The Great NHS Free-For-All

Today, an important but understandably touchy angle on the seemingly perpetual divide between the realists and the fantasists. Yesterday, the Labour MP, Dave Anderson had a letter published in the Torygraph bemoaning Nice - the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. As you know, it is the job of this unfortunate set of souls to decide what we can afford to cure 'free'.

By this I mean they look at treatments and medicines, work out how much they cost and what benefit they deliver. They use necessary but harsh sounding units called "cost per quality-adjusted life year". They take all this into account and work out if the NHS should add this treatment to the sanctioned list that John Q Taxpayer can undergo or be prescribed free at the point of delivery.

It must be a desperately depressing job. When they rubber stamp something that helps people out, they are unthanked (naturally, one might think - it's their job). However in the absence of the smooth, they certainly get their 'fair' share of rough; when we do hear about them, it is not normally in a story showing them in the greatest light. You can probably recall at least half a dozen articles along the lines of 'Nice refuse to fund cancer drug condemning little girl to death' or other such monocular representations of the very complex situation.

Now the thrust of Anderson's letter was a criticism of the decision to place under Nice's remit the assessment of viability of "high-cost, low-volume drugs for very rare conditions." Sadly it appears he has previous experience with one such condition having lost two family members to myotonic dystrophy. However, in his concluding paragraph he exposed the ultimately flawed opinion which characterises his party.

He stated "people affected by rare diseases should not be faced with the uncertainty of knowing whether Nice would deny them treatment on the grounds of cost." Whilst I can empathise with someone who has experienced the terminal illness of a loved one, I cannot agree with this statement. We should strip out the "rare" part and analyse what he says - essentially "diseases should all be treated free of charge by the NHS regardless of cost".

This is one of the reasons why we have a cyclical political cycle. The Tories piss everyone off / stab their leader in the back / erupt into civil war and Labour get in. Labour then bankrupt the country because they subscribe to the economics school of Ocean Finance. Cue Tory return. Ad infinitum.

As I blogged about in part here, referencing this excellent comedy sketch (here), there is a finite amount of money to be apportioned to varying competing demands (and the same goes in all areas of Government, not just health). What Anderson is essentially saying is there should be no Nice. Drug companies should simply create procedures, treatments and drugs and the Government should pay whatever price those companies choose to charge, because everything should be free. Nothing's too good for our loved ones, surely? NHS means 'Free For All', right?

Anyone suggesting otherwise surely wants people to die? Painfully. What total Tory bastards.

Or of course, they know that there is only a certain amount of money and lots of ill people. So you have to take a utilitarian sort of view and try to do the most good and the least bad. Now those closest to illness are naturally biased. I would have been a terrible Chancellor or Health Secretary whilst my father was ill. I suppose I might have sold all the eye units, pawned off the heart disease research centres and put the maternity wards on eBay. I might have traded it all in for as much anti-cancer stuff as I could get my hands on. Luckily I wasn't in charge, so that didn't happen.

Like Dave Anderson's brother and sister, my father didn't make it. Unfortunately, that's life, and indeed death. It comes for us all, and there is likely not a family in the country who have not had somebody succumb to one illness or other. Many of them no doubt feel very strongly about funding for research into the disease or condition in question. But that's why we have Government to make impartial, unemotional decisions. MPs are part of that and should be able to speak as a representative of their constituency, not just of their family.

At the end of the day there isn't enough money (even if we had not been left in such a parlous state by the last Government) to treat everyone to the highest levels. Those lucky enough to afford private healthcare can mitigate this to some extent. Those lower down the economic scale cannot. So we have a system that tries to make sure the money goes as far as it can. Often this means refusing to fund medicine that would help some sick people quite a lot. It is not out of spite. It is because they have decided they can spend the same money elsewhere and make a few more people better.

