Crap: A Guide to Politics - The Blog

Ideological Crap from the BMA’s chairman and others

On Friday 27th February I posted an entry on the NHS which referred to the Cheeky Crap of Dr Michael Ingram who feared that increasing “privatisation” of GP practices would metamorphose from a care system admired at home and abroad into one where the concept of a family doctor is just a distant memory, leaving me to point out that it had been a distant memory for at least a generation.  Indeed the family doctor concept began to disintegrate after GP practises were nationalised.

It is not difficult to see why, with the doctors’ trade union, the BMA (in which Dr Ingram has been quite active over the years) following the trade union principle (producers first, customers last) to a tee.

Rarely can this principle have been better illustrated than by the BMA’s current chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum, who told the Sunday Telegraph on 6th July that he was opposed to patients being allowed to “top up” their health service care by buying life-extending drugs that the NHS will not fund.

“My gut instinct is that this goes against the sort of NHS I believe in, which is  free at the point of use, fair and equitable for all”.

Unless you have a problem with your gut, and the solution isn’t free at the point of use.

Meanwhile in a letter to The Telegraph of 9th July from Mr Simon Wakeling of Heidelberg, who has had many years of exposure to both the UK and the German health services, says that “without a shadow of doubt that the German system is, in all respects, incomparably better.  German hospitals’ waiting lists?  What’s a waiting list?”  And so on.

More generally “health tourism” from the UK (often to much poorer countries) is a thriving industry.

The latest NHS scandal is in maternity wards, where the Healthcare Commission has again found a chronic shortage of facilities, to the point where in many cases mothers are likely to be turfed out in short order (24 hours is a long stay) or even turned away altogether.

Perhaps the same could be done with maternity leave.  Nicola Brewer, Czar of yet another new quango, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, first teased us by acknowledging that lawmaking is followed by the law of unintended consequences:

“new laws on maternity leave have had the unintended consequences of  increasing the disparity between the time mothers and fathers spend with their children” - (reported in the Telegraph 14th July 08)

But we all know what comes next:

“No-one is suggesting that women should not have the rights they have to  maternity leave, what we are saying is that dads need a slice of the action too”.

Or inaction, as the case may be.

The latest news is that the government intends to to link doctors’ “merit payments” to patient mortality and other measures such as post-operative mobility; in other words to pay bonuses based on a ridiculous array of “outcomes”. How about a competition to forecast how and when the law of unintended consequences will kick in on this one?

We the Sheeple: One-Rule-For-Them Crap with a vengeance

The last couple of weeks has thrown up three wonderful (i.e. horrific) examples of the politicos on a roll over those they are meant to serve.  Rarely do the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm come so readily to mind.

First off is the David Davis affair (by which I do not mean telephone calls to Shami Chakrabati).  The vitriol poured upon him from much of the press (for his resignation to fight an election on the 42 days detention issue) was shocking, not least from The Times which called it

“one of the most egregiously self-serving political stunts in living memory” which  has put “his party at risk for the sake of a disastrous ego trip” (Times Leader, 13th June 2008)

On the same day, columnist Rachel Sylvester called his resignation “more about one man’s misguided impulses than the good of his party”.

We the sheeple don’t count.

In the same paper the next day, Peter Riddell wrote

“Davis has deserted when his fight could be won”

A traitor, no less.  But what our old friend Matthew Parris was worried about on the same day is that the sheeple may take a different view:

“So although Mr Davis’s motives may be suspect, the vanity palpable, the distraction unhelpful…. I am not quite confident that this is how the voters will read the story”.

Heaven forbid such a disaster, Matthew.

Next we have the attitude of the politicos to the Irish vote against the proposed EU Treaty (virtually identical to the one thrown out in earlier referendums in France and the Netherlands). This attitude is simple: “Up You, Sheeple”.  On June 16th David Miliband told the House of Commons that the Irish rejection “must be respected”.  He went on to make clear that it may be “respected” but not “accepted”, suggesting the Irish should have another vote – no doubt after lots of clever bribes (not to be confused with the so-called bribes of BAE to Saudi officials, of course – see my book, chapter 9).  Meanwhile Gordo, always trumpeting his “moral compass”, is the hero of the hour amongst the EU politicos, rushing to ratify the treaty and telling everyone else to do the same – despite his party’s promise of a referendum in its 2005 manifesto.

