Ed's Clause Four Alarm?

As my euphoria at the spectacular sporting summer was finally dampened yesterday by an abject batting
display from England, I noticed so wrapt have I been this past month with the Lions, Wimbledon et al, that I have been rather remiss with my blogging. There are a few worthy candidates for centrepiece of July's first rant...

It will have come as a massive shock to everyone I am sure to find out the jobs-for-your-leftie-mates wonderful public service (which a recent survey shows is less well-regarded than a decade ago) that is the Beeb has been throwing your tax pounds around like a drunken student on loan day. Or like the public sector in general, really. Overly generous compensation packages for those leaving the BBC have been hitting the headlines of late, and no wonder. It appears the fat cats at the Beeb, who they insist have to be paid so generously to lure them away from the private sector (well, thank God we are paying them so well - they've been so good recently; think Saville, Hall, McAlpine scandals to name a few), have been stuffing the pockets of their chums with wads of cash as they leave.

Presumably this is so it becomes generally accepted practice so when they next make an enormous balls up themsleves, nobody bats an eyelid when they walk away with a cool half million of so including pay in lieu of work they were actually paid for in the first place. It would almost be funny if it were a private company that would obviously only be hurting itself by depleting its cash reserves rewarding failure (or the quite magnificent compensation given to Caroline Thomson to make up for her not being considered good enough for the top job - what's the point of getting promoted when you can fail to get promoted and still get the higher salary to make up for your hurt feelings?). But it's not funny because we are forced to pay for them, whether we like them, watch them or not. Rather like having to donate to the Labour party regardless of your political persuasion... more on that in a bit.

There has been some totally expected politically correct quota-based nonsense over company recruiting. It is unsurprising in today's climate in which where you come from isn't your fault, unless of course you come from some degree of deemed 'privilege'. Yes, we are back beatng the class envy drum again and making sure we socially engineer our workforce. A study by the Association of Graduate Recruiters shows one in six leading companies are vetting the socio-economic status of their applicants, and predict it will soon be a quarter. Why? So they can make sure they have the 'right' mix of poor kids, rich kids, kids from state school, kids from private school, kids with university-educated parents, kids with barely-educated parents (vast tracts of the last two of which will in years to come merge together the way we are going). Apparently we have a 'need to diversify our workforce'. Yup, it is not just our universities that shouldn't any more have anything to do with meritocracy, but companies too. The best companies aren't run by the 'best' people, they're run by the politically correct 'right' people. Everyone knows that.

Under what banner is this positive discrimination taking place - "social responsibility is becoming higher on the HR agenda, so professionals are pushing this forward more". I know we've been here many times before, but imagine for a moment a world where this exact thing were happening but instead of saying we didn't want well-educated rich kids of well-educated parents, we had companies actively discriminating against better candidates on the basis that their parents didn't go to university, they don't earn much money and they sent their children to a state school. There'd be riots. But of course, as ever, class discrimination is ok as long as it harms the supposed higher echelons. Two wrongs apparently make a right. Absolutely barking.

The human rights fiasco barely needs touching on because it has all been said before. The laws are written in far too loose a way which thereby fail to recognise that firstly there will obviously be cases where different articles are competing on opposite sides of an argument (e.g. freedom of speech vs. right to respect for family and private life), and secondly it fails to fully elaborate on the caveats which allow for the limiting of human rights (e.g. fair imprisonment and the knock on effects). Clearly the most recent judicial horror show where the European Court of Human Rights have somehow sunk lower in eveyone's estimation is their ruling that whole life tariffs breach the human rights of the convicted multiple murderers and rapists in question. Utter horse shit. Illogical judges trying to be controversial to gain a name for themselves twisting the wording and interpretation of the poorly scripted laws to justify an obviously incorrect decision. Nothing more. What should we do?The same as we should do with the rulings over prisoners voting, or conjugal visits so prisoners might be allowed to father children. Ignore it, tell Europe to go hang and if they kick up a fuss, take our ball and leave. Same thing the French do with every ruling they don't like. We just need to stop being so British - stop being the only ones who queue at the great European ski lift.

But the winner is Red Ed and his 'Clause IV moment'...

The Tories have had a lot of fun this last week of so with the embarassment that is the Union stranglehold on the Labour party. Everyone knew it, as everyone knows the only reason brother Dave's taking his banana and heading off to America is that the Unions also choose the Labour party leader, and they wanted push over lefty Ed. Milliwho is doing his best shot at righteous indignation over the underhand tactics he has undoubtedly known about forever. The Falkirk scandal has brought the dead hand of the unions to the fore and with it their funding of the Labour party.

Now I for one think it's absolutely fine for the unions to try to influence policy - surely much of their raison d'être. As I have written before, I don't want politicians to exist in a bubble. They are meant to be being lobbied - which means trying to influence (the key word is 'trying'). We are then meant to pick the ones who we think respond in the best and most upright manner to said lobbying and produce votes, decisions and policies designed to help the country. People campaign for more attention (and normally more money) to be directed towards things they hold dear to themselves; it is human nature. People with relations with rare diseases form charities and pressure groups and lobby Government to get more funding for research. Communities lobby Government to say they don't want a massive power station built in their green fields. Business lobbies Governments to make business easier ahnd cheaper to do. Workers unions lobby Government (supposedly) on behalf of their workers to get things their workers would like. This also extends to funding political parties who they think will in general promote policies their interest group will like. It is barmy to have an issue with this.