It is very sad for the unfunded group, but we should not let Nice become a punching bag. Perhaps the equation they use could do with tweaking, perhaps it does not take all of the right things into account? But it has to be there in one form or other. It has to exist. It is as necessary as a medic on a battlefield deciding which soldier to treat - given the time he has and the equipment with him, where is his help best put to use? We should all feel sorry for the man left to bleed out as the medic moves to help the man lying next to him and then the next and the next, all in the time the medic would have taken to treat the first man and still perhaps not save him. We can make a song and a dance about it if we wish, but we should not question the medic's motives nor forget the greater good he did by not treating the first man.

This is Government; trying to do the most good for the most people but being realistic about the fact that we will never please everyone. Unfortunately, there are too many people commenting disingenuously about decisions on where we can afford to spend and where we cannot. We know there isn't enough money to go round. Yet we still hear bleating of evil cuts as if there was no need to budget.

This is the fallacy Labour would have us believe - that the cuts are for shits and giggles; some kind of old-Etonian 'screw the poor' party where all the spare money is spent on champagne and fox hunting or just burnt in great bonfires for fun. Because if they pretend the choice to fund a drug or not is not an economic one but a moral one and anyone who disagrees is just punishing the ill, they hope you'll forget the reason why so many of these decisions do actually have to be made from an economic point of view - because they screwed the economy of this country for likely decades to come.

We must feel great sadness for those who are struck down by illness and even more so for those whose treatment is not economically viable. It would be lovely for those falling ill to not have to worry about treatment costs, but to pretend their having to is the whim of a malicious, uncaring Government is poor form. They rightly do have to worry because there isn't enough to go around and objectively the money might be better put to use elsewhere. It is the fantasy of the centre and left, of Labour and Lib Dems, that all decisions should be made on principle and not economics. It is what got us into this mess in the first place. If they are let back in, they will cause chaos again in the economy - then the NHS really will be a free-for-all.

Another Slice of the Golden Goose

This week David Cameron decided it was time to stand up to aggressive corporate tax avoiders to mixed reviews. Some companies complained of the added cost of being forced to publish their basic tax positions. This sounded a lot like saying "we'd rather you didn't know" since they already produce annual reports and statistics for various bodies, not least of all their shareholders. I can't imagine it would take an intern more than a day to look at the column in the excel spreadsheet that says "UK taxes paid", divide it by the column that says "UK profit" and multiply by 100. That would go some way to satisfying the desire to check tax is being returned in reasonable proportion to the country of the citizens who funded the profit.

Really the only people who are going to whine about this are indeed 'doing a Starbucks'. I don't think it's morally wrong - that's not important, and it's an opinion of which DC should have but didn't steer clear. As I've said before, a company owes it to its shareholders to maximise profits; this includes getting staff to work for as low a wage as they can reasonably offer, buying raw material cheap, selling product as high as they can and paying as little tax as they can whilst complying with their legal obligation to pay full tax in whichever jurisdiction their company structure allows.

Some people like to bang on about moral obligations - the 'fair share' tax lobby for instance. I, for one, think that's a load of old cock. Companies should behave in a moral way, but legally minimising one's tax bill (as anyone with a personal ISA or parents who pay into their children's ISA or child trust fund is) does not contravene moral behaviour. We're talking about not paying exploitatively low wages, not using child sweat shops, not trading in blood diamonds - that sort of stuff.

Trying to go the Clegg route of minimum effective rate of tax is not going to work. I think, for once, there is some merit in the idea, but actually far more applicable to personal not corporate tax. We can investigate that one another day. The main point though, is that this hasn't been thought through - like everything that leaves the Lib Dem leader's mouth. Putting aside the potential resulting disincentive for businesses to operate in a country that doesn't allow very effective (read: "aggressive" in today speak) tax avoidance, the law would be too complex and probably very easy to get around.

The far more obvious route to go is public pressure - look at Starbucks. If you make everyone show they're playing fair, consumers can talk with their wallets and not patronise those companies who they think take too much in profit from their country and return too little in tax. That's what DC is suggesting and makes sense - I just wouldn't have framed it in the somewhat anti-business rhetoric he did.