Finally, good old Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein (featured in Chapter 12 of my book) explains and condones why the pigs behave as they do:

“The party that is first to let the voters know what it really stands for…..loses”.

Thus, says Daniel, in The Times of 18th June:

“After the 2005 election David Cameron deliberately shifted his party closer to  the position of the Government. This was the same move that Tony Blair had  made before the 1997 election. In both cases they concluded that a broadly moderate, centre, position was superior as an electoral strategy and governing  philosophy. They sacrificed definition by reducing the differences with their opponents, but regarded the trade-offs as worthwhile. And they were surely right”.

Daniel goes on to say that between 1997 and 2005 the Tories “strove to be distinctive”.  In so doing “the contrast principle kicked in and voters understood the position for the first time”.  And they went out and chose Mr Blair.

Can you imagine anything more damning of the politicos?  They want power, and they’ll do anything to get it, including issuing a false prospectus – something which is a criminal offence for company directors.

Say no more.  Except to ask Daniel what sort of a Tory is he?  True Lies, perhaps?

MEANINGLESS CRAP FROM OUR PM

There are others more competent than I am to comment on Gordon Brown’s adulation (The Times, 2nd June) of his proposal “to detain suspected terrorists without charge for up to 42 days”. So I’ll stick to Gordon’s more obvious nonsenses.

"Today in Britain there are at least 2,000 terrorist suspects, 200 networks or cells and 30 active plots…”

What is “suspect” and how strong is the suspicion, Gordo?  Strengthen the qualifications and there could be 200 suspects; weaken them and there might be 20,000.  The weaker you go, Gordo, the more you will alienate potential informers.

Gordo really knows that it’s a judgement call:

“They [the police] have to make a judgement about intervening early to avert  tragedy, which means more time may be needed between arrests and charges  being laid, to unravel the conspiracy and assemble the evidence”

But also, intervening early means more expense and less concentration on other suspects, as well as the loss of informers. So “new measures to safeguard our security” also involve a “judgement”.

Never mind all that; what counts for our PM are our principles of liberty. Gordo has no less than six:

“So our first principle is that there should always be a maximum limit of pre-charge detention.  It is fundamental to our civil liberties that no-one should be held arbitrarily for an unspecified period”

Go nap, Gordon; what’s wrong with 365 days – specified of course?

“Our second principle is that detention beyond 28 days (why 28, Gordo?) can be  allowed only in truly exceptional circumstances. The decision… must be backed  by the Director of Public Prosecutions as well as the police.”

Never mind that the DPP is a prosecutor, pure and simple!

“Our third principle is that the Home Secretary must them take this decision to Parliament for approval”

Except in the 76  day summer recess?

“Fourthly….. a senior judge will be required to approve the extension of detention in each individual case every seven days”

No doubt the judge will be picked out of a hat? Or maybe just a touch of hawkish history would be best?

“Fifthly… the independent reviewer will now report publicly not just in general on the operation of the legislation but on each individual case”

So we now have the police, the Home Secretary, the DPP, Parliament (sometimes) a senior judge, and an independent reviewer (like the “independent” Bank of England choosing its new deputy Governor?) most of  whom will know bugger all about any of the details of the case!

Bring ‘em on Gordo, Round ‘em up.  Just like you’re going to vet all those who  come into contact with children or vulnerable adults – already, I’m  told, the head  count is over 11 million.Vet ‘em, and vet ‘em again, for ever.

We know you love statistics, Gordo. So how many vetters does that mean?  And how many days of innocence are lost at 42 days per head – where again you have no doubt calculated  the cost of locking ‘em  all up? (Five grand a head, say?)

Cheeky crap from the fourth estate

In the Introduction to my book I explained why my selected newspaper for providing examples of crap was The Times, which has strong statist leanings and is in tune with Big Government Conservatism.

A good example of this pro-government stance, without much semblance of a responsibility of the press to watch over government on our behalf, is cited in Chapter 4 (Statistical Crap) where a Times Leader welcomes the proposal of tax-payer funded government research on mobile phones and disease, without any evidence of a connection.