What Miliband is trying to do though is make it seem he is breaking from the Unions and cleaning up political party funding. He is not. All he is proposing, at some unidentified future date, is that he will stop mandating anybody whjo joins a worker's union (which offer various benefits and are generally not a bad idea whatever your political leaning) paying money direct to the Labour party. It's one hell of an assumption to make and it is good that it will stop. What won't stop is the unions donating vast sums "on behalf" of their members (who don't vote on this - it's down to their self-important Gernerally-Thick-Secretaries). So union influence won't stop, nor will the money. However, because Ed has apparently cleaned up his side of the house he can now apparently assume the moral high ground and demand that political party donations from individuals be limited to £5,000.

Ridiculous. As everyone knows, the vast majority of donations Labour gets it gets from the unions who will still not qualify as 'single donations' despite it being a donation from a single entity generally run by a single person. The Tories differ in their funding, with far more coming from large individual donations. So Ed thinks he can somehow trade removing a disgraceful forced stealth donation for slashing the funding of the Tories. Not a chance. Anyone is free to give as much money as they want to poitical parties. All you need to do is have a system which mandates you to declare it all properly so the electorate can make a decision whether the party in question is being overly influenced by said donors against the best interests of the country. It is the same check against a millionaire oil tycoon donating millions to the Tories and naturally wanting less tax on oil as it is against the enormous workers union donating millions to Labour and naturally wanting more pay for its workers.

The other bizarre mandate from Ed, all pumped up from his showdown with Big Len is his stance on second jobs for MPs. Apparently not having checked that it might affect some of his senior MPs too, Ed has declared no Labour MP can have a directorship or consultancy by 2015, nor earn more than 15% of their Parliamentary salary elsewhere. Another barb aimed at the Conservatives who have many more MPs who have outside interests of note, it is a pathetic attempt to ride the swell of public opinion against MPs. It is the same swell that sees those in handsomely paid ministerial roles denouncing Ipsa's proposed basic salary increase. Easy for Cameron, Miliband and Clegg  (paid around £400,00 between them and each worth millions) to say that backbenchers on £66,000 shouldn't get another £6,000 or so; it's peanuts to them.

You can't have your cake and eat it boys - you wanted an independent body to set pay; you've got one. Yes, it is poorly timed but the grown up response from all of them should have been that the correct level of pay should be some degree higher. In comparison to similar public sector roles, their pay really is rather low - think about the Beeb, think about NHS managers, think about civil servants, hundreds of whom get more than the PM let alone a lowly backbench MP. They should acknowledge what everyone knows - that there have been years of refusing to increase headline pay because it is bad press but stealthily increasing benefits in lieu. It was what in part caused the expenses scandal. I'm not advocating a "pay them more so they don't have to steal" concept but you have to see on a basic level their salary is relatively low. It is better to have ourselves rid of the obfuscation of the expenses system and just pay them an appropriate upfront salary.

Ed is as plain wrong on this second job ban as he is on individual donations. MPs should be encouraged to be actively involved in the country they run. We don't want canned professional politicians, believe me - there are enough already. I want doctors, soldiers, teachers, lawyers, businessmen. MPs whose sole life experience is of politics is a recipe for disaster - political spin, survival over achievement, zero subject matter expert knowledge in policy making or on committees. I could go on. Earn what you want, declare it all and let the public decide. If they think an MP spends too much time in their private hospital surgery and not enough in their constituency surgery, boot them out. If they think an MP spends too long writing articles for papaers and magazines and not long enough writing replies to their constituents' letters, boot them out. If they think an MP is making decisions on his defence sub-committee based on the whims of his masters at a defence firm, boot him out. The answer is not banning influence, it is not banning our MPs from the right to earn more than their parliamentary salary, and it is certainly not banning them from having any interaction with the society they are meant to represent.

Milliwho's announcements this week have sought to impress some kind of leadership upon the unions who elected him and tried to turn the tables of debate onto donations to the Tories and their outside interests. It is not as Blair and some commentators suggest, a defining moment of leadership, though it might be a defining moment in his leadership. Ed has highlighted the overbearing influence the unions have on his party and picked a fight with McClusky he cannot afford to lose. With the IMF upgrading the economic outlook, the Labour lead slimmed to mid-single digits and still no coherent policy other than 'we'll copy the Tories plans but be really miffed about the unfairness of it all' there are better odds on Len still leading Unite after the election than of Ed leading the Labour party. This looks less like a Clause Four moment and more like a c(l)ause fo(u)r alarm (sorry, best I could do)...

George's Taxing Decisions

George Osborne's budget must have gone well last week, because one of the main things Labour are making a point over is the fact that an Evening Standard employee broke embargo to tweet Budget information before Georgy Porgy got to his feet in the Commons. Naturally, it's hilarious to hear that according to politicians of both sides, nobody has ever intentionally leaked budget data before the actual budget. This is despite the fact that in the run up to most budgets various treasury insiders angling for a straw poll or ministers angling for public outcry at their budget being trimmed take the same approach to secrecy as your average C list celebrity selling the mundane details of their tawdry lives to glossy dentist reception magazines. But that's beside the point as it is perfectly normal to pre-release to news institutions with strict provisos and controls in place. That a Standard employee broke the embargo is a matter for the Standard and maybe the police. You can blame George for a lot of things I am sure, but this isn't one of them.