It is up to him and his Chancellor to set rates (and corporate tax rates are not the only relevant business tax - many others have been rising to offset the decrease in the headline corporation tax rate) that attract people to pay their tax bills in the UK. The key is being cheaper than the financial cost of setting up an avoidance system and the reputational cost of being exposed as an "aggressive tax-avoider".

But I've said most of that before. What I really wanted to talk about was how popular tax avoidance rhetoric is these days. So much so that Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary has tried to jump on the band wagon with his new target. There is a group of people out there engaging in a disgusting tax avoidance scheme. They make Jimmy Carr look like Lord Sainsbury. Who are these people refusing to pay their fair share? Old people who refuse to get dementia.

Bastards. Old, fully-marbled bastards.

Let me explain, Manuel…

Labour have not learned that our money is not their money. Still. So they are trying to revive their "death tax" in response to the Coalition plans to introduce the social care cap (which looks like it may be the first actually well-thought out policy of this Parliament). Yup, beyond the already monstrous theft that is inheritance tax, Labour would like to take some more of your already taxed money to pay for the care of the elderly. Regardless of whether you ever need any yourself.

Amazing.

Having grasped the wrong end of the stick, Burnham thinks the extensive reviews into how to save those unfortunate enough to require care in their latter years from liquidating often their only asset which they have spent a lifetime paying for is actually an excuse to tax everyone some more. He and his moronic pals have thought this would be an excellent opportunity to make everyone pay an extra 10% of total estate on death to pay for someone else's care.

Now I have already written about the dubious script that everyone seems to accept unquestioningly that elderly care required for age-related illnesses (e.g. dementia) is somehow different from infant care required for age-related illnesses (e.g. premature babies and various infant conditions). Because it is apparently different, the latter is free at the point of delivery having been paid for by general taxation budgeted to the NHS. The former though is apparently something different - an optional extra like reverse parking sensors, built-in GPS or heated seats. Therefore it is something we all have to pay extra for if we require it.

Now you know I accept there is not enough money to pay for everything - it's why we don't have 10,000 uber-hospitals with 1:1 doctor:patient ratios and 15 minute waiting lists. I just think we don't present this one in the correct light - call it what it is. We have to charge people for elderly care because there's no money left. That's because we spent rather than saved whilst the sun was shining. We failed to recognise the burden of population growth. We sold all our gold at rock bottom. We raided our pensions. We sold all our Government assets to pretend we had annuitised income to spend on buying elections when really we were reducing our capital base and often then decimating our 'earnings' in a very short time renting back the assets. For 'we', I think you know what to replace in its stead…

Now Burnham and Labour think on top of all the taxes we pay through our lives, when we get to the end we should then pay another great whack to pay for extra care that should have already been covered by our taxes but instead was squandered by a Labour government who tripled NHS spending without improving anything because more money for granny's hip and little Timmy's asthma was a good news story. Apparently, having to pay the social care cap (or insurance premiums to cover it) is forcing people to pay a 'dementia tax'. Therefore those people who have the audacity, nay the temerity not to suffer in their old age are avoiding this tax. And that's not 'fair'. So let's tax them some more. It's always the answer.

Hopefully Labour will make this anti-tax avoidance message central to their election campaign. I think we'd all sleep a lot better in our beds at night knowing they will never get near Government with it.

 

The Great School Smokescreen

I've written a fair amount about universities, specifically about Government attempts over the last decade and a half to use them to embark upon various kinds of social engineering exercise. In case anyone is unsure (you can read more here), I don't think it is the responsibility of universities to ensure they take a cross-section of society. I think they should take the best students who will respond best to what they have to teach them. That won't always be those with the highest grades but the point is they are still adjudged 'the best' from whatever mix of attainment and potential the universities choose to use. The key is they aren't just filling quotas. What they certainly aren't responsible for is their schooling up until university.

