twentieth century standards of policing and sentencing had been applied in Edwardian Britain, then prisons would have been virtually empty; conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s then most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Welfare benefits

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Letter from Harry Benson to the Guardian:

Sir,

Polly Toynbee trumpets Labour’s mini-manifesto for children (23 Mar). All of these policies undoubtedly have a positive side. But ultimately they further absolve parents of responsibility and entrench the role of state as parent. Pouring taxpayers money into parents hands provides relief from poverty but encourages welfare dependency. Longer school opening hours allow parents to work but send the clear message that it’s OK to leave the children all day. The new children’s centres offer better access to health professionals and “everything children need” – except the parents.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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From John Clare's excellent Any Questions section in the Daily Telegraph today:

My 14-year-old complains that his "citizenship" lessons are banal, pointless and silly. Having leafed through a textbook, I have to say his description barely does justice to the subject's banality. We feel his time would be better spent reading a book or a newspaper. Can he be excused these lessons?

Alas, no. Thanks to David Blunkett, citizenship is a compulsory part of the national curriculum in state secondary schools. According to the Government, it is about "the kind of society we are striving to build and the role of the state in the process". It also has "an important role to play in the intellectual and social development of individuals". In other words, it is a non-subject which, according to Ofsted, is one of the worst taught and least-liked in the curriculum.

It is an inherently bad idea that the government should tell the people what to think and it is a particularly bad that it should tell people how to be citizens. (The very choice of the word indicates a political judgement since Britain is a monarchy and we are, in theory, 'subjects', not 'citizens' - a concept popularised in the French revolution.) The government is there to serve people, not to boss them about. In "citizenship" classes, the scope for pro-government and clearly political propaganda is obvious. Schools need little encouragement to push a political or otherwise prejudiced point of view. The propaganda content in the teaching of geography, history and science continues to increase. The idea that an education should equip people to understand at least two sides to an argument is fading.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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From the latest Adam Smith Institute email newsletter:

My friend John Hughes, CE of Cygnet Health Care, has sent me a neat little squib mocking the tide of jargon in so many government services. It's basically just three columns, and you pick one word from each and string them together. He calculates it can generate up to 91,125 authoritative buzz phrases. Saves so much time writing reports to ministries. Here's a sample:

Proactive Performance Strategies
Collaborative Partnership Process
Developmental Community Potential
Resource-rich Governance Approaches
Interactive Organizational Pathways
Intensive Consumer-led Modifiers

So from that you can generate "proactive consumer-led approaches" or
"developmental community strategies" or pretty much anything you like. If only some of it actually delivered any service to the public!

The Adam Smith Institute website is here and the insitute's blog is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General • General • Waste in public services

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Lunch with a senior official of the Hong Kong government. Hong Kong still has a relatively low burden of government, but the weight has got a lot heavier since John Cowperthwaite's day. (Cowperthwaite is the hero of the chapter on tax and growth in The Welfare State We're In). Whereas government activity used to account for 14 per cent of gross national product. It is now up to 22 per cent. Of course, that is still miles better than our 40 per cent and rising.

The official admitted that the big rises in spending happened in 1993-1996, when Chris Patten, the Conservative politician, was there. Mr Patten played a strong political game in Hong Kong. But he was, of course, a British centrist. Under him, Hong Kong welfare state spending rose. It comes as no surprise that unemployment after Patten has been higher than it was before he arrived.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS • Tax and growth • Welfare benefits • Welfare benefits

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Some commonly believed myths:

That the pay of women in Sweden is closer to that of men than in other societies.

In fact, their pay is lower compared to men than it is for women in other countries. The reason is that they have more rights to maternity leave and that commercial employers therefore avoid employing women, particularly in responsible positions. The pay of women in the USA, relative to that of men, is higher.

That women all wish to combine full-time careers with having children.

In fact, in the view of Catherine Hakim, the academic at the London Schools of Economics on whose research this posting is based, women can be more realistically divided into three sorts, with different attitudes: 1.Home-centred women, 2. Adaptive women (who want a mix of home life, part-time work and full-time work) and 3. Work-centred women. Women do not all want to have full-time careers. On the contrary, that sort of woman is in the minority. This is one of those 'The emperor has no clothes' observations. The moment the words are said, most of us recognise from our own experience that they are true.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General • Parenting

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Vastly more money is being spent on the NHS and yet...I learn from an osteopath today that the Primary Care Trust of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is £9 million in debt. The decision has therefore been taken to curtail the provision of osteopathy paid for by the NHS in Kensington and Chelsea. Meanwhile the provision of Accident and Emergency services at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is being cut back. Where does all the money go? See the entry on the Great Ormond Street Hospital in the NHS section of the Discussion Forums by clicking here or going via the link in left column.