The thing that struck me about the commentary on the budget though was the pathetic language of the entire press corps, whatever their political colour (you don't see any red in the Torygraph and it's all you can see at the Peoples' Commissariat for Public Information - the BBC). It seems that no matter what the news, no matter how generous a budgetary move is, anyone who doesn't benefit from it muct be a victim or a loser.

For example they are all up in arms at the "discrimination" of choosing to put 10p more tax on wine but take 1p of beer. There is little talk of the fact that wine bars are doing just fine, as is the wine producing industry, and those who tend to drink more wine can probably live with the 10p increase. No talk of the fact that the lower financial echelons disproportionately drink more beer than the better off. Nope, when the stats aren't in our favour we ignore the class envy angle. Nor will you read much about the benefit (though 1p is more symbolic than financially meaningful) that our flagging pub industry will receive from this cut. The important one here is that women drink wine and men drink beer. So this cut in beer duty is... a discriminatory attack on women. You simply cannot win with this bunch of whining liars who seem to set out to deliberately misrepresent policy for a mix of profit and political propaganda.

Newsflash: As I have mentioned before, the word discriminate, means to choose, nothing more. That is the job of Government. They decide from whom they should take money and how much, then to whom they should give it and how much. Otherwise we could just have a system designed to extract a flat amount (or rate) of tax, and then to redistribute it evenly, so as nobody can be accused of making a choice, which by definition would be "discrimination". That would unfortunately put the cat amongst the 'fair tax' pigeons. It would also mean we may as well not pay the people to take and give back in equal measure, because their pay just reduces your rebate. Let's have no Government - it worked pretty well for Belgium.

Flippant yes, but the point is that Governments make decisions every day - it is what they are elected for - where they prioritise their many competing demands against their limited resources. Increasing funding for cancer research is not a vicious attack on all diabetes sufferers. Buying new science textbooks for a school is not a slap in the face of the teaching of humanities.

Unfortunately we continue to characterise all such funding decisions exactly so. Why? Because we are a nation of spoilt, selfish children. We cannot be happy for anyone else unless we get the same or more. Watching politicians, journalists and the general public discussing public spending is like watching a bunch of poorly brought up children fighting over who got more sweets, or complaining that the other kid gets all the presents on their birthday.

This is much like the talk of "real terms cuts" - when what we need are actual cuts. All these people talk about an increase in this benefit or that as a "real terms cut" because it is below the level of inflation. This again puts me in mind of a kid in a sweetshop. Every year the child grows, and its appetite with it - inflation. Mother hands out some of her hard earned cash to buy a bag of penny sweets, but as the years go by, and mother adds 5 pence to the bag per year, the child complains that the percentage its stomach is growing is larger than the percentage increase mother has gifted. In today's society, this means mother is evil. She is a horrible bitch who is starving her children - and should probably have them taken away from her. And even that analogy is without going into whether, if the child wants more sweets, it might be better off taking a milk or paper round rather than constantly demanding more from its mother...

We have NO MONEY - have we forgotten that? How short are our memories? Labour gave it all to their key demographic to ensure election victories and the exacerbation of most social ills during their time in power. Where did all that money go? Is anything tangibly better (apart from Tony Blair's bank balance, of course)? The Tories, fighting with one arm tied behind their backs thanks to having to pass everything by the bizarrely powerful, finanicially illiterate and very unpopular minority Lib Dems, have somehow allowed the press to say they are cutting deeply and we have real austerity in this country when we are actually increasing out debt and increasing our spending.

The result; no spare money to pay for growth policies like tax cuts because of such largesse and no votes at the polls because everyone believes they are slashing budgets left, right and Chelsea - the worst of both worlds. God, it's enough to wish Alastair Campbell was a Tory - this party are so poor at getting their message across, they couldn't sell water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.

Back to the point… even more furore has been kicked up over the new childcare tax rebate. I read everywhere of the unfairness to all stay at home mothers. Apparently this policy will penalise them.

Bollocks. Plain and simple.

If you stay at home, you don't need sodding childcare. That's your job. Women have campaigned, quite rightly, for homekeeping and childrearing to be considered a job and not a cop-out for the workshy. So how on earth, if you have decided that this will be your full time job, could you are you being unfairly penalised by not receiving something for which you have no need?

It is akin to an able bodied person complaining when an amputee receives a prosthetic limb that they don't also get one. They need that to bring them up to nearer your level. The key is, these whiners don't want the spare leg; they just want to stick it on eBay and pocket the cash. That's what this is about. The Government is rightly saying that the disgracefully high cost of childcare in this country is one of (if not the) biggest barriers to going back to work. So to help women, who as we all know are very under-represented in full time work (primarily because of this), they are giving a small helping hand back into work. What thanks do they get? They get greedy (and, yes, I do mean greedy) people complaining that that money should have been theirs rather than acknowledging a positive step in helping women back into employment and a much needed rebate to help defray the obvious costs of doing so.