The columnist Magnus Linklater has a small walk-on part in the same chapter, displaying a tendency to take government research as a model of impartiality.  But his colours have come to a much stronger light in more recent offerings, such as this piece of Cheeky Crap, (or maybe Prolific Crap) defending helpless politicians against the “vitriol” of we the people in an article on 18th May 2007 entitled “Criticism of public figures has lost all proportion”.  Forget that his “public figures” turnout to be “politicians” – and certainly in today’s “celebs” culture I doubt if he’d accuse us of over-criticism there!  Even worse, he goes on to say:

There is a quality of venom about political commentary on both sides of the Atlantic that seems out of proportion to the performances of those on the receiving end, and cannot wholly be explained by the febrile climate of the times. 

Mr Brown is now the object of what can only be described as a feeding frenzy  that goes well beyond criticism of his political indecision, the handling of the Northern Rock affair and the errors he admits to, such as the 10p tax fiasco.

The only examples of “feeding frenzy” he gives are another newspaper and the Tories – more politicos.

The next day Matthew Parris reminds us that far from admitting to errors:

...the list of mistakes and misfortunes that Mr Brown won’t acknowledge has grown too tedious to detail.  Northern Rock, a range of tax twists and U-turns, the  recent notorious abolition of the 10p tax rate (where Brown still fails to use the word “I” when acknowledging mistakes)...

And that in defence of the £2.7 billion tax “cut”, (financed by borrowing) he replied to interviewers that:

"The £2.7 billion tax cut, financed by borrowing, was a response to the world  economic downturn: a measure to stimulate domestic growth by putting extra money in people’s pockets.  Brown said he wanted to ease the financial squeeze  being faced by hard-working families."

Asked why the need for this had only been discovered since the Budget, he could give no answer.  It was pitiable.

The Spectator’s leading article at the weekend ended with a simple sentence; “This is a Prime Minister who will do anything – anything – to cling to power”.

Come on Magnus; let’s give discredit where discredit is due!

CHEEKY CRAP FROM OUR PRIME MINISTER (for how long??) COURTESY OF IAIN MARTIN

“The far greater depressions and inflations of the twentieth century have not educed nearly as much mass interest in economics as did the milder economic crises of the past century” - Murray Rothbard, History of Money and Banking in the United States (Mises Institute)

I comment on the extract below from Iain Martin, the excellent Sunday Telegraph columnist. Iain Martin is far from being a regular crap artist, but free marketeers are too thin on the ground to let false history pass without comment especially when it comes from our Gordon:

"Confession of a free marketeer: Gordon Brown is right
By Iain Martin

Henry Morgenthau Jr is a name not much mentioned now; in his time he was a giant, an architect of the new world that emerged from the wreckage of war.

He was President Roosevelt's treasury secretary, who chaired the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944 and largely got his way on a redesign of the global capitalist system. The results were a new basis on which currencies would operate, the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to encourage growth, more open markets and a greater role for government in the regulation of international finance......

In 1999, Brown said: "The founders of Bretton Woods resolved that the failed policies of laissez-faire which resulted in vast inequities and recurring depression from the 1870s to the 1930s would not be repeated… Unregulated market forces had brought great instability and even greater injustice. In the post-war era, governments had to work collectively.".....

the lesson from Morgenthau and his contemporaries is that we are not powerless in the face of forces over which we might think we have no control. Brown's intervention shows that he understands this. In response free marketeers will need to have more to say than "get government out of the way"."

Free marketeers do indeed need to have more to say than “get government out of the way”.  They have to say why, which in this case means pointing out that Gordo’s “laissez-faire” and “unregulated market forces” had disappeared (at least insofar as Bretton Woods was concerned) long before his starting point of 1870!

For a simple proof of this one need look no further than banking, where free market banking had disappeared in England at least two generations earlier and in Gordo’s Scotland (despite an excellent record in its period of genuine free market banking) in 1844-5.  (In Morgenthau’s USA the early influence of government was even greater; genuine free market banking never existed there at all)

On April 15th in the Financial Times, Martin Wolf (another regular guy) had to admit that: “the incidence of banking crises has been as high since 1980 as in any period since 1800” whilst Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, has admitted that the Fed caused the Great Depression. 

The UK’s own Great Depression was caused by government too, by its return to the Gold Standard in 1925 at the parity of its departure in 1914, despite the years of substantial inflation in between, (an error which provided an excuse to go off it altogether in 1931).