Now I know what you're thinking … surely only a total moron would think that it should be up to universities to educate children at school? That would be the job of …  er … schools. Yes, schools. They seem ideal candidates for holding the responsibility for teaching children stuff up until university age. They seem to have the children for hours on end per day. They have books, teachers, desks and so forth. Almost ideally suited come to think of it. Well we've got one such moron, Vince's mate Professor Les Ebdon. I forget what the other side of the tawdry Coalition deal was that put the utterly daft Ebdon in charge of the worryingly 1942-esque Office for Fair Access. One hopes for many reasons that the Tories can stop the rot and win an outright majority in 2015. One of the most important is to be able to oust this interfering and utterly misguided man before he does lasting damage to our university system.

Now on the surface one might think that universities helping out preparing school students for the travails of university would be a good idea. But it isn't when it is dictated by political overlords hell bent on social engineering and who hold enormous financial power over said institutions; when part of their budgets is mandated to be used to encourage wider access. This is all just a very large smokescreen to hide the fact that a large proportion of the state system has failed. There are doubtless many state-educated students who do not gain places at university or at a good enough university because their school has not developed them to their full potential. There are also doubtless many students who would likely never be academically gifted enough to study at any university of repute regardless of the teaching standards at their schools.

The lefties, Les included, would rather we didn't discuss that. Nope, they would far rather point out that the only problem is all the evil, rich, elitist scum universities that only want to take thick rich kids, don't care about quality and instead of central heating just burn the poor. It is an incredibly dim view to take of the masters of our universities; quite a charge to lay at their door. But the press and the left lobby do it all day long. Clearly without an ounce of investigation. Go and find out how much universities spend trying to get children from unlikely areas apply. Find out how hard they scrutinise applications and try to discover the real value and the real potential behind the applications from across the spectrum of society. These are professional, caring academics, and they don't deserve the vitriol they are castigated with simply in the name of covering up someone else's failure.

So no, universities should not be targeting children from aged 7 to groom them for university. Schools should. We could call it education. The sooner we get off the case of universities and realise raising the quality of our schools across the board is far more important, the better.

The Lack of Service Industry

I broke the law this weekend. Or to be more specific, the chef who cooked for me at Côte in Sloane Square broke the law. Apparently.

You see my wife and I were staying with friends nearby and had our hearts set on a breakfast of eggs benedict and other usual suspects. But after watching the last session of the test match in India, we were later out of the house than planned and arrived at a cafe on the Kings Road a whole six minutes after midday. The cafe in question was Blushes.

We sat down and were handed lunch menus. Wanting eggs and all that jazz, we asked if they were still serving brunch. Our (naturally) foreign waitress told us that they were not. What a shame, thought I. Nope, they finished serving breakfast at noon.

At this point I still had enough to be annoyed about to write this post. I found it bizarre that in a service industry, where repeat custom and tips are paramount, a little leeway over six minutes was not going to be possible to satisfy four customers who wanted to spend some money in their establishment buying brunch. Nope, there was no "I'll see if the kitchen can do that for you" that I expect and get in my local pub and anywhere that actually knows the value of proper service and that customers have very long memories that will keep them either away or keep them coming back again and again.

But the best was yet to come. You're going to love this. I nearly weed myself it was so good.

The response to my question of whether we could order instead from the breakfast menus she presumably was still in the process of clearing away…?

"It's illegal to serve from two different menus, so we cannot serve you breakfast during lunch"

Absolutely amazing. Illegal. I haven't looked it up. I already know, as do you, it is total and utter bullshit made up on the spot by a fucking moron with an issue with the truth ("Sorry, I can't be fucked to ask the chef"), no grasp of the concept of customer service and a tiny bit of power.

What did she get for her troubles? Well for starters I politely pointed out everything she was saying was pure unadulterated lies and she might want to not utter those words again lest every person in Chelsea come to realise she has the mental capacity of a slug. Then four paying customers got up, left her restaurant and spent their money 100 metres up the road. About £60 if I remember correctly. Nothing enormous, but we are in our early 30s, so in repeat custom I reckon that's going to add up over the next 50 or so years.