The conversation came on the same day that the Daily Telegraph reported:

One of the biggest deficits, £21.5 million, was at St George's Hospital, Tooting, south-west London. It intends to leave unfilled 100 vacant posts and has closed 24 out of 1,100 beds.

Peter Homa, the trust's chief executive, said: "These are serious measures and we do not take them lightly. St George's faces difficult financial problems and for the long-term good of the hospital we have to solve them."

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.

For the full story in the Daily Telegraph, click here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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A former consultant has sent me the following email:

"I don't know whether you have had a chance to look at the King's Fund report which is reported in the Sunday Times, but is available on the Fund's website. The wording of the report is very biased in favour of Labour.

"For example, what their own figures and histograms show is that the number of patients waiting is now the same as in 1987, the median and average times for in-patient waiting has actually increased and is now about the same as in March/Sept 1996.

"Since 1999, the number of intensive care beds has increased by just 200! and the overall bed numbers has remained static, but managers have increased from about 22,000 to 35,000 since 1997. Its fairly obvious what has happened, most of the money has gone on administration, but reading the King's Fund report, that is not what they say!

"I leave you to look thro the rest, there is plenty to go on!"

The King's Fund "audit" of the NHS under Labour is here.

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From Instructions to American Servicemen in Britain, 1942:

The British are tough. Don't be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. ___

They are not given to back-slapping and they are shy about showing their affections. But once they get to like you they make the best friends in the world.

___

The Briton...is... the most lawabiding citizen in the world, because the British system of justice is just about the best there is. There are fewer murders, robberies, and burglaries in the whole of Great Britain in a year than in a single large American city.

___

You will find that English crowds at football or cricket matches are more orderly and polite to the players than American crowds. If a fielder misses a catch at cricket, the crowd will probably take a sympathetic attitude. They will shout 'good try' even if it looks to you like a bad fumble. In America the crowd would probably shout 'take him out'.

___

They are good sportsmen and are quick to recognise good sportsmanship wherever they meet it.

___

It isn't a good idea to say 'bloody' in mixed company in Britain - it is one of their worst swear words.

___

The British dislike bragging and showing off.

___

In peace or war, 'God Save The King' (to the same tune as our 'America') is played at the conclusion of all public gatherings such as theater performances. The British consider it bad form not to stand at attention, even if it means missing the last bus. If you are in a hurry, leave before the national anthem is played. That's considered alright.

___

On the whole, British people... are open and honest. If you are on furlough and puzzled about directions, money, or customs, most people will be anxious to help you as long as you speak first and without bluster. The best authority on all problems is the nearest 'bobby' (policeman) in his steel helmet. British police are proud of being able to answer almost any question under the sun. They're not in a hurry and they'll take plenty of time to talk to you.

I quote these excerpts because they add to the evidence in The Welfare State We're In that the British used to be regarded as particularly civilised people (something which is no longer the case).

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Gordon Brown claimed in the budget that he was going to cut back the regulatory burden on business. I have visited two small businesses that were infuriated by the mound of extra work created by his tax credits. The idea of Mr Brown genuinely cutting any kind of burden of paperwork is grotesquely absurd. In Thursday's Daily Mail, Edward Heathcoat Amory did a superb job of demonstrating why Mr Brown is the last person to be believed when he claims he is going to do any cutting of regulation, waste or excessive paperwork.

This, after all, is the same Mr Brown who last year publiched the longest Finance Act ...in history, with 328 section and 42 schedules.

This is the same Mr Brown whose tax credits system has become a byword for complexity. His new pension credit....expects claimants, the elderly and the poor, to wade through a 16-page claim form and 18 pages of impenetrable notes.

This Mr Brown has also been a key member of the Labour government which has imposed a total extra regulatory cost on business, measured by the British Chamber of Commerce using the Government's own figures, of £40 billion since 1997.

That involved 23,222 new regulations - 15 for every working day.

...This is the Mr Brown whose ministerial colleagues have insisted that every horse in Britain must have a passport, that anyone wishing to replace a window must become a member of the Fensa (the Fenestration Self-Asessment Scheme), who won't let you change a light fitting in your kitchen without permission from the council.

Now they claim to want to cut regulation. This has something of a familiar ring to it. In 1997, Mr Blair set up a Better Regulation Task Force. In 1998, Mr Brown launched a Better Regulation Guide. In 1999, the Government passed a Regulatory Reform Bill.

Along the way since then, we've have red tape czars, check lists, action plans, panels and reviews. None of them has made the slightest difference.