It is shameful that a supposedly responsible media happily gives these people a prominent voice without even the hint of balance or even pragmatic and sound financial analysis. Even if there were enough money for Gordon Brown's style of dowsing voters in borrowed cash in return for votes but no progress, it is morally bankrupt as a policy. Instead, we are actually bankrupt by any normal standard which means there certainly isn't enough money for such profligacy.

We have to target the spending better - this is Government's job. Just as they were right that if one of you earns £60k (and therefore about 130% above the national average income; and as much as it would help and you'd like it), we cannot afford to give you child benefit, so they are right here. Yes, that means some people will get stuff you didn't get, and because it is too expensive to get everything perfect, it also means you can find seemingly unfair anomalies. But that shouldn't be the story - because ultimately you don't need it. Like people with two legs don't need spare prosthetic ones and stay at home mothers don't also need help paying for childcare. Childcare is crippling, and help is welcome for those who want or feel they need to go back to work and who can earn enough to make it worthwhile. Anyone who thinks it isn't is a spoilt brat.

PC PC

This week the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks have been running the gauntlet of the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. Our upstanding Members of Parliament (my, how short our and their memories are?) have been busy lobbing stones through the empty frames that make up what used to be their moral glass houses. Now they have all been grilled to the same extent. The MPs didn't go easy on Rupert just because he's an octogenarian. They even didn't go easy on Rebekah because she had ginger hair. Or because she was a girl. Now it's a good thing it's our non-PC MPs carrying out this investigation because left to Greater Manchester Police it may not have gone quite the same.

Nope, it appears Greater Manchester Police may well have just roasted James, but would probably have stopped short with the old fella and the girl. You see they've just had their fingers burned by the PC Police.  A couple of weeks back it was reported that Inspector Diane Bamber, 51, had taken Greater Manchester Police to an employment tribunal and won after she failed a fitness-based selection (here).

The test comprised a 500m course, wearing full riot gear and carrying a 17lb riot shield. Known as the "shield run" this is the base level fitness standard required to join a public order unit and must be completed in under 2 mins 45 secs. And she failed it. Because she's not fit enough. So she sued them. And won. Apparently she felt "humiliated" after failing the test. The tribunal ruled that she had been discriminated against because of her sex and age.

Now here is a little test to see if you've been reading my blog - what do I think about this?

a) Now that seems perfectly sensible, why would we possibly want riot police to be physically fit? As long as they're nice people, I'm sure the rioters won't go for the fat wheezy policeman who can't keep up with the rest of the riot shield wall. I imagine weak links are positively encouraged as the key to effective shield-based combat - the Romans probably had it wrong. Now I think of it, it's unfair to rule out the elderly or the infirm, they're people too. And let's get the morbidly obese in there as well. Everyone deserves a go as a riot policeman. That's what equal opportunities means.

b) Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ.

Yes, it was a toss-up, but I went with b). If you didn't you can probably stop reading here and go play with the traffic or continue interfering with an animal. Over the years it is an understatement to say there have been incredible miscarriages of justice with totally unjustified age discrimination, sexual discrimination, racial discrimination and more. We have, though, moved on and I'd say we are much of the way there. However, we are threatened with losing the good (and ongoing) work at the expense of ridiculous rulings like this where half-wits mis-interpret the law to their hearts' content and in so doing create terribly dangerous precedents.

Now you've perhaps read my thoughts on discrimination before (here, but most particularly here). In essence I think it's all about motivation - and I'm right, obviously - not about just choosing, which is all discriminating is. For example, fireman need to be strong enough to carry unconscious fat people to safety from their burning sofas after their discarded fag butts have ignited the stacked copies of NOTW forming a shrine to investigative journalism in the corner of their 13th floor apartment. Or rescue people from middle class fires. Or the Queen from whichever palace in which she currently resides.

Now some women will have failed the fireman test - or whatever slightly more official-sounding name they have for it. And some men. They will have been the people who couldn't hack it physically. And we're all the safer for the fire service that has produced - except when they're on strike for more pay. The average 7st woman is always going to find it much harder than the average 13st man to lift a 15st body or whatever the test is. Likewise the average 62 year old is going to find it harder than the average 25 year old. Fat wheezy kids will probably fail as will those with a build akin to the chap from the Mr Muscle adverts.

They aren't, however, being unfairly discriminated against. They just failed an objective test. There is a need for an objective test because you can't do the job if you can't carry a deadweight person. The unconscious victim doesn't weigh less if the fireman is over 50, or female. He or she weighs what she weighs. Some people will be more genetically predisposed to success than others, but that's life. For some things, many things in fact, maybe even most, there has to be one level for all. Equal opportunities means everyone from every 'category' (old, young, male, female, big fish, little fish, red fish, blue fish) gets the same shot at trying for a job or whatever. It does not mean we massage the test to get an equal number of everyone from every 'category' to pass.