So the chef of the next cafe along, who were happy to serve us even after they were taking orders from their lunch menu must have broken the law. Or she was a dunce.

Fancy a Cuppa?

I have spent a lot of time in Starbucks recently. No, I hear you ask, I am not there protesting at their UK tax position. Nope, couldn't really give a crap. Tax in many ways is a service that countries offer - part of the tertiary industry - and big ol' multinationals and international billionaires can shop around for where they can get it the cheapest just as Nadine Dorries clearly does for the best price for a pint of milk.

It is not a simple race to the bottom as such, because Government procurement departments (civil service run) are the only ones that automatically believe that the best product is the cheapest one - an interesting strategy to ensure quality goods and services, always defaulting to the lowest bidder; guarantor of real quality. Anyway, I digress… point is rich people and companies have the option to massage their tax around and chose where to pay it. Every country's exchequer would like their revenue service to be the one the companies and individuals chose to pay the bulk of their tax to. So countries need to produce a system that has a sensibly low rate of tax to attract people to pay it there and avoid the costs of avoidance schemes. It still has to be high enough to bring in some revenue though (a 'fair' amount, no wonder).

So the move towards 20% corporation tax (too slow for my liking) is geared towards making " Britain open for business" as George says. If someone is legally exploiting tax loopholes you have options: firstly, try to close all loopholes, or secondly, to remove the need for them to find those loopholes. Clearly a mix of the two is needed and the balance as ever is the key.

Now brazen tax avoidance schemes should probably be sought out and closed, but really what is required is a total rewriting of tax law. Only then, when you can restart legislation and therefore have a good grasp of it and what it is intended for, can you stand a reasonable chance of staying ahead (or at least not too far behind) the clever accountants. Much of our tax legislation was written for a world very different from today - adapt to survive and all that.

But in the meantime, perhaps look at why people go to these lengths - it is because the cost of avoiding is still worthwhile to pay their tax elsewhere (like the Netherlands in Starbucks' case). It is all very good saying tax rates should be high because these companies earn so much, but as can be seen from the reported tax receipts from the Googles, Amazons and Starbucks of this world, grandstanding over 'fair' rates of tax turns companies away from the door of HMRC, and rightly so - they have a duty to their shareholders to maximise profits, part of which is minimising tax. Simples.

Those calling for higher tax rates (personal and corporate) remind me of a moron (pick your favourite, there are many) on Dragons' Den insisting on retaining a greater share of their company in exchange for Duncan Bannatyne's money and thus walking away empty handed. Taking the moral high ground and keeping a 100% share in fuck all will earn you less than realising where the power in the relationship lies, meeting half-way and walking away with a reasonable share of something. If you insist on slicing open the golden goose, all the others will find it more attractive to migrate. But I really wanted to talk about hot chocolate.

You see I am changing jobs so I have been meeting lots of very helpful people which generally happens in coffee shops. Now here I try to sell my various positive personal traits (or ones I pretend to have), like integrity. Problem is, I always get off on the wrong foot on the whole integrity thing. This isn't because I used to hang out with PR gurus or TV presenters in the 70s, or because I swipe the charity box from the counter. Instead it is because as you well know if you have ever been in a similar position, you are only permitted (under "the rules") to ask if someone can spare time for a chat over a coffee.

And I hate cofffee.

Loathe it.

But you have to ask them for coffee. You see, if my wife and I bump into you whilst out walking/shopping/whatever, we might invite you round to our house for a cup of tea. This is within "the rules". If coming round to somebody's abode is in the frame, invitations for tea are de rigueur. If you have perhaps come round for dinner and the end of the night is approaching, I am permitted to offer you an array of hot beverages. I am perfectly entitled, for instance, to ask if you would care for a hot chocolate. And I wouldn't even get so much as a raised eyebrow.

