Teaching to the test: getting better all the time Before you read this blog, you need to click here and watch the video.ResultsPlus. Glossy? Certainly. Slick? Yup. Blood boiling? Arrrrgggghhhh.We're all surely aware by now that the government's regime of school management via tests and tables has some serious shortcomings.In... Read more...
Does anyone have a clue where we're heading? Halfway across a severely swollen river is not a good time to let the tiller go. But that of course is precisely what Cap'n Alan Johnson is doing on the good ship NHS. Whereas Commissar Hewitt had it hard about, Cap'n Al... Read more...
Quite apart from taxes, government imposes a further huge burden on us in the form of regulation.One part of this- although only one part- is red tape. Successive governments routinely promise to slash it, but somehow the slashing never seems to inflict much more than a mild scratch. Even worse,... Read more...
This week we turn our gaze away from Tower Shamlets and the other one party states of East London and cast our watchful eye on the South West for our non-job of the week. Gloucestershire County Council has applied for a spin doctor for their waste department. Yes, rubbish needs... Read more...
For far too long the language and rhetoric of international trade agreements has been depressingly mercantilist. If one country agrees to reduce its protectionist measures it is talked of as a "concession" and a "sell-out", whilst politicians and diplomats who dogmatically cling onto their ridiculous trade policies are saluted and commended for defending their... Read more...
Last year, Gordon Brown committed the Government to reduce the total cost to businesses and charities of regulation from £20 billion a year to £16 billion a year by 2010. In response, Whitehall departments have drawn up plans to abolish unnecessary regulations and reform others. But a National Audit Office... Read more...
An interesting piece by Sue Cameron in today's Financial Times reveals how outsiders recruited into the top ranks of the civil service are being paid up to £100,000 more than the advertised top rate for the job, and that £6 million a year is being spent on commercial headhunters whose... Read more...
News broke this morning in the Daily Mirror that Royal Mail had agreed to alter its pension’s policy; forcing workers to put in five years more graft in order to claim their pension. Despite this being taken from a ‘company document’ seen by the Mirror, Royal Mail this afternoon denied... Read more...
The future may look a little brighter today for those in the West Midlands who are in opposition to costly road pricing proposals (Birmingham Post, 24.07.07), as the region will now not be amongst the first to pioneer the plans. However, we mustn’t be fooled into thinking that this was... Read more...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and last book in the Harry Potter series, has just become Britain’s fastest selling book in history, beating the record held by the previous Harry Potter book. Given that level of market penetration, it is perhaps not surprising that commentators, reviewers and... Read more...
As we've blogged many times, the 2012 London Olympics is a classic of fag packet planning. And that original £2.375bn budget was almost certainly dreamed up over an evening playing the Withnail drinking game down at the Stoat and Weasel.Last week the National Audit Office produced its second report on... Read more...
Hands up anyone who'd like to try a brain op We've blogged before about how the NHS wastes vast amounts of money through employing expensive- and quite possibly poorly qualified- temps (eg here).Now it turns out that hospitals are having to employ hundreds of locums to cover for shortages caused... Read more...
The TPA has extended the concept of Tax Freedom Day, long championed by the Adam Smith Institute and now an established part of the political calendar (in 2007 it fell on 1 June) and can now provide an estimate of the Cost of Government Day. This is the date in... Read more...
Hope you guys are insured... In the news this week:Hull Council's insurance fiasco cost £200m- "Taxpayers face a massive bill to repair flood damage in Hull after the local council admitted that its properties were not insured. Officials at Kingston-upon-Hull City Council revealed that most of the city's 28,500 council... Read more...
On Burning our Money we have always doubted claims that our £17bn pa police are efficient. The latest report into police funding from the Home Affairs Select Committee spells out precisely why we are right to be sceptical. Read more...
Aide memoire for crime stats This week the Home Office published its latest annual crime statistics. The question is whether anyone takes them seriously.The reality is that hardly any of us believe all those government claims that crime is plummeting, or even this year's more measured assurance that "crime is... Read more...
Councils in the West Midlands have failed to come to any agreement on the prospect of a road pricing scheme for the region and, according to today’s newspapers (Express & Star, 20th July), are set to miss their deadline. Proposals have already cost £4 million to draft and look set... Read more...
A report form the National Audit Office today warns that the costs of the already over-budget Olympic Games could increase further. Funding of Olympic venues, construction price inflation and the Olympic Park were areas the NAO highlighted as leading to possible increasing costs. At £9.3 billion, the 2012 Olympics is... Read more...
West Midlanders who live in fear of ill health, not because of hesitations about local treatment, but due to worrying if their sheer weight will thwart their transit to hospital, needn’t fear any longer. The West Midlands Ambulance Service is now fully equipped for those who weigh in at 19... Read more...
In 787 AD, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Britain experienced its first ever Viking raid when a group of warriors sailed from Norway to Devon. On arriving in Devon, they were mistaken for merchants by a royal official, and so asked to pay a tax on their goods. The Vikings... Read more...
...if we don't sign up to big new taxes on hard-up manufacturing industry and good old family holidays. I saw this flyer at the Prince Charles cinema off London's Leicester Square; at first I thought it was a macabre joke: Looking at the reverse it appears it is a protest... Read more...
The Wall Street Journal reports today yet another example of how continental politicians hope to use the EU as a means of enforcing their economically disastrous policies across the whole continent. Each individual EU country knows that their statist schemes will retard economic growth, and send investors, entrepreneurs and capital... Read more...
It’s been a very bad week for our state broadcasting station. As an 'impartial', government run, taxpayer funded outfit, it’s been accused of bias (again) and today’s papers expose another phone-in competition scam at the BBC. This comes barely days after Blue Peter admitted fixing one of their competitions. Today... Read more...
Just as the West Midlands breathes a sigh of relief this week following announcements confirming that the undemocratic regional assemblies are to be phased out, we learn that the powers of the money-guzzling, unelected regional development agency, Advantage West Midlands, are to be strengthened to include housing, planning and transport... Read more...