Cabinet Office accounts

Dizzy wonders why the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is avoiding answering the question of how much public money it paid to Capita plc (a major Labour party donor). The man in charge, Tom Watson says it's too expensive for his department to find out.

A cursory Googling reveals that the Cabinet Office's accounting system is Sun Accounts, and there seems to be an external procurement package running alongside it - from the linked document it's order processing only, which could mean that the invoice processing is done through Sun. 

It's possible that there are ancillary systems in, for example, Cabinet Office quangos which is probably how the justify the "too expensive" argument.

My suggestion would be to rephrase the question as: "how much was paid to Capita plc in each of year since 2001 via (a) the Cabinet Office's Sun Accounts system and, if different (b) the e-Pop system." This should pick up the bulk of the payments, but should be a trivial query for a semi-competent IT bod to do. Say 30 mins maximum each.

Anyone fancy giving an FoI a try? 

Nepotism in the mainstream media

The Guardian appoints a new travel blogger. Max Gogarty's going to write about his gap year. Oh yes, and he's the son of a sometime Guardian staff member. Cue much ridicule in the comments.

Meanwhile commenters at Tim W's place wonder how India Knight's writing justifies a Sunday Times column. The answer's in Wikipedia:

The media magnate, journalist, former editor of The Economist and News Corporation Director Andrew Knight is her stepfather..

Back to the seventies

Inflation, strikes, flared trousers and now they're nationalising the banks.

The answer to global warming

...is central planning and management by target. According to this LibDem, anyway.

Different worldviews

Via Instapundit comes the this Reuters story that Danish "youths" have been rioting for the seventh night in a row.

Bands of youths set fire to cars, buses and schools in Denmark on Saturday, the seventh night of rioting and vandalism in the capital Copenhagen and other Danish cities, police said on Sunday.

Four youths were arrested in the capital for suspected arson and at least 24 fires were reported across the country. Several youths were detained in Denmark's second city Aarhus in Jutland, and in Odense on Funen island.

I wonder what these "youths" were rioting about? There's a clue later in the article...

Authorities have arrested dozens of youths, predominantly with immigrant backgrounds.

And if you read nearly to the end of the article. 

Social workers said an alleged plot to kill a Danish cartoonist for his drawing two years ago of the Prophet Mohammad might have fuelled the riots. Danish newspapers reprinted the cartoon on Wednesday in protest against the plot.

Yes, I suppose it "might have" done.

Good to see that after seven nights of rioting, Reuters felt the story was newsworthy. What about the Beeb, though? Their take on the story is here:

Hundreds of Danish Muslims have been demonstrating in Copenhagen against the reprinting of a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad they consider offensive.

"Demonstrating" eh?  I wonder if someone objecting to the licence fee burnt TV centre to the ground, the BBC would call it a "demonstration"? Perhaps not.

Does anyone find it slightly disturbing that these appear to be the only two UK-based references to this story on Google news? 

The political class and its enemies

Having recently read and enjoyed (if that's the right word) Peter Oborne's rather depressing "The Triumph of the Political Class", I've wondered, from time to time, which MPs aren't in fact fully paid-up members of the self-perpetuating oligarchy - which ones shouldn't be lined up and shot.

A few thoughts:

Conservatives

• Richard Shepherd (ignores the whip, I believe)
• David Davis perhaps? He had a real job once?
  

Labour

• Frank Field
• Kate Hoey
• Bob Marshall Andrews

Updated:

Independent

• Richard Taylor
  

And what about LibDems? I suppose it's possible that they might all be non-political-class. After all you don't become a LibDem if you've a great desire to wield power, do you?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any others at all, so it's going to be a bit of a bloodbath. There must be some more. Any suggestions? 

Market share

There is much glee at the BBC over the Competition Commission's plans for supermarkets. Apparently the big four have too much market power and they're going to have to sell land to their competitors. Who won't be able to get planning permission anyway.

But hey ho, a few more bureaucrats will be kept in gainful (if not useful) employment.

The Beeb has a graph up on their website showing the sheer dominance of the big four supermarkets:

 

It's instructive to compare Tesco's paltry 31% of the grocery market with the BBC's 54% of the radio market.  If the BBC was privately owned, the competition authorities would have had it broken up long ago.

Why do we have to tolerate it just because it raises its financing coercively? 

Scraping the barrel

Do I hear the sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped?

The educational authorities have excelled themselves today. For sheer fatuousness, it's hard to beat the initiatives they've come up with today.

First up is the idea of retraining ex-soldiers as teachers. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with soliders per se, but you can't help feeling that the mindset of the military man and the pedagogue may be ever so slightly different. I mean, aren't soldiers meant to, you know, kill people who disagree with them? Or at the very least punch their lights out.

Mind you, unarmed combat skills could be useful in some schools.

Secondly is the bizarre idea to make children sit "creativity tests". Needless to say, a whole bunch of quangos (QCA, Ofsted, Creative Partnerships etc, if you must ask) have been running amok in schools throughout the land, and are now breathlessly reciting all the ways they have dreamt up to further pad their already grossly enlarged budgets. The latest wheeze, worthy of a PhD in creativity at least, is that somebody needs to measure children's creativity. Because creativity, like motherhood, is a good thing. So if you're in school, there's a whole lot more testing coming your way soon.

Just remember folks, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

I do just wonder though whether they think (a) this will make any difference to anything and (b) whether anyone is paying any attention anyway. 