Now try to swap those latter drinks into the work email… "Could you spare some time for a cup of tea?" Sounds weird. "Could you spare some time for a chat over a hot chocolate?" Sounds like I am odds on to propose marriage to my prospective drinks pal. Positively out of the question.

So I am stuck in this mire having to propose meeting for a beverage I would probably rather dip my crown jewels into than drink. I can only hope they don't realise my bare-faced lie when instead of asking for the very drink I coaxed them out of their office for, I sidle up to the counter and furtively ask for a medium hot chocolate, marshmallows and sprinkles, hold the cream. Damn these pesky rules...

Full Court Press

So what do we all think of the Leveson report? Or perhaps more importantly, what do we think about what the important people and politicians of various colours are saying about the Leveson report? That's the key point really, seeing as not many of us will have read the 2,000 page dossier.

I did however, watch Hugh Grant's disarmingly charming performance in his new rom com on Channel 4 - "Taking on the Tabloids". I thought the initial storyline was good - principled, slightly rough around the edges but good looking nonetheless, foppish bloke in underdog struggle against big corporation. Unfortunately the love interest curiously never made it into the frame. I assumed she would work for said corporation; they'd initially hate each other but realise love is more important than their political differences and live happily ever after. Like the Coalition. But that didn't happen. He just talked about the press for ages. Some good stuff though.

Hugh and I agree that there's a difference between "in the public interest" and "of interest to the public", thought I don't know if he signs up to my idea that if you effectively make a contract with the press and those who read it that you make your money by their interest in your life (the Kerry Katonas of this world, for example), you have given up some of your rights to privacy. A Venn Diagram here would be most helpful, but I can't be arsed to draw one.

Before you get too tetchy, the long and the short of it is that if you are Jane Q. Taxpayer, the Sun or whoever has no right to publish photos of you topless on a beach on holiday. Yes it is a public place, but by living a non-public life you have a right to things that you put in the relative public space not being broadcast to the world. If you make money as a pop star or somesuch, and you are on the same beach, I reckon it's fair play for the Paps to snap you pups. This is because you put yourself in an overtly public place having got everyone interested in you.

It doesn't stretch to anyone naked anywhere (like for example the poor old Duchess of Cambridge) - if telescopic lenses etc are required to see you, you have gone to enough trouble to remove yourself from the public eye. That has to be then respected as private. And it's not just nudity, but details about your lives etc too. Private is private for everyone, but what is fair game from what is public is down to your 'contract type' and behaviour. It's a shades of grey argument (no, not that like that) which I covered in far more detail here.

So what do I think about press regulation? I'm not a fan. I would also point to the fact that most of the things we think are terrible that the press did were illegal already. Hacking phones is illegal. You don't need new statutes. Use the existing ones. The privacy law idea is always going to be hard to delineate. My 'common sense' approach might make sense (or not) but I imagine it would be hard to enshrine in law.

The press does some pretty despicable things, and there certainly appear to have been very few heads to have rolled, and often not the right ones. I would love to see a better watchdog rather than editors sitting in judgement of themselves. Putting the cat in charge of the cream rarely ends well - just look at the ongoing farce with MP's and IPSA as they continue to stick their snouts in the trough until they are found out (at which point they will apologise for our error in interpretation of their honest mistake and add some transparency that might not have been there before).

But I do not think statutory press regulation is right. Hague makes a very good point that it would do us no favours when trying to take the moral high ground overseas. You could go on forever with examples of when some aberration allowed Parliament to legislate at the thin end of the wedge with only the best of intentions but over time we wandered slowly to the thick end. Income tax started as a one-off levy to pay for the Napoleonic Wars - we all enjoy beating the French but this is taking it a little far (a childish example but you get my drift). Press regulation, as they say, is like pregnancy, and you can't be a little bit pregnant.

But what I really wanted to talk about, partly because I don't have an answer to the press problem; just a gut feeling that statutory regulation is wrong, will be a slippery slope, will have myriad unforseen negative ramifications and is in most cases unnecessary due to existing law, is who is talking about it.