In fact the 1925 version was a Gold Exchange Standard, which it was able to impose on other countries, the essential feature being an internationally co-ordinated inflationary government-issued paper money based on the UK pound.  Bretton Woods provided the same thing except that it was based on the US dollar, which was the main objective of Morgenthau.  Neither has stood the test of time and both caused untold damage around the world.

The last thing that is needed in today’s crisis is more government interference, internationally co-ordinated or not.  Gordo should learn a little more about financial crises in his own country and how it avoided them in its period of free-market banking.

Free-marketeers have indeed more to say than “get government out of the way”.  We should also say “get government schools and government education out of the way; its history syllabus and lessons are bunk!

Six Social Myths

Today I take the opportunity of quoting a commentary which is not crap – it would have been in my book as part of my own commentary had I been clever enough to anticipate it.  The excerpts below come from an article in a magazine called Policy, from the Centre for Policy Studies in Australia, “the leading independent public policy ‘think tank’ within Australasia” and it is hard to find a better exposition of the Prolific Crap that sustains the welfare state.  I suppose it’s nice to know that we’re not alone in the world!

Six Social Policy Myths [Policy (Australia) Vol 24 No.1 Autumn 08]

Policy experts often think alike, even when the evidence contradicts them. This is how billions of dollars get spent on government programs that don’t work, argue CIS researchers Jennifer Buckingham, Andrew Norton, Phil Rennie, Jeremy Sammut, and Peter Saunders.

Myth 1: All children can benefit from an increase in government spending on institutional child care

What all this adds up to is that the research literature provides no strong evidence that child care is good (or bad) for all children. You would never know this from listening to the public policy experts in this field. They talk and act as if the research is clear and the issue is done and dusted. The truth is that governments are being pushed to commit ever-increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money to funding something that does not deliver the claimed payoffs. Australian child care advocates are convinced of the case for more child care and greater subsidies, but the evidence does not support their claims.

Myth 2: More government spending on education and training can solve the problem of joblessness

Recent research by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) finds that, far from benefiting from more education, low ability students often lose from it.

The point that is persistently overlooked in the education and training debate is that some people are simply not cut out for year 12 schoolwork, a university degree, or a technically skilled job....

Myth 3: High tuition fees are pricing students from poor backgrounds out of university

Strikingly, the more a working-class family earns, the less likely it is that their sons will go to university, although for daughters, university attendance rates do increase slightly as household income rises. The children of the poorest professional families have higher university enrolment rates than the children of the most affluent working-class families, which suggests that parental occupation has more of an impact on children’s educational outcomes than parental income.

A person’s family background has a big influence on whether they go to university, but it operates indirectly, via school results, and has little or nothing to do with income....

Myth 4: Poverty in Australia is getting worse, and higher welfare spending is needed to counter it.

But there are at least three reasons why we should refuse to go along with this.
The first is that the welfare lobby’s definitions of ‘poverty’ are entirely arbitrary.

Secondly, the report is not measuring ‘poverty,’ but income inequality.

[Thirdly].... Household incomes fluctuate, so most people who appear under any arbitrarily-drawn ‘poverty line’ do not stay there long.

Myth 5: Higher spending on preventive medicine will reduce health costs in the future.

But the authors of these studies admit they contain no evidence that access to and receipt of primary care reduces obesity (that it modifies individual behaviour) or that it lowers the incidence of chronic disease.(32) They also admit that improved health outcomes depend on an ‘appropriate balance’ between primary and secondary care.(33)

Meanwhile, a 2002 cross-country analysis of primary care across thirteen OECD countries found that those (including Australia) that had weaker primary care systems but spent more on secondary care achieved better health outcomes than the stronger primary-care-oriented countries.(34) Of course, prevention is better than cure, but only when it works.

Myth 6: Higher social expenditure creates a more caring society.

The unifying theme that underlies all of the myths we have examined is the belief that social problems require additional government spending to put them right.

Here, then, is the biggest myth of all—the meta-myth, if you like—which is embedded in the shared consciousness of the social policy establishment. It is the assumption that government is the appropriate agency for resolving people’s problems, and that we as individuals bear no responsibility for sorting out our own lives. For as long as this myth persists, ‘social problems’ will continue to grow, government budgets will continue to expand, and job opportunities for social policy experts will continue to multiply.