Airbrushing and biofuels

In an a wonderfully brass-necked piece on the always lamentable Comment is Free, an enviro-loon called Mark Lynas claims, astoundingly, that environmentalists were right all along. Biofuels are a disaster!

Yes, you read that correctly. The environmentalists are going to start claiming that they've always been against biofuels.

When you've stopped killing yourselves laughing here's the "proof". Lynas says:

When the prospect of large-scale use of biofuels as a response to climate change was first mooted, many green campaigners and writers - including Greenpeace and the Guardian's George Monbiot - raised concerns about the impacts on land-use, food supply and biodiversity.

To his credit, Moonbat has written against biofuels in the past. But as one commenter on the CiF thread points out, Friends of the Earth have been welcoming pretty much every move towards biofuel for years: 

Here's what Friends of the Earth had to say in 2004:

Climate Change and the Budget, Nov 2004, page 19
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/pre_budget_nov_2004.pdf

"The Government should introduce a Biofuels Obligation, to stimulate a UK biofuels industry - as a lower carbon alternative to conventional transport fuels. The obligation would require that a proportion of all road transport fuels in the UK should be sourced from accredited renewable sources."

and here's what Friends of the Earth had to say in 2005:

Cautious welcome for biofuels obligation, Nov 10, 2005
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/cautious_welcome_for_biofu_10112005.html

"Friends of the Earth welcomed the Government's promise today (Thursday 10th November) that biofuels will form five per cent of transport fuel sales by 2010, helping to tackle transport's contribution to climate change."

Friends of the Earth eventually reversed their position in 2007:

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/oecd_warning_over_biofuels_11092007.html

"Friends of the Earth called on the EU to scrap its ten per cent target for using plant-based bio-fuels for transport, after a leaked paper revealed that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD's has grave concerns about their social and environmental effects."

Friends of the Earth spent several years campaigning in support of biofuels with total vigour and certainty. They're now campaigning against them with equal vigour and certainty.

And what about Greenpeace, who Lynas claims have been in the forefront of the green perspicacity on biofuels. In fact they've been screaming in favour of them for simply years - this from 1993. They were still welcoming biofuels targets in 2005.

Airbrushing history is just so much more difficult when your opponents have got Google.

More on MPs' expenses

The inimitable Guido Fawkes has pointed out that of the three MPs appointed by Gordon Broon to investigate MPs' expenses

• David MacLean (Con) was the architect of the recent attempt to exempt aforementioned MPs' expenses from the Freedom of Information Act
• Stuart Bell (Lab) employed his son as a researcher (and the little brat used his access to the palace of Westminster to do some thieving to supplement his income)
• Nick Harvey (LibDem) is a part-time lobbyist

For the record it's also worth noting that Stuart Bell was one of those who voted in favour of David MacLean's bill making MPs' expenses secret. Nick Harvey didn't vote.

So, of the three people appointed, two are against any sort of transparency, and all three are compromised.

Eminently predicatable. 

Is oil a fossil fuel

I've been dimly aware of an argument that oil is not in fact made by a biological process for a couple of years now, but I've never really given it much thought - it all seemed a bit hare-brained to me.

But now, via the Englishman, comes an article in Science which seems to support the theory.

Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat.

If this is right, then oil is not a fossil fuel at all, and another prop has been kicked out from under the global warmers' feet. Interesting times. 

More on Climate Feedback

The greenies at Nature Climate Feedback are still at it. A little while back a warm snap in the Chinese City of Harbin elicited a breathless article entitled

Ice festival wilts in global warming heat.[We're all doomed!!!!]

Today the news carries reports of major snowfalls in China, large enough to damage crops and affect the food supply. 

And Nature Climate Feedback has a report entitled....

"Largest teach-in ever" focuses US on climate change

Ho hum. 

 

How many Labour MPs are on the fiddle?

The latest development in the "Cash for Conways" scandal is the pathetic sight of the party leaders trying to outdo each other in making minor concessions to the idea of transparency.

We've had Cameron telling us that 70 of his MPs employ family members and that he's going to tell which frontbenchers do April.

Why April? Why not now? He knows who they are. Why can't he tell us? And why only the frontbenchers?

Someone of a more cynical frame of mind than me might conclude that rather more than 70 had family members "on the payroll" but that only these 70 were actually making them do any work in return. The others have a couple of months to exorcise these ghost workers so that the boy Dave can present a clean bill of health for the new financial year.

Apart from the departure of Conway, one good thing to come out of this has been the reaction of the Tory grassroots. The deluge of invective from ordinary Conservatives suggest that the party rank and file are of a rather better character than their representatives in Westminster. It's also instructive to compare this reaction to that of the Labour grassroots over the Hain revelations. The red corner was virtually silent on the issue. Only one Labour Home article actually covered the issue directly and started thusly:

Poor Peter Hain, he is being hounded for failing to declare donations to his DL election campaign. Its something that can be easily overlooked in the heat of an election campaign. Its wasn't his fault unless he was made directly aware of it himself.

A couple of commenters said he should go, but the rest were more concerned about the embarrassment to the party. It rather smacks of a bunch of people whose attitude to wrongdoing is "my party, right or wrong". Which may be how we got into this mess in the first place.

Then again, one can wonder just what Labour MPs are hiding themselves. These figures show how MPs voted on the third reading of the bill to exclude MPs expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

 

So it looks very much to me like a very large number of Labour MPs were very keen to support a Conservative private member's bill. Far more than would have been needed to win the vote.

I wonder why? 

Either way, I think we should keep a very close eye on the expenses issue, because I think the folks in Westminster are hoping we're going to forget about it.