Nor do the specific proposals in the Budget inspire any confidence at all. First of all, in a move typical of New Labour, the Government plans to set up two more new quangos, a Better Regulation Executive and a Better Regulation Commission, both within the Cabinet Office.

There they will join the Strategy Unit, the Delivery Unit and the Office of Public Services Reform, all created by the Prime Minister, all providing jobs for expensive civil servants.

I would like to offer a link to the full article but sadly I have not been able to track it down on the Mail website.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Tax and growth

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I made a return visit to Canary Wharf on Wednesday after being asked to write a leader on the budget for the Daily Telegraph. An editorial is, of course, the view of a newspaper, not of the individual who has written it. Nevertheless, I agree with it. In doing the research, I was struck most of all by the figure for the current income tax allowance in Poland. Unlike the British government, the Polish does not seem to believe in taxing the poor. The leader is here.

What astonished me yesterday - and again today - is the respect in which Gordon Brown is held. The Daily Mail, a newspaper I generally admire, is against the Labour Party yet still is in thrall to Mr Brown. The leader in it yesterday called him "awesome" while at the same time being highly critical of the statist society he stands for. Very curious. Meanwhile the poll in today's Telegraph show that Mr Brown is widely respected and admired among the populace. Yet this is the man who, in 1993, said he wanted to end means-testing for the elderly and has proceeded to make half the pensioner population entitled to means-testing. He has undermined saving, thus reducing the incomes of millions of people in their old age. He has increased welfare dependency. He took a country with the some of the best savings for old age and destroyed that inheritance. His social security policies have been ignorant and damaging. Beveridge would have scorned him. Frank Field does - and wrote a book to that effect, comparing him unfavourably with Lloyd George.

Yes, he had one big success in handing over control of interest rates to a monetary policy committee. But he has been wholly inconsistent. He came to power thinking he could improve the public services without extra spending. That was the mandate and the promise. He failed. So he resorted to the Old Labour technique, in 2000, of throwing more and more money at the public services. This sudden infusion of money has not been used efficiently and productively. Brown opposed the reforms in the NHS which have had some modest success. In the course of his spending, he has increased the taxes on the poor. The personal allowance next year will still be less than £5000. If it had been increased in line with earning, it would be over £5,500. So more poor people are liable to tax on more of their income. True, there are tax credits. But by definition they have three disadvantages:

1. People have to fill in forms to get them which, at best, is a waste of their time
2. A large minority - usually the most vulnerable and least literate - don't fill in the forms and so don't get the money.
3. If you are not entitled to one of the tax credits, you get taxed. For example, a non-pensioner who does not have children. If you are poor, bad luck. Under Brown, you are not one of the favoured groups. You are taxed heavily even though, according to Brown himself, you are in 'poverty'.

The spending goes on, pushing public expenditure as a percentage of national income back towards the level it was in the early 1980's and before. Public spending is less productive than private spending. Huge amounts of money are wasted. He is gradually undermining Britain's capacity for growth, just as the socialists did in Germany.

He is the most overrated Chancellor of the Exchequer of my lifetime - and that is saying something considering we had Lord Barber setting off the inflation of the 1970s.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Tax and growth

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"People now have a tendency...to feel that they are virtuous on the basis of what they believe rather than on the basis of what they do. They think that if they are outraged and if they think that the government ought to 'do something' about whatever outrages them, that they are one of the good people and that meanwhile others - perhaps greedy corporations or rich people - are the bad people. This is not really a system of morality. It is vanity, laziness and self-delusion."

Excerpt from an interview I gave to James Hamilton for his blog.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General

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James Hamilton, a psychotherapist, recently interviewed me for his blog. This is an excerpt:

Do you feel that the protective conservative virtues and values, have been repressed by state intervention?What do you think of Theodore Dalrymple's assertion that it was the middle-class abandonment of traditional values that led to a similar abandonment by the working classes whom those values had most urgently protected in the past?

The circumstances in which we are brought up and live determine which parts of our nature will come to the fore. I used to enjoy telling my father - a classic 'English gentleman' - that if he had been born as one of the ravaging hordes of Attila the Hun, he would have murdered, raped and robbed without hesitation. He was amusingly discomfitted by the idea and tried to deny it.

But if we are brought up, say, where it is normal to be a member of a Friendly Society (as it was at the beginning of the 20th century) which offers help to us in times of need and requires to help others when they are in need, if we are bought up in a family in which mutual help is expected, all this and more brings out different parts of our nature than if we are raised in, say, a vandalised council estate where a large number of people are on state benefits and not working.