BACK SOON, WITH MORE REAL CRAP

PROLIFIC CRAP FROM MATTHEW PARRIS

At the launch party of my book at the Institute of Economic Affairs, I quoted with approval a paragraph from the Tory MP and Times columnist Matthew Parris:

“The British Left has never had a problem in principle with intervention, coercion  or prescription. Why would they? To the leftist mind, impressed with the  possibilities of collective action channelled into statist structures for the purposes  of increasing the sum total of human happiness at gunpoint, the idea of wading  into the Middle East to sort things out was always going to have an instinctive  appeal”.

Here is a politico linking the Warfare State and the Welfare State – both need guns. Now that is promising. Maybe, I thought, we could move off the bogus spectrum of Right versus Left (what would the British Right do, Matthew?) to the real issue: Big Government versus Small Government, and thus debate what functions necessarily belong to Government. What must be done at gunpoint?

We had Matthew’s answer on Saturday 29th March; one helluva lot. Under the title of “The State Works; Have faith”, his list of things that only Government can do includes the following:

"Put Canary wharf on the map. Get Crossrail built. Get roads built. Get decent  healthcare for those who are poor and chronically sick. Underwrite and arrange  free and universal schooling. Protect us abroad [wow] and police us at home.  Force the pace on Climate change. Frame, amend and administer the law. Defend  the interest of the generality against the appetites of individuals. Create a  national park, guarantee a green belt. Hold back the march of a million breeze  block bungalows across the countryside. Redistribute wealth and power."

Both history and theory demonstrate that nothing on this list must necessarily involve Government, and much of it is touched on in my book (the basic issues are ownership of property and the signals of market pricing).  But what I would like to concentrate on here is not Matthew’s list above, but rather his assertions below:

“The great challenges as they appeared in spring 2008” are “the environment,  the regulation of banking, fair trade, malaria and HIV-Aids, congestion,  immigration, asylum.  What has anti-statism to say about any of these?  I cannot  remember a time when the ideas of Hayek, Joseph, and Sherman all seemed more  distant to the anxieties of the hour”.

Firstly, Matthew, haven’t you left a few biggies out?  Like war, including Iraq (on which you have those major debates with your colleague David Aaronovitch), political corruption, and falling living standards, all of which are the direct result of Big Government, and only Big Government (ie your statist structures). What about major government cock-ups (like losing discs with data for 25 million people, or Katrina, or last summer’s flooding – about all of which Big Government had been warned months and indeed years earlier and done nothing about it).

Secondly, let’s look at the challenges named by you and generously assume that they are the topics on everybody’s lips (I’ll leave out the environment – too long to cover here, so buy my book!):  banking, where your now irrelevant Hayek’s proposed denationalisation (ie re-privatisation) of money is still the only solution; fair trade (if it’s not free it’s unfair and highly damaging to the poor); malaria and HIV-Aids, (where Big Government is responsible for the deaths of millions of people by banning DDT); immigration (never a problem until Big Government took it on, and now a huge issue as I write – see also my book page 63); and asylum (where last week The Independent Asylum Commission attacked the system as inhumane).

On all these matters the State does NOT work. Anti-statism can hardly do worse. Indeed Statism stole these issues at gunpoint, Matthew, from the far superior laissez faire system. Oh, and by the way, that chap Hayek not only revealed statism as dictatorship (elective or not) in The Road to Serfdom. He showed why the worst get to the top. And he showed elsewhere that the perennial “challenge” of living standards and the quality of life is far better dealt with outside the State, because the taxes government take attack the division of labour at its roots.  My calculation (see Chapter 7 of my book) is that every extra pound of tax reduces overall living standards by about 65p, and vice versa, and that’s before any waste!

Come off it, Matthew.

I should have known better, of course. In Chapter 8 (Ideological Crap) of my book I took to task another Times columnist, Associate Editor Anatole Kaletsky, for including in his necessary list for Government the following: law enforcement, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, the promotion of public culture (see my entry of March 10th on “Crap Art”) and the financing of pure scientific research (see October 29th). And this from a self-described “instinctive liberal”!

THE PUBLIC SECTOR CANNOT BE EFFICIENT

In the Daily Telegraph of 17th March, Philip Johnston lays into Government waste, referring at length to a forthcoming book by John Seddon “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector” which apparently argues that the massive waste is not deliberate; it arises “because it has failed to listen to people who know how to run services on behalf of the customer rather than the producer”.

Thus:

“public services have requirements placed upon them by a whole series of bodies that are all based on opinion rather than knowledge”.

