Just how far are their snouts in the trough?

A thought occurred to me the other day. If MPs are using their expenses to pad out their paltry sixty grand salaries, then it might be possible to see this by analysing the expenses figures and looking at how they correlate with other data. My first idea was that there should be some correlation between the travel expenses and the distance from the MPs' constituencies to Westminster.

The House of Commons Expenses data for 2006-7 is here. As is normal with sensitive data like this, it is provided in a format carefully chosen to make analysis as difficult as possible. However, with a trial copy of Adobe Acrobat, and a bit of jiggery pokery in Excel I've managed to get what I think is a clean set of data. I've removed from it those people who are no longer MPs - including Tony Blair.

Having eyeballed the data, the travel expenses didn't actually look as if they were going to throw up anything nefarious. Because of this, and because the staff costs were so much higher, I decided to analyse these instead.

My hypothesis was this: if MPs are employing lots of staff, their office costs should be inflated too, to reflect all the work done by the staff. I therefore prepared a scatter plot of office costs (columns 3, 7, 7a and 8 on the PDF file) against staffing costs (column 4). Here it is:

 

I've asked Excel to calculate a linear trendline, which you can see on the graph. And if you were in any doubt as to how good a correlation there is between staff costs and office expenses, the answer is that there is none. Literally. (For those who aren't statisticians, the R² value of 1E-5 which is to say, near as dammit zero, is the figure which tells you whether there's a correlation or not. A value of near to 1 is a strong correlation. Zero means there is none.)

Which strongly suggests that quite a lot of our elected representatives are on the fiddle.

(If anyone wants the data, you can download it by clicking here). 

Changing attitudes

Lord Mancroft's outburst about the nurses in Bath is the subject of a posting over at Liberal Conspiracy. Alix Mortimer reckons the nursing profession is up in arms about Mancroft's remarks. Strangely though, this outrage is not reflected in the blogosphere, with the vast majority of postings collected on Technorati being broadly supportive of the peer's position.

What changed times we live in when a slack-jawed Tory peer can criticise the angels of the nursing profession and be cheered for doing it.

These are the postings: for, against, and undeclared. 

For Lord Mancroft (11)

Tony Sharp
Mental nurse
Tangled Web
Dr Grumble
Random Thoughts
Conservative Home
England Expects
Dr Grumble
Bishop Hill
Ben Brogan
Jammie Wearing Fool 

Against Lord Mancroft (5)

Piqued
Prison Law Inside Out
Hot Ginger & Dynamite
Curly's Cornershop
Byrne Baby Byrne 

On the fence (5)

Suzanne Lamido
Dr Rant
NHS Blog Doc 

More on sleaze

It looks very much like Cash for Conways was not an isolated incident.

The Telegraph is reporting that more than fifty MPs have laid off staff since our Derek was sent down. Meanwhile, Guido has noted that most of Labour MP Tom Watson's family seem to be suckling on the public teat. Watson pays his wife as an assistant, but it's even better than that:

Like her husband, [Mrs Watson] also works for [Euro MP Michael] Cashman and for Wolverhampton Labour MP Pat McFadden, yet still finds time to be a Labour councillor in Sandwell.

And the political classes are rushing to destroy the evidence. According to the Telegraph article, it was alleged yesterday that Speaker Michael Martin has permitted the shredding of MPs expense claims prior to 2005. 

As these expense claims form part of the MPs' remuneration, isn't this illegal? 

Abolition of income tax

Well, nothing like arriving with a bang.

The UK Libertarian party has issued its first policy - the abolition of income tax.

It's radical, and I fear it will allow opponents to portray the party as lunatics, but who knows, maybe people are ready for something radical?

Tesco good, M&S bad

M&S have said they're going to selflessly charge us for plastic bags. Tesco have said they're not.

When I want my supermarket to make ethical decisions for me, I'll ask them to do so. In the meantime, I choose Tesco.

Good news

There's good news today, with the government's announcement that it's going to build twenty new university campuses around the UK.  You've got to hand it to Labour, they know what's worrying us middle class parents. With a campus on every street corner, a university education will become a ticket to a lifetime on the tills at McDonalds.

Which means I'm not going to have to pay for three kids to get a university education. I can retire after all! 