I thought it was brilliant that Ed Milliwho has recently become clairvoyant. He didn't even need to read Leveson's report before he knew, he just knew, that everything in it would be just perfect. Nope, Ed wasted no time working out that Leveson would most likely suggest some form of statutory regulation that would be as unpalatable to the Tories as it would be impractical to apply. So he committed the Labour party (traditional defenders of liberty and freedom, no?) to supporting everything Leveson said and promise to enact any and all recommendations made. Why? Two reasons:

1. He doesn't have to make those decisions as he is not in power so he can make grandiose statements of intent safe in the knowledge they will simply remain just as that (traditional Lib Dem think).

2. It will make for discomfort for Big Dave.

Yup, the bit about Leveson I'm happy to say I have a view on is the behaviour of Red Ed, his party and many Lib Dems. No debate on what is a crucial political topic that could define an entire era, no sensible discourse in Parliament over potentially eradicating 300 years of press freedom. Nope, just political positioning for short term points scoring. One can only hope the British public are intelligent enough to see this and they are punished at the polls. My magic 8 ball suggests the outlook for that is gloomy.

Ed is also one of those who throws all his weight behind people like the McCanns, Christopher Jefferies, Hugh Grant - those who have suffered at the hands of the press. And they have. I should put that front and centre. I have the utmost sympathy for this category of people. I lamented in these pages the court of public opinion's riding roughshod over due process when Christopher Jefferies was essentially convicted of Jo Yeates' murder by the press before he was found totally innocent. But their very intimate involvement with press regulation, or lack of it, if anything makes them totally the wrong people to have at the forefront of statutory legislation.

We put people on trial before an unbiased jury of their peers and subject to the sentencing of a qualified, independent judge for a reason. We don't let the plaintiff adjudicate guilt nor set the tariff. We don't do an eye for an eye. This is not to say that people touched by something are not ever able to be impartial, but it certainly means they are unlikely to be.

People who's loved ones die from a particular disease will often fundraise solely for the charity representing the fight against it; it's human nature. I give more to fighting Alzheimer's and cancer because they are the ones closest to my heart. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad person, or that fighting cerebral palsey is not a noble cause. It just means I probably shouldn't be put in charge of the budget for  disease research for the whole UK: I'm likely to be biased.

People clearly have views - that's fine. MPs might feel one way or another about different diseases or nuclear deterrents or whatever. So might judges. They are expected to put aside their subjective views and examine everything objectively, from the point of view of their constituents and the country. If we think they are sucking at this, we vote them out. Pretty simple.

But the fact remains that those most affected by an issue will in general find it hardest to be objective about it. Which means they shouldn't be the people influencing law. So I say no to Sarah's Law, Megan's Law, Madeleine's Law or any others. Not what is in them - they have fine intent and may be perfectly good pieces of legislation (I am not an authority), but I think composing their content is better left to those professionally obliged to be impartial and experienced in the process of law-making. Is that crazy? I think not. If you would like all of that summarised in a much funnier 1 minute and 42 seconds - listen to Mitchell and Webb's view on it here. I suppose I should have just put that bit at the top and be done with it...

The White Man's Struggle

So I'm going to leave the heavyweight political stuff for a moment - and on a day of such political importance too! I know, I hear you ask "surely you can't be passing up the chance to write about the election of the year?" And I am. Because I couldn't give a fuck. In fact, worse than that, I don't want to vote. No, scratch that; I don't want there to be a vote on sodding police commissioners.

I think it is a shit idea. I don't think accountability is a shit idea. I think politicising the role is a shit idea. A really shit one. What they are really saying is the police service, like other public services is not accountable enough. Once you get high enough, it's hard to get booted out. You have to work really hard at it - you know, start shooting innocent civilians - that sort of thing. But their fix is not to look at the way that the public sector (civil service, police, military et al) promotes, demotes, apportions credit or blame, but instead to put a political figurehead at the helm and get people to vote them in and out.