Mr Seddon is not enamoured of “local engagement” or “citizens juries” (Three cheers!).  He argues that:

“what people want from public services is for them to work properly…… waste  can be eradicate if the systems are properly designed against demand rather than  phoney outcomes”.

Mr Seddon is an occupational psychologist and “management thinker”.  Good luck to you and your book, Mr Seddon, but quite frankly this all seems very much beside the point.  In fact it seems very similar to the proposals of Michael Barber, a partner in the management consultants McKinsey & Co., and a former head of Tony Blair’s “delivery unit” – see Chapter 12 (Prolific Crap) of my book.

These people have to earn a living, but I am surprised that Philip Johnston doesn’t ask two simple questions:  How does one design against “demand” if you don’t know what the  demand is?  And how does one decide on what aspects of life and civilisation should be in The Public Sector?  After all, there is no problem with “demand” in markets; satisfy it or go bust.

How, for example, would one “design against demand” in assessing the merits of single-sex hospital wards referred to in my previous entry (February 27th).  Outside the public sector – private hospitals for example – it’s easy – suck it and see.

What kind of “knowledge” is it that censors the most wonderful information system available to humanity – the signals given by market prices?

What other “knowledge” tells NICE how to assess the value of expensive drugs – or to say “yes” in Scotland but “no” in England?  Or to advise Ed Balls on class sizes?  Or on the acceptable number of children who don’t get into their first choice school?  What are the acceptable losses in a rural school or post-office?  What is a sensible cost for roads – or flood defences?  It looks awfully like “back to the producers” to me.

Come on Philip.  Wait, my apologies!  I’ve just thought of something.  No doubt this is the first of a two part article, with the obvious questions to come next time round?  Isn’t it?

Crap Art

One of the (very positive) reviewers of my book pointed out that the Crap categories can sometimes overlap.  This entry shows that all too clearly – where Misleading Crap and One Rule for Them Crap vie for the top position.

My selected issue is the row over funding for the Arts.  Before the storm broke in January Dame Helen Mirren had called for tax breaks for the film industry.

“Tax breaks are absolutely what is needed to keep London alive as a film capital  because we are facing competition not just from California but the Eastern European countries as well” (reported in The Evening Standard 30th Non 2007)

So is the wine-growing industry, Dame, and no doubt 101 other industries as well. (And how about little financial gesture from the film stars?)

The storm came early in January when The Times reported that The Arts Council faced an unprecedented vote of no confidence from hundreds of angry actors and directors opposing its decision to terminate the funding of nearly 200 of the nation’s companies:

“Kevin Spacey, the Oscar-winning star, gave warning of a revolution and Sir Ian  McKellan, one of Britain’s finest actors, called the cuts destructive”.

They’d certainly help to destroy a little of the enormous welfare-state-in-reverse enjoyed by our elitists, starting with the BBC.

And how about the Tate Gallery, (with the ubiquitous City toff Paul Myners a director) secretly buying works of art from its own trustees (reported alongside other insider-dealing practices which would put the City to shame, by David Lee in the Sunday Telegraph of 13th January)?

Back in the main business of funding, the Arts Council’s approach was described as “bollocks” by the National Theatre’s director, Nicholas Hytner:

“They [the powerful and influential at The Arts Council] don’t just believe the  bollocks, they live the bollocks.... I think there is a very simple proposition here.  Good theatre – and for “theatre”  read the performing arts in general – deserves public investment”.

Why the cuts, affecting some 200 cultural bodies?  According to The Times (2nd February) the Arts Council argues that they are necessary to fund 81 new organisations and projects, and that overall the Art Council’s spending has “risen by 9 per cent, spreading £1.3 billion between 888 organisations over three years”.

So there is an overall increase! You can imagine the corruption going on here.  The description applied to the United Nations by Stefan Halper “a miasma of corruption” – see Chapter 9 (One-Rule-for-Them) of my book, seems to fit very well to the Arts Council and all its works.

One could go on.  I was reminded of all this by the recent lynching of Margaret Hodge for daring to suggest that The Proms had “failed to attract a diverse audience and unite different sections of society”, upon which Gordon Brown’s spokesman (great things, spokesmen) praised the concerts as “a wonderful, democratic and quintessentially British Institution”.

Democratic?  Come on.