Now Inspector Bamber doesn't want to be a fireman, but the physical levels required to join a public order unit are correctly imposed in a direct parallel. There's no humiliation in failing an assessment designed to test even the hardiest of our youths. Likewise you probably shouldn't hang your head in shame for failing selection for the SAS or the Parachute Regiment. Or not getting past youth trials at Arsenal. Or not getting the place at the top university you were after. You see they are all objective tests - are you strong enough to be a riot policeman, a good enough footballer for the Premier League, or a clever enough boffin to study astrophysics at Harvard?

Maybe not - and in all cases it will be a mixture of latent talent and hard work which decides if you make the grade. That is the wonder of objective tests - by their very definition they are neutral, non-subjective, impervious to bias or malevolent discrimination as long as the pass requirements are justified by what they are testing for. Sometimes the effort will not be enough to overcome the genetic disadvantages you start with. That may be because you are a short girl, or a thick boy, or born with the proverbial two left feet. The test takes no account of that though - only your performance. It is not shameful to fail trying. It is shameful to hide your failure, however, behind spurious lawsuits relying on the ongoing spinelessness of the judiciary when anyone whispers "discrimination" in their general direction. Especially if you're a sodding police Inspector.

Quote Unquota

Well seeing as we are on the subject of universities, I shall let you all know something else that grips me. In case anyone was thinking I blindly sign up to whatever policy comes out of Tory HQ I hope my criticism of their handling of university fees goes some was to dispelling your worries of bias. Today, a step further, with indeed an individual element. You see I cannot square myself as a little 'c' or big 'C' conservative with the total and utter tripe spouting forth from Clegeron, or Cameregg, whichever elision you prefer for the Dave and Nick show.

This week Cameron and then Clegg have lambasted Oxford University for their poor (or indeed "disgraceful") record on admitting black students. Now we can certainly spend some time on the foolish misuse of statistics Dave embarked upon by including only statistics for 'black-Caribbean' students in his statement about black students gaining places. Surely he must have seen from Opposition how damaging misuse of a statistic can be, especially when it is so easy to prove a deception. It was one of Labour's favourite modus operandi - trot out some statistic that in isolation might justify the crap one is about to talk about or even the legislature that one is about to attempt to pass.

So, first smack on the wrist to naughty Dave. Not least it was foolish because if you are going to take his upside down view of who is responsible for low percentages of one group or other (compared to society's cross-section) attending top universities, only 41 children of any black parentage gaining an Oxford place would still be a headline low figure. But that is all immaterial, because the way he is going about this is desperately foolish in its leftwards leanings.

Quite how you can think the number of students good enough to attend a certain university is down to said university is beyond me; for that is the problem. If you have been to pretty much any university in the past 15 years (and it is probably more true of Oxford than of most others), you will see the enormous amount of time, effort and money that goes into encouraging poorer students to apply. That though, is pretty much where the university's responsibility ends.

Certainly it has to conduct a thorough assessment on who is the most gifted and would benefit the most from a university education (and who would benefit the country the most by said education). To do this it will of course take into account many things, and those factors won't be exclusively to do with money. There are poor children on bursaries at private schools, there are rich children whose parents do not pay for their education. We do not all fall into the rich/poor circles of the Venn diagram and those circles only - unique snowflake and all that.

This is where we trust our institutions to use their not inconsiderable intelligence to differentiate between grades and potential, though that is not to say they don't very often go hand in hand (On a side note too often the liberal media and politicians seem to think if you go to a good school, you are given good grades on a plate. Yes there is an opportunity, but just that. It takes brains and a lot of hard work to realise that potential). I truly believe this selection process is happening. What is more, given the choice of letting non-political academics make these decisions or two-a-penny politicians after cheap points in sound-bytes, I'd go with Professor Plum every day of the week and twice on Sundays. After doing all this, the university can and need do no more.

The problem is clearly that the state is failing to produce the raw material. Not enough quality is getting to the doors of the Russell Group. To blame them for not admitting people not good enough is farcical. Oxford and Cambridge work. They are still world class institutions. This suggests they might be doing something right. Likewise, most private schools seem to have a pretty firm grip on things - if they don't, people vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere. Most at state school do not have this luxury. To blame the university they fail to get into for their lack of schooling is ludicrous though, and does them a great disservice in shifting the focus from where it should be - namely raising the standards of state schooling to somewhere nearer that of private schooling, level or beyond.

The even more worrying leftist tosh, Clegg dribbled out yesterday. He essentially threatened Oxford and by extension all other universities of withdrawal of funding if they didn't ensure more students from poorer backgrounds were admitted. Here are his actual words: "if you want to continue to get support from the taxpayer to educate our young people, you've got to make sure that British society is better reflected in the people you take into the university in the first place." Some pretty important language to pick up on there, and some statistical nonsense.

First let's deal with the easy bit - yet again totally rubbish statistics; the "better reflected" part. Last year 22% of Oxford's student population were from ethnic minority backgrounds. This compares to about 10% nationally. Certainly there are individual ethnicities who do better than others and those who do poorly. However, there are many mitigating factors, not least the majority arts bent at Oxford and the oversubscription of many of the courses most popular among ethnic minorities. For an excellent review of this topic from January, read this article from the Cherwell, a student paper in Oxford (here). So, at double the national average, not desperately racist, and more than a better reflection one might think; unless we're going to ask Nick Griffin to point out how a lower percentage of white people gain places at Oxford than there is in the national cross-section. So let's steer clear of that one, eh?