In the former, there are various pressures to be what we regard as 'virtuous'. There is peer pressure. There is the pressure of knowing that we will be helped only because of the deal whereby help we must help others. In the benefit-dependent estate, on the other hand, the need for mutual help has been taken away by the state. The people are put in the position where they are perennial takers. That develops a different attitude. This is just a part of the way in which, I believe, the welfare state has changed the the nature of British people.

I admire Theodore Dalrymple's writings enormously. However I disagree with the idea that the the lower classes have somehow followed the example of the upper classes in living in a less virtuous way. There is far more divorce and separation among the poor than among the rich. In this, as in other things, the poor have not copied the rich. They have developed different habits. Benefits dependency, the drastic reduction in incentives to save and to marry and many other changes have strongly affected the poor. They have been changed, not by a bad example, but by bad laws and, in particular, the welfare state. The welfare state has profoundly changed the circumstances of the poor.

Through this, not example, the character of the poor has been changed.

What are your views on the role of popular culture in the decline of civility? It is a theme of Nick Hornby's novels (High Fidelity, About A Boy) that pop culture can have the effect of trapping people in an extended, damaging adolescence. In the absence of the Welfare State, would civility have survived pop culture?

I find this idea wholly unconvincing. Pop music and words come out of the culture. They do not create it. It is true that in reflecting a culture, popular music re-inforces it. If you have obscenities from Eminem, then people will be influenced. But first you have to create Eminem - the culture in which he develops and becomes successful.

Popular music has been around for centuries, indeed millenia. The idea that popular music has a life of its own and goes around creating cultures is incredible. We did not move from "I give to you as you give to me" (part of a Bing Crosby song) and "Get yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again" (part of a Fred Astaire song) to "F***, you, Debbie, Debbie, f**** you!" (Eminem referring to his mother) by some sort of arbitrary, self-creating vagary of the history of popular music. The change in the music grew out of the change in the culture. That, in turn, was changed by the creation of the welfare state which so profoundly changed the circumstances in which most people live.

For the complete interview, go to the March 4th posting on James Hamilton's website which should be here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Each year, it seems that Gordon Brown has little room for manoeuvre and yet each year he manages to convince many journalists that he has dished out money and pulled off a triumph. He always seems to have some extra money to spend.

Where does the extra money come from?

It comes from various places, but nearly always from two places in particular.

First, he does not raise tax thresholds in line with the growth of the whole economy. He just raises them with inflation, which is less because it does not include economic growth. This means that - as the country becomes richer - he takes a higher proportion of national income in tax. Through his failure to raise income tax thresholds in line with the economy, he has made an extra 1.35 million people liable to higher rate income tax. A higher proportion of people's income has become liable to standard rate income tax (the personal allowance for next year will be less than £4,900 whereas, if it had been increased with earnings since 1997/98, it would be over £5,500). Although he has doubled the stamp duty allowance in this budget, throughout his time in office until today, more people have become liable to stamp duty on their house purchases - and it continues to be the case that many have crossed the thresholds to higher stamp duty rates. So it goes on and on. Inheritance tax is another one that has had the Gordon Brown treatment. All these failures to raise threshold in line with the economy, amount, in reality, to tax increases. They are increases in the proportion of national income that the nation pays in tax.

His second technique is to raise welfare benefits, too, in line with inflation - not in line with the economy. So gradually, he has cut welfare benefits in relation to the whole economy.

That is how he gets extra money every year. He taxes us more, without declaring it, and he pays out lower benefits, without declaring that either. To some, he seems clever. But all he is doing is giving us back some of the money he has taken. Most commentators have no understanding of what is going on and therefore cannot pass on a true understanding to the public.

Does it matter?

Yes, it does rather. It is much better to avoid taxing people in the first place than to require them to fill in forms to claim tax back. The latter method involves an expensive bureaucracy and many of the people who are entitled to tax credits do not claim them. Often these are the poorest, oldest or least able. For him to paint himself as acting for their benefit verges on the obscene.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Tax and growth

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It is revealed in several newspapers today that the London School of Economics has been operating a secret quota system to favour the admission of state-educated students. It has been doing this, no doubt, because of the pressure from the government.

The news will increase the perception of those who pay a great deal to send their children to private schools that they are being discriminated against. This may add to the various factors tending towards a possible re-structuring of university education over the next ten or twenty years. Britain may develop some private, fee-paying universities. Other factors pushing in this direction are:

- The top universities including Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics believe that the money they receive as part of state education is inadequate for them to cling onto their already doubtful ranking as world class. They are already flirting with the idea of 'going private'.