Decision day

So, it's decision day for parents today. The day when thousands of worried mums and dads find out if they've got their children into their preferred school. The day when the hopes of many are dashed. The day when careers are remapped, and expectations for the future are downgraded in the light of decisions to go private or home-ed.

The educational establishment meanwhile has got its retaliation in first, with a press release:

School leaders are calling on politicians to end what they call "the misleading rhetoric" of school choice - which, they say, cannot be delivered.

and there's a strong hint that it's not just the rhetoric they want to see the back of:

The admissions regulator, chief schools adjudicator Philip Hunter, has said that the present system of admissions and "parental choice" is fuelling social and racial divisions.

He has said that options that will be unpopular with many parents, such as having local lotteries for places, might be necessary.

It's probably true that school choice can't be delivered at the moment, but this is mainly because of all the silly rules which the government has set up. My children's school, which is about five miles away, is very rural and struggles to keep numbers up, although it's generally held to be very good.  Last year it lost a teacher because of the falling roll and one of the classes is now a composite of two years' intake.

Meanwhile the school in the village where I live is again very good, but has had a surge in numbers. It is now hugely overcrowded, with classes held in corridors and cloakrooms.

In a sane world, parents from an overcrowded school would be offered places at the non-overcrowded one. But an absurd rule stops this from happening. To take the overflow, the school with space would need to take on a teacher, to replace the one it lost last time round. The rules say they can't do this. They can only offer out-of-catchment places up to their existing staffing levels.

I just can't imagine the levels of stupidity that would be required to think that a rule like this was a good idea.

Anarcho-capitalism in Somalia

Here's a really interesting story.

Though Somalia has had no government for over a decade – or rather, because of this – international call rates are the lowest in Africa, most of the country has telephone coverage, and you can get an Internet account in a day.

I'm not an anarchist, but stories like this one, and this older one too, sometimes make me wonder if there isn't something in it.

(Somalia story H/T LPUK) 

Jobs for the boys

Via LibDemVoice, a vacancy for which there will be no shortage of applicants:

 

A change in the weather?

Maybe it's just me, but I wonder if I sense a change in the global warming debate. Perhaps this has been prompted by the sudden dramatic fall in the global temperature - a drop in the last month big enough to wipe out the putative warming of the last century.

A few things have brought this idea to the fore. A survey conducted by a warmist and a skeptic found that 25 percent of bona-fide climate scientists reckon global warming is overdone. A giant of climatology came out of the closet and said she was sceptical of much of the science. A conference of sceptics wasn't ignored by some of the mainstream media. E-day was a flop. A report found that more informed people were more sceptical of global warming. A prominent warmist blogger agreed that the temperature record contained flaws. McIntyre was invited to speak by climatologists at Georgia Tech.

Of course, I could be deluding myself, but something feels different right now. Maybe it's just spring in the air. 

Privatising healthcare

Here's something I hadn't heard about before although apparently it's been going on for a couple of years now: Canada is starting to privatise its healthcare system.

Last week, the Quebec government proposed to lift a ban on private health insurance for several elective surgical procedures and announced it would pay for such surgeries at private clinics when waiting times at public facilities were unreasonable.

Now, it would only be fair to point out that Quebec didn't actually start down this road voluntarily - they were forced down the road to reform by the Supreme Court, which said that a ban on private health insurance was illegal when you couldn't actually get the socialised healthcare you'd already paid for. Good for them.

The effect of the decision on the other provinces seems to have been salutory  too:

The decision applied directly only to Quebec, but it has generated calls for private clinics and private insurance in several provinces where governments hope to forestall similar court decisions.

Which sounds good to me. Banning private healthcare is absurd, if not outright obscene. It's worth remembering that there are only two other countries where this is the case: Cuba and North Korea. I can't really believe that this is the kind of company the Canadians want to be keeping, despite all the credulous claims of the superiority of Cuban hospitals.

Can you imagine a world so topsy-turvy that medics are forced to operate clinics illegally? Apparently this is what happens in Canada. I can't imagine how anyone in the free world could stand to see someone prosecuted for this. "You have been found guilty of providing hip replacements for the wrong reasons - send him down!"

The article I've cited at the top of this post is from 2006, but it appears that there's been no let up in the pace of reform:

The architect of Quebec's now-overburdened public health-care system is proposing a strong and controversial remedy that includes further privatization and user fees of up to $100 [£50] for people to see their family doctor.