Second up, the language Clegg used was the language of quotas. This misguided attempt at two wrongs making a right has long been championed by the left. Make up for deficiencies in some system or other, glossing over the cracks by simply adjusting the end product. Problem with not enough women in Parliament? Do what Harperson wants and have quotas based on the general population. Don't worry about trying to deal with institutionalised sexism, just alter the picture at the end. Don't worry about using a proportion based on full time workers who take no time off for pregnancy (which goes a long way to explaining some of the gender gap in top flight business, politics etc), go straight for 50:50. Because that is the thing about quota politics. Not only is it totally morally bankrupt as a policy, but each quota is invariably based on something utterly incomparable. It works on the exclusionist, discriminatory principle it is supposedly meant to be ousting.

I don't like agreeing with Simon Heffer, he's a little too far right for my liking, but his article (here) yesterday was spot on regarding this quota setting. Clegg is totally wrong when he says universities have "got to make sure" society mirrors their intake. All they have to ensure is a fair admissions policy and the pursuit of academic excellence. It is up to Clegg and Co to deal with the standard of student applying to university, Oxford or otherwise. They need to forget this quota nonsense and realise that it is for the Government to try to give the opportunities to the poorer children to exploit their potential. Once everyone has done that, let the chips fall where they may.

This has been dangerous and foolish talk from a Coalition I had high hopes for concerning education. I thought they understood the way to deal with high achievers in the private sector doing better than poorer counterparts was not to criticise them, legislate against them or try to drag them down (or as Labour called it "education, education, education). It is to give them a bloody good run for their money by raising the standards of the state sector.

Hopefully Michael Gove can step in and rescue this horribly backwards thinking that seems to have come out of nowhere with some real direction in primary and secondary education. That is the key to it all - education, and not higher education, because unfortunately for most, by then it is too late. Cameron needs to grip this alarming leftist lurch of his, or else he may find his abused Conservative partners bring about an end to this Coalition rather than the minority Lib Dem partners he seems to be more than willing to accommodate on almost every issue. For everyone's sake let us hope this is merely part of the courting procedure that he doesn't intend to carry through to the marriage. Like buying flowers.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

My, doesn't time fly when you're having no fun at work and no time to vent your angst online? Not long now until resumption of full blogging duties, I promise. Not much time for research this evening, so I'll knock this one out straight from the hip. Today's subject is tax, not the eleventy million pounds we pay the taxman every time we fill up our cars, but the cash we hand over to him when we die. Yup, today, a very quick one on inheritance tax, as you may have gleaned from the title. You may have read that last week the Office for Tax Simplification called for the treasury to overhaul the death duty system of tax reliefs. This would be lovely to hear if it were in line with the Tory pre-election proposal to vastly raise the threshold at which inheritance tax is paid, and hopefully get rid off it entirely in time. However, it was instead a call to tighten rules allowing people to avoid (not evade) paying death duties.

Now, this will be quite a quick one, because the bulk of my argument can be copied and pasted from either the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, or from my earlier post on paying for care of the elderly which ripped aforementioned fable off a treat. Ooh, split infinitive, I feel so naughty. So, for revision, feel free to peruse either text.

Let's start with my stance on inheritance tax, just in case you were in any doubt, before I even wrote a word. It is wrong. Totally. Why? Because it is wrong to re-tax those prudent enough to save. It is not because we pay a monstrous amount of tax, though we do, day in, day out. My stance would be the same if we were all taxed at 1% or 99%. The point is, it is yours once HMRC has taken his usually massive slice. We work, we make money (hopefully), we give some to the Government to take care of some services (army, doctors, school, prison, MPs' expenses etc) then see if we have enough left to buy the rest of the things required for survival. Fine. We'll get to levels of taxation another day, but as a system that seems to make sense. Re-taxing those who choose not to splurge their taxed cash on fast women and loose cars is economically and morally repugnant. At this point please refer to ant/grasshopper argument if clarification is required.

Inheritance tax makes no sense. On a moral level, there is nothing wrong with working to feather the nest of one's children; saving and not spending on yourself but preparing a brighter future for your offspring. Is this not what parenthood is about? It is entirely right to want to pass on assets, and fair that one should be allowed to do so. It is what we as a society should and indeed nature does wish us to do - support our progeny. It is typical leftist nonsense where to solve the problems of one end of the scale, one should seek to drag the other down until everyone is equal and therefore the problem solved. On an economic level, it gathers little money, yet encourages tax exiles and expatriation, likely netting a loss for the Exchequer. It encourages fast living on debt, because at least HMRC don't want a share of that. In essence, it promotes a worse society.

Ultimately, it is desperately unfair, anti-aspirational and targets a specific group. You will notice that it is ok to target this group - Labour and the Lib Dems think they are fair game for some more squeezing, the capitalist pigs. Making children sell their parents' house to pay some ludicrous 'duty' owed is apparently fine because they must be rich, because they own a nice-ish house or live anywhere in the south. Just don't take any benefits away from the clinically work-shy; that's victimisation. Remember, it's not targetting if you don't like them or don't think they would traditionally vote for you. Then it is making people pay their fair share. It also only catches the people in the middle who usually can't afford to pay without selling the main asset (usually the family home). Once you get into the super rich, they can generally afford to shuffle things around to pay less tax than Wee Jock Poo Pong McPlop. And I don't care - no-one should pay this tax.