- Some universities, especially the London School of Economics, receive a substantial income already from foreign students. For them, it would not be such a major break to 'go private'.

- Students (or their parents) are now subject to top-up fees even when they stay in the state system. So the difference between the cost of going private and staying with the state is less than previously

- Gradually parents are learning from their children just how inferior state-funded university education in Britain is becoming. They hear how little contact the students have with teaching staff, how few essays they are set to write and, in effect, how much time is being wasted.

- Some parents also fear that universities, in one sense, actually damage the life chances of their children by instilling them with anti-business, neo-Socialist attitudes.

Already there is a trend for parents to send their children to American universities, at considerable expense. This trend is likely to continue unless some British universities go private.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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With an election is coming up, the state of the NHS is one of the most important issues. But the electorate will not be allowed to hear anything against it from those who know best what is going on: the doctors and managers. They are under contract not to speak out of turn.

One instance of this was mentioned in the Daily Mail today. A confidential memo to senior managers at the Scarborough, Whitby and Ryedale Primary Care Trust told them that they must not speak about the coming closure of some services. The maternity and minor injuries departments at Whitby Community Hospital, North Yorkshire, are scheduled to close as part of a cost-cutting exercise. The memo stated, "Nothing must hit the press this side of the election".

I have spoken to senior consultants who have been carpetted for saying something against the NHS. One consultant whom I quoted in the book did not want to be identified, saying "I am too young to lose my job". A BBC survey of managers showed that they felt they could tell their superiors about failings in the service. Meanwhile they are under pressure to manipulate the figures. There is a culture of fear and lies in the NHS. The Labour Party propaganda machine must not be contradicted.

This is a perversion of democracy. The Labour Party should be removed - if for nothing else - for the way it has turned doctors, as well as press officers and other civil servants, into fearful parts of its propaganda machine - whether they actually promote the propaganda or just stay silent when they know it is misleading.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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I was being taken around a preparatory school in London and the head noted that a computer screen had been moved in one classroom. "Yes," explained the teacher. I put it in the front last week when we were being inspected. Now the inspectors have gone, I have returned it to the back."

It is a rather humiliating when independent schools feel they have to hide away the methods of teaching they really believe in because of government diktat. In this case, the teacher felt he had to pretend to believe in the "computers everywhere" idea that was, above all else, an attempt by Tony Blair - a politician, not an educator - to sound modern in 1997.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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It is quite astonishing that Great Ormond Street Hospital, the most famous children's hospital in the world, has had to turn away patients and close wards. The idea of ill children being refused admission to hospital is sickening.

Great Ormond Street says it is short of £1.7 million. How can this be, at a time when the Government has devoted so much more money to the NHS?

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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There are two (related) attitudes that are fairly prevalent in education which should be in question. One is that absence from school for, say, a week, is appalling. The second is that education necessarily takes place when a teacher is present and, conversely, cannot be taking place when a teacher is not present.

If a middle-class parent takes a child out of school to get two weeks skiing that are actually in the skiing season (and one of which is in term time), it is treated with the shock and horror, as if the child's life was being blighted.

Taking a child away from school is considered a kind of sacrilege. In theory this is because everyone (supposedly apart from the parents) are so concerned about education. But education now is rather like religion (or religious practice, as it has been at various times in history). Form has come to be considered more important than the content.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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This excerpt from the Daily Telegraph story on the state of the NHS today tells us something fundamental about why the NHS will always provide an inferior service to other countries with systems that have a large proportion of private or charitable hospitals:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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I gave a talk at Civitas yesterday. Afterwards, Julian Le Grand who is a senior adviser to the government on the NHS, said that it had been an insult to the intelligence of those assembled. Fortunately it was an insult they bore bravely - all of them, except Mr Le Grand, staying to the end, offering compliments and, in several cases, buying two copies of the book.

His substantive points were - and please forgive me if I am unable to remember them all or to do them justice:

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Discipline in schools has deteriorated. That is the message of the recent report commissioned by OFSTED.

- In 1996/97, 76 per cent of schools said they had good levels of discipline. The figure had fallen to 68 per cent by 2003/04.
- Gang culture is perceived as widespread in a fifth of secondary schools.
- Children are caught carrying knives and other weapons at least once a term in two out of five schools.
- 'Challenging behaviour' is shown by up to half of pupils in some schools. 'Challenging behaviour' includes biting, pinching, throwing furniture, assault, disobedience and temper tantrums.

Of course this is not very scientific. A lot of what is being analysed are perceptions - both by teachers and inspectors. Nevertheless, where it is difficult to get hard evidence, we sometimes have to make the best of something less satisfactory.

The Government response to the news was typical.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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