Referendum or not

There's a lot of tit-for-tat politicking going on at the moment over who wanted a referendum and who didn't and when and why. The Conservatives were against a referendum on Maastricht (but it wasn't in their manifesto then, so that was OK apparently). Labour and the LibDems said that they wanted one on the constitution in their manifestos but the cover of the Lisbon Treaty is blue, and the Constitution one is red, so it's OK, OK? And the LibDems say they're calling for a referendum on whether we should make water flow uphill instead - they promised a referendum and they're fighting to give it to you!

Thank-you all.

When should we get a referendum?

It's fair to say that there is no default right to a referendum, which undermines the way things are done in the UK. We're a representive democracy after all. Many argue, however, that parliament should refer to the people over fundamental constitutional issues, although it's clear that this was not done for Maastricht or say for Scottish devolution.

I would argue that when an issue is (a) constitutional, and (b) related to the EU, then it is necessary to put the matter to a referendum. Why do I think only EU matters should be treated in this way? The reason is that the single fundamental fact of the English Constitution is that no parliament may bind its successors.  But the succession of EU treaties tying us closer and closer to the EU have had the effect of doing just that. If Lisbon is ratified tonight, it is not possible for a future parliament to unratify it. It has to unratify all the other EU treaties as well. The effect is to limit future parliaments to a choice of "all or nothing". Whichever way you look at it, this is still binding them.

The ropes may only be tied around Britannia's feet, but she is still bound.

Blogger accused of having blood on his hands

John Adams is probably better described as an expert on risk than as a blogger, but we'll let that pass. A commenter has accused him of being complicit in the death of a driver in New Zealand. The driver was not wearing a seatbelt when killed, an offence he'd been convicted for many times previously, and the commenter reckons Adams is to blame because of his stated views on seatbelts. (OK, so the guy was also high on drugs too, but....)

I'm reading Adams' book "Risk" at the moment, and I find his arguments quite convincing. In essence he says that if you wear a seatbelt, you are probably going to driver more recklessly than if you aren't. So while a seatbelt reduces the risk of injury if you're in a crash, it also makes you more likely to have a crash in the first place.

This is perhaps all a bit subtle for the commenter in question who reckons that Prof Adams has been campaigning for people not to wear seatbelts. If he (the commenter) was consistent he would also be cheering Adams' "campaign" every time a pedestrian was knocked over and killed: if people weren't wearing seatbelts, they'd never drive so fast.

Olympic security

According to an article in the Times, builders working on the Olympic site in London are going to have to pass through stringent security checks, just to get in:

About 100,000 workers at the Olympics site in London are to be screened using advanced face and palm recognition techniques in one of the largest and most expensive security operations undertaken on a British construction project.

I just wonder if anyone in government asked the suppliers to guarantee that all this equipment still works when the hands and faces being scanned are covered in concrete. 

Ellee Seymour

Ellee Seymour has a post up about issuing firearms certificates to children.

A Freedom of Information request found that an 11-year-old has been given a shotgun licence by police already this year, while in 2006 a 10-year-old was handed one. In the past five years, 182 under-16s have received shotgun licences from Suffolk police which are valid for five years.

Ellee comes across as a nice person, but with the traditional politician's love of banning things. She'll feel right at home if she gets elected next time roung. Clearly, children using shotguns is a major problem if people aren't even aware that it's happening. As Mr Free Market says in the comments

Every time I see the hysteria whipped up in the sensationalist gun fearing press about youngsters & air weapons (or firearms), my Boy gets sent out into the farm yard to shoot rats because out here, vermin control has always been a youngsters job.

Since he has been physically large enough to lift a weapon, he has been taught & is continuing to be taught, all aspects of handling, marksmanship & safety.

And that's the point, isn't it? Children have been shooting vermin on farmyards since time immemorial. I'm sure the kids love it and it's a job that needs to be done. What better way of introducing a young person to the real world?

I wonder if Ellee thinks the boy would be better off hanging round on street corners?  

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.