In a 338-page report, former provincial Liberal health minister Claude Castonguay concluded that Quebec can no longer sustain the annual growth in health-care costs. The province currently spends about $24 billion annually on health care, or about 40 per cent of its budget.

It's that second paragraph which gets to the crux of the matter. The problem of the whole "equal but inefficient" approach of socialised medicine is that eventually it's either going to become unaffordable, as in Canada, or, as in the UK where costs are held down, the system decays to the extent that it's more dangerous to be treated than not. 

No alternative

Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times hits the nail pretty squarely on the head on the subject of whether the Conservatives are actually offering alternative NHS policies to Labour.

If Lansley tells an audience of doctors and nurses that the Conservatives will no longer fiddle with the NHS like new Labour, he will get easy applause. Health workers are truly fed up with obtuse management and endless Whitehall directives. But after the clapping has died down he should ask that room whether the NHS should continue as it is...
 
...David Cameron, you present yourself as the future, the new politics. If you don’t offer the prime minister a challenge on health reform then another decade will be wasted. By not rocking the boat you think you will get more votes. Maybe. But you’ll be passing up a great opportunity and we will all be the losers.

It's not just health policy where the Conservatives are offering a policy of "the same but better". Here's the Shadow Education Secretary, Michael Gove:

Tomorrow, parents across the country will find out if their children have got into their first-choice school. I vividly remember last year when I, like thousands of other parents, faced a nerve-shredding few weeks to see if my daughter had got into her preferred school. She was lucky and now she's enjoying a superb education at a fine state primary. But the experience reinforced my conviction that parents shouldn't have to endure this anxiety and a good state education shouldn't be a matter of chance. It should be a right.

What makes this year's admissions roulette even more tense is the pressure by the Government to micro-manage the process. Schools face new rules and parents new barriers when it comes to exercising choice. Head teachers have been warned not even to talk to parents lest those who are committed to finding out more about a particular school secure an unfair advantage. And the bureaucrat in charge of this process is threatening even more lotteries to come. As someone who believes totally in state education I understand why it's important to do what we can to make opportunity more equal.

If even the Conservatives can't see that it's the "state" bit of "state education" which is the problem, heaven help us.  

Illiberal and statist outreach work

I often wonder whether we in the libertarian part of the blogosphere end up just preaching to each other. With this in mind, I've been making doing some outreach work at LabourHome and LibDem Voice which has been lots of fun and much more of an intellectual challenge. (I don't think I've actually converted anyone yet though).

The latest venture here was the comments thread on this post at LibDem voice on the subject of Post Office closures. The point I keep coming back to is this: if you're not going to use economic viability as your criterion to decide if a PO branch should remain open, what are you going to base your decision on? So far this appears to have the Liberal party stumped. 

Disingenuous greens

The Green Alliance have issued a report calling for VAT to be replaced with a green goods tax.

Julie Hill, Green Alliance’s waste policy expert, says:

“We have a choice: do we want to continue living with stuff which conflicts with living a low-carbon, low-waste lifestyle or do we want to consume in ways that are smart, pleasurable and sustainable? The market still brings forward products that conflict with the government’s own environmental goals, from appliances that can’t be taken off stand-by to packaging that can’t be recycled. And without the right price signals this pattern is set to continue. Other European countries do it so let’s tax bads  - not goods.”

What Julie Hill neglects to say is that this can't actually be done, because VAT is compulsory under EU law. She does actually know about this flaw in her little plan, because it says so in the full report. She just accidentally forgot to mention it in the press release, I suppose. 

What is it about the name "Prescott"?

Lots of traffic coming my way as a result of the "E-day" post. Welcome to everyone who's visiting here for the first time.

While researching the background to E-day, I came across a curious fact: there are lots of Matt Prescotts involved in greenish politics.

We've already met Matt Prescott, PhD (Oxon) in Ecology, head of Ban the Bulb, Planet Relief and E-Day.

Then there's Matt Prescott who runs Carbon Limited, a project trying to make Carbon Communism Personal Carbon Allowances a workable idea. 

And there's a third Matt Prescott who is a spokesman for PETA.

As far as I can tell, these are all entirely different people, but they're all involved in enviroloony causes. 

But I suppose I might go off the rails too, if I shared a name with our former Deputy Prime Minister.