Now I have no idea for what reason people are going to vote either way today. Some will know of the candidate and like the cut of his jib. Not many I would wager. Others will perhaps vote based on what little propaganda there has been about - and what similar claptrap it all has been. Who was going to put out a leaflet saying they would like to be lenient on crime, on the causes of crime, would like to increase red tape and make the community a less safe place? All total cock. Identical, total cock. No, most likely the Tory supporters will vote for the Tory candidate, the Labour supporters for the Labour candidate and presumably the Lib Dems just think we should all just get along in the shangri-la that exists only in their heads so probably don't need a police force let alone put forward a police commissioner candidate. So the result will have sod all to do with policing, though will have an impact upon it, and everything to do with current political sentiment. Which is pretty stupid if you ask me.

But that's not what I want to talk about today, because it's not really worth the internet paper upon which I have already written it. Nope, today I am gong to bang on for a good paragraph or two about the struggle of the white man - or more specifically the white bread man - against the sandwich Nazis…

I like sandwiches. I like toast. So, it seems do many people. My academic research for this post has been running for a decade or so. As such, it is the most deeply researched topic I have ever written about in this blog by pretty much ten years.

If you were to glance about in the supermarket on your weekly shop (by which I mean the proper, edge-of-town-high-street-murdering-uber-market supermarket that we are all up in arms about but shop at anyway because it's convenient and cheap), you would see almost an entire aisle of bread, I would wager. If you were to take an approximate calculation at the ratio of white to brown bread you would see in the pre-sliced 'Hovis/Kingsmill cuboid of bread in a colourful plastic bag' area, it's about 50:50. By 'brown' I also include granary et al - essentially a nice Nick Griffin-style definition of 'everything not perfectly white and pure'. In the 'fresh out of the in-house bakery' area it's probably 80:20 to the whites (oh, how Mitt Romney would love to see those stats).

I've been doing this for years. The ratios are pretty steady. Brown (or non-white) has been on the rise in the last decade or so as we try to eat more healthily, but it has plateaued. So, it logically follows that demand is about 50:50 at best (for the brown supporters).

Fine. Have your bread any colour you like - very much a personal choice. In a restaurant my wife will always choose the nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, capers and sawdust bread roll on offer (which surely barely makes it bread under advertising standards rules?) whilst I rootle around in the basket looking for something a child would put Dairylee on at lunch break. I have no objection to the healthy stuff. I just think it tastes like old shoes (though new shoes are not on my delicacy list either). I want the one pumped full of sugar and bleached to within an inch of its life. It's like the Coke/Diet Coke idea. If you're going to cheat, cheat big. What's the point of fannying about with Diet Coke? It's still not good for you, but the added bonus is it doesn't even taste good. They do create an amusing line in television advertisements though. Either way, it's pretty clear half the people who want bread want white bread, and half brown.

So why are all the fucking pre-made sandwiches in the world made with brown bread?

Do people who buy white bread only make breadcrumbs or croutons with it? Or toast it and add butter? Or feed it to the ducks? Are only brown bread purchasers turning these bread slices into sandwiches? Surely I cannot be the only person who likes white bread and can't be bothered to make his own sandwiches? Who did this definitive market research? It must be out there, because you can't get a white sandwich for love nor money. Everyone buys into it; supermarkets, petrol stations, newsagents, the lot. Half an aisle of white bread. Half an aisle of brown bread. Brown sandwiches. Bastards. The lot of them.

Every now and again you find a solitary white sandwich in there, probably with a crap filling, like egg and onion. Who is asking for onion in sandwiches? Or salads for that matter, but I digress…?

It upsets me. As you can no doubt tell. We are being discriminated against. We, the proud, unhealthy, white bread eaters of this world. We 50%. Our demographic is being under-represented in the sandwich industry. We need to stand up for our right to a proper pre-made sandwich selection, before it's too late.  I think I know how the suffragettes felt now...