The last word (nearly) can go to extracts from two letters to The Times of 6th March.  Valerie Thompson of East Horsley, Surrey tells us that:

“The Government seems to be trying very hard to destroy the last remnants of our  artistic life by taking cash away from arts organisations”.

Taking away from, Valerie?  Taking away from?

Susan Seely from Worsley, Manchester, points out that the Proms are hardly zenophobic, with the international composers on show this year including Mozart, Beethoven, Grieg, Debussy, Gershwin, Chopin, and Verdi.

Now there’s a wonderful list. Plenty of artistic life in those days; I wonder how many of that little lot were funded by “public investment”.

THE CATASTROPHE THAT IS THE NHS

Chapter 3 (Meaningless Crap) of my book records Dave (The Vague) Cameron’s answer to the permanent crisis in the National Health and Education industries which supposedly are, as Gordon Brown never tires of saying, “free at  the point of use”.

“Yes you should meet higher standards, yes you should give your patients and your pupils more.  But we’re not going to tell you how to do it.  You are professionals.  We trust in your vocation.  So in a Conservative Britain, professional responsibility will provide the answer to rising expectations in the NHS and schools.”

(David Cameron, Conservative Party Conference 2006)       

No doubt Dr Michael Ingram, a GP who writes occasionally for The Telegraph, agrees wholeheartedly, declaring on 5th February that:

"Waiting in the wings are the privatisation of general practice and its metamorphosis from a personal, long term relationship of care that is valued in  this country and admired abroad into a private production line system where the concept of “your” family doctor is just a distant memory”.

What planet is he on?  Surely this has to be Cheeky Crap.  “Your” family doctor, the embodiment of which pre-dates the NHS (remember Dr Finlay?) has been a distant memory for at least 30 years.  The state-run NHS, the world’s third largest employer, has been reduced to setting utterly meaningless, weasel-word targets and other bureaucratic nonsenses, for want of price signals.  Take, for example, the current mixed-wards scandal.  No doubt a stab at the likely costs of a full makeover has been made, but there is only one way to find if mixed-wards are worth it, and in what circumstances.  That is not to commission a study, it is to test it on paying customers.

The more fundamental point demonstrates why professionals alone, whatever their intentions, cannot run any large organization, let alone one which is in the “public” sector and “free at the point of use”. It is that, as Nikita Krushchev is reported to have said, “When all the world is communist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything”.1

Prices are the invisible hand which guides decisions about the use of all scarce factors of production (capital, labour, land and a myriad of sub divisions); that is why socialism is impossible, and why “national planning” must always be grossly inefficient. (It is not surprising that government censors free market prices wherever it can, that way we, as well as them, must grope about in the dark.)  It is also why the NHS cannot even grope without them.

What, then, has enabled the NHS to stumble along this far?

Firstly, I suggest, is that it started life by compulsory nationalisation of a system that already worked.  As that system became obsolete (via changes in technology etc.) the NHS began to crumble.  Secondly, á la Krushchev, it relies on “Switzerland” i.e. external markets.  Do not Messrs Cameron and Ingram realise how vital in hospital budgeting and funding are its tariffs, (e.g. for operations) copied from the private sector?  Thirdly, it is bolstered by the taxes of the increasing number of taxpayers who don’t use it, preferring to go elsewhere at home and (increasingly) abroad.  (Were this iniquity to be removed by tax rebates, the exodus would become a flood.)

The anti-choice nature of the NHS has been deliberately muffled since its birth by the socialist slogan “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs” – misleading crap and ultimately meaningless crap.  Why?  Because any group of citizens and families with the same means demonstrates a huge diversity of choice amongst different goods and services – health, education, holidays, hobbies, shopping, eating out, and so on.  Only a Stalin would remove such choices by nationalisation and taxation in the name of “free at point of use”.  Only a Stalin would gladly trade several thousand hospital deaths a year in the name of socialism2.

And a Bevan, of course. Aneurin Bevan, the founder of such injustices, is one of the Cameroons’ “Key Britons” whom we must be taught to remember for all time (yes, as a beacon not a blight).  Yet within a couple of generations or so, either the NHS or civilization in the UK will be doomed.

1. The underlying point was first proved by Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s and has never been refuted.

2.   By, for example, outlawing the sale of organs for transplants and by wilful neglect of MRSA,  virtually unheard of in private hospitals.