If you and I earn the same but you buy a house and save money (good for our economy), and I spend it all on foreign holidays with time split evenly Flashman-style between bordellos, bookies and bottle shops (useless to our economy, good for someone else's economy), why are we treated differently at death? I would have nothing but a raging case of syphylis and a bloated liver, and you would have assets. We both chose to 'spend' our money on acquiring them, yet for some reason, the taxman thinks he's entitled to your savings but doesn't want any of my hepatic failure / curious itch.

If you want to counter with 'redistribution of wealth' arguments, you are a Marxist fool. We have a progressive tax system that does just that, but re-taxing savings and assets is not paying one's 'fair share', it's robbery. If you counter with 'they can afford it' look at the relative levels of inheritance tax threshold and house prices over the last 20 years. You will see many if not most of these people being taxed are not the super rich; simply owning a modest family home now forces many estates above a boundary that has not kept any kind of pace with inflation, dragging more and more people into its insidious net.

It may be an old law, but being around for a long time does not make it right. Let us hope that the Tories do a good job of the economy for the next 4 years. If they do, maybe then they can move to remove this envious and illogical tax in a second term once shorn of their Government partners who are so opposed to wealth, as if the concept itself were evil. That will perhaps be the real test of where David Cameron's allegiances really lie - once he has the Governmental majority and mandate to make Conservative policy, will he? If not, perhaps the meek shall one day inherit the earth, but they'll have to sell it to pay the tax.

Insuring European Equality

They say never start with an apology, and you probably think an apology unlikely in general from someone who appears so confident in his own views' veracity. However, I must start by apologising for not blogging for a little bit. Clearly still in the grips of some slight post traumatic stress over my screaming baby flight, I have been a little unattentive of my blog. My newspaper cuttings, stored hyperlinks and notebook are overflowing with things that vex me, but I have been somewhat lax in putting pen to paper. I shall blame work, which is easy (blaming it, not doing it), and indeed is going to take me away for another couple of days now, so you may have to wait until Friday or Saturday for an update on what Law Abiding Citizen thinks of the world. Oh dear, talking about oneself in the third person; I must have let the recent 50% increase in followership go to my head. Oh, and I'm not apologising for the title; it's not a typo, it's a crap pun, but it's late and nothing rhymes with union ... you'll see.

So, pseudo-apology over, onto the important news of the day. More important than Libyan unrest, or gay cricketers, today a medium length one on the wonderful bilge currently being spewed forth from the courts. I am not refering to the ruling that a couple who hold faith-based opinions that homosexuality is wrong cannot foster children. I like to steer clear of religion in general, not just because I don't profess to know a huge amount about most faiths but also because it appears more trouble to get into it all than it is worth. A devil's advocate might be inclined to ask, though, whether this ruling refers to Christian views on homosexuality only (they're getting a bit of a public shallacking for their views in this particular area it seems - gay weddings in churches etc). It's just that the High Court judges decreed that homosexual rights "should take precedence over the rights of Christians in fostering cases", which seems a bit narrow considering there are a couple of other mainstream faiths who don't have the most liberal views on the gay community; public stonings and the like come to mind as slightly more severe than not being willing "to tell a young child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing" as the couple in the case stated. Are the same standards to be applied within other faith fostering too? Now everyone has their right to be as gay as Mardi Gras or as straight as an arrow, but perhaps the ruling would be more comforting to Christians who feel the country largely built around Christianity is rather turning on it, and not even on just religion in general. So I didn't really steer clear of that one, but you get the point - whichever way the ruling went, shouldn't the judges have referenced the rights of all religions taking or giving precedence to homosexual rights, not just those of Christians?

Anyway, as I said, I'm not talking about that, I am talking about the decree from that fine bastion of nonsense that is the European Court of Justice. I speak, of course, of the ruling that insurers cannot consider gender when deciding premiums. The news item that caught my eye yesterday was about male pensioners losing out as their yearly pension will have to decline to meet women's. The previous difference can be explained by clever people called actuaries who work out the risk of pretty much everything, and therefore the price of insuring it. In short, men die first, so they get fewer bigger payments than their wives who spead their equal pension pot over their longer retirement. Of course, predictions (no doubt accurately) suggest men's pots will go down to meet the women's rather than vice versa.

I cunningly though I would blog today on other ramifications like those for car insurance but it would appear it wasn't that hard a link to make so I shall regurgitate today's news rather than pre-empt it. In short, by re-reading Europe's gender directive which had previously allowed such sensible actuarial work, we have now outlawed gender as any type of base for discrimination. Unfortunately, this is as mad as a box of frogs. This was surely never the idea behind the Charter for Fundamental Human Rights? That is the problem with absolving our own Parliament of any real control over UK law, shifting everything to Europe where a bunch of apparently well-meaning bureaucrats make up poorly-drafted, poorly-worded and poorly-thought out laws which then members of the European judiciary decide to take in the daftest way possible presumably to make a name for themselves.

