GOVERNMENT IGNORES THAT THERE ARE MILLIONS MORE NI NUMBERS THAN VOTERS
In yet another instance of right-hand-not-knowing-what-left-hand-is-doing government, The Daily Telegraph reports today that the right to vote is going to be linked to people’s National Insurance numbers in future. After July, everybody wishing to keep their entitlement to vote will be required to give their [...]
Despite his promise to cut government propaganda, spin has soared under Gordon Brown
When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, he promised a different kind of politics and an “end of spin”. Presenting government actions in the best possible light had mushroomed out of control during Tony Blair’s premiership and was roundly ridiculed by an [...]
Sir John Baker, ex-chairman of the Senior Salaries Review Body, revealed on BBC Radio this lunchtime that The Fees Office had been forbidden to co-operate with an investigation into expenses.
In an extraordinarily revealing interview on Radio 4’s The World At One, Sir John Baker shed light into a hitherto dark corner of the MPs’ expenses [...]
What is the point of regulation? It’s a question that is not asked often enough. Ignoring the obvious, sceptical response, surely the answer must be that regulations are intended to improve the lives and conditions of the citizens in whose names they are being enacted.
Open Europe is, according to The Guardian, an independent thinktank committed [...]
This surely comes under the “you couldn’t make it up” heading. Despite the Chancellor giving the impression of back-pedalling on ID cards last weekend, the rollout continues. After the launch in Manchester, where citizens greeted their arrival with utter indifference, the cards are now being introduced across the whole North-West of England.
Except, that is, for [...]
Last week, Manchester Evening News journalist Angela Epstein became the first British member of the public to possess an ID card. As one of the few journos to favour the card, the Home Office asked if she’d like to be first to test it out. “I’m so proud I could almost burst,” she wrote about [...]
The press has been having a field day observing Hillary Clinton and David Miliband sitting next to each other at the NATO meeting of foreign ministers, flirting and giggling together like two naughty children whose budding romance is going to be broken up at any moment by the teacher sending one of them to the [...]
It is hard to believe how stupid our politicians and civil servants can sometimes be. The Department of Health funded some climate change research, which was published in The Lancet. It suggested that getting rid of 30% of Britain’s cows and sheep would mean less methane produced and, with less meat eaten, our intake of [...]
“Everything I did was within the rules.” Bleat, bleat, bleat. “It’s not me, it’s the system.” Zebu, Zebu, Zebu.
MP after MP has uttered a variant of these pathetic excuses, whining that their own expense claims did not infringe the 36-page Green Book, which sets out what MPs can claim for.
But have all our MPs conducted [...]
Remember the Gordon Brown who became Prime Minister in 2007? So keen was he to distance himself from Tony Blair’s premiership that he made the Office for National Statistics independent, so that there would be “no more spin” and public faith in government statistics would be restored.
Sir Michael Scholar was made chairman of the UK [...]
Many MPs have blamed “the system” for the mess they find themselves in over expenses. They give the impression that what Gordon Brown called “the biggest parliamentary scandal for two centuries” appeared from out of the blue. If only they’d known what was going on, they’d have helped put a stop to it; but whoever’s [...]
For the 15th year in a row, the European Court of Auditors have felt unable to sign off the accounts of the EU. This is apparently largely down to serious errors in regional and rural development aid, which accounts for over a third of the Community’s budget.
In a break with tradition, Spain, Italy and Portugal [...]
The plan for phone companies and internet providers to be forced to keep details of all our phone calls, website visits, emails and text messages for a year, during which time they will be open to scrutiny by any one of 653 government and public organisations, is pretty scary. Given the way in which anti-terrorism [...]
If somebody gave you an estimate for work, then kept revising it upwards after you’d given the go-ahead, you’d surely be livid. How angry would you be if you were asked to pay six times the original figure, with no guarantee that the bill wouldn’t rise further?
That’s the case with the 2012 Olympics. The original [...]
In the House of Commons on Thursday, Leader of the House Harriet Harman accused Mark Harper, Conservative MP for the Forest of Dean, of being “a gender pay discrimination denier.” Harsh words, but she was angry with Harper for daring to suggest that men who work part-time are paid less than their female equivalents.
Harper’s figures [...]
The government appears to have lost patience with the common people for having the bare-faced temerity to object to their glorious plans to build power stations, windfarms, roads, pylons and the like. So it has changed the planning rules as they have operated for 60 years or so.
The idea that it is going to become [...]
The sacking of scientific adviser Professor David Nutt by Home Secretary Alan Johnson might have caused astonishment, but the government has plenty of form when it come to flying in the face of scientific advice.
In the early days of New Labour, much was made of “evidence-based policy” from Tony Blair and others. The 1999 paper [...]
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