So, even though young boys crash eleventy million times more than young girls, we shall be seeing the last of Sheilas' Wheels and Diamond for a start. Naturally, as with pensions, I assume all rebalancing will be upwards, so everyone will now pay more. Why stop there? I assume the same Charter is breached by allowing Saga to offer cheap insurance to old people, or probably Odeon for letting them see films on the cheap. While we're at it, let's start training 60 year olds to fly the few remaining aircraft the military have. They may be old and frail and we'll never get the return for investment in training out of them before they retire (non-compulsorily), but it would be unfair to say they couldn't give it a bash. Let's also get children working from age 5 - it gives them great discipline in life and can cut down on families' trainers bill as the children can sew their own. Or perhaps we should enter Lewis Moody and his England rugby pals into the Under-15 Girls' World Cup - they'll almost definitely win.

Now I might have taken that a bit far, but the point is obvious - there are reasons we make decisions related entirely or partly on age or gender. These decisions allow some people to do things, disallow others, create benefits, and deny them. The point, as ever, is that discrimination is just choosing. Unfair discrimination is not choosing on the basis of some characteristic that cannot be helped (age, height, sex, sexuality etc) or even can be helped. Perfectly fair and sensible decisions can easily come this way. It is choosing maliciously because of it, not sensibly - I blogged at length about it here. So here we are again beating the discrimination drum, when really we need to take a step back and use common sense. The problem is, as with so many of these things, it is completely out of our hands. We are at the mercy of the European Union - the next thing you know they'll be giving prisoners the vote... Then again, one presumes they are trying to get onside with a couple of dodgy auditors who might finally sign off the EU's accounts once they get released...

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Now I'm off to the desert again for a few days, so you shall have to amuse yourself in other ways than the 3 minutes a day or so it takes to read, disagree with and mentally discard my thoughts on life, trivia and the universe. Perhaps have a look at a couple of the blogs I check in on from time to time - they're on my reading list on the right. It's an area I'm trying to expand, and is especially useful out here where my beloved dead tree news takes longer to arrive than a Christmas parcel. If you see any good ones out there feel free to email me - my details are on the right too. Just don't find anything too good and not come back. Then it would just be me and perhaps my mother reading.

So how to make sure of your return? It should be the greatest post ever, even better than "First Secretary of State, Lord President of the Council, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade, Baron Mandelson of Foy." And that was quite a post. Only "Dark Lord, Ruler of All that is Insidious" was missing, and I don't think I have it in me. So I thought I'd blog about sun cream, and not just about it being taken away from me by kleptomaniac airport stasi. I thought I'd point out how as much as I prefer the spray sun cream, it irritates me that the rather vital spray element of the item tends to pack up after 4 squirts leaving you pouring liquid hither and thither cursing your positively mormonesque sunbathing neighbour with his retro but functional cream bottle. But I realised that was all I had to say on that, and it probably wouldn't be good enough. So I'm going to talk about equality instead.

The "Equality Act", and it is certainly an act, is the 'brainchild' of none other than Joan of Harman, crusader for apparent equality. Shabbier than the standard pardons of political friends on leaving office in the US, this was a true Parthian shaft from Harperson. If it wasn't for the fact that I don't believe her intellectually capable of such devilment, I might suggest she forced this utterly crap Act through in the last breaths of the Labour Government just to spite those who she knew would inherit it.

Now the Coalition were right to get rid of the horrific social engineering element of this pathetic leftist Act. They have purged the awful clause, begging for legal exploitation, about making it beholden upon all public bodies to essentially socially engineer if a person's lower socio-economic level in any way correlated to their not getting a free mansion, a Double First from Cambridge and an endless supply of £40,000 a year for life scratch cards. They have not gone far enough, though.

They have pressed on with the "Equality Duty." Whilst I can see logic in bringing together a lot of the miscellaneous equality legislation, and this is the only straw to which the Government are grasping, it is still utterly misguided. Perhaps it will save a lot in the long run by condensing what has been a haphazard legislatory debacle into "one easy to manage loan", I mean 'piece of legislature'. But that doesn't get around how it is still a total load of crap itself.

Under the "Equality Duty" all public bodies have to ask a bunch of questions of their employees. The larger the organisation, the more intrusive the questions and more expensive the implementation. In the case of the Department for Work and Pensions I imagine they require gold plated speculums. Apparently we must know if employees are: gay, straight, black, white, brown, blue, tall, short, male, female, right handed, left handed, Catholic, Hindu, Jedi. Competent unsurprisingly doesn't make the list. Then we put it all into a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, highlight it all and click the pie chart button. A paper clip will pop up in the bottom corner saying "It looks like you have collated a load of irrelevant data. Would you like me to make it look like society is being ruined by the domination of pushy tennis mums and white middle class men who listened at school?"

You see, all this is, is a very expensive census. Telling us who is employed, how many of them are over 50, how many are atheists and how many have an extra nipple (not necessarily all together) is pretty pointless on its own. You can't look at those numbers and say: We don't employ enough Scientologists. We don't employ enough 42 year olds. We don't employ enough pole dancers. Without going into massive detail, you will have no idea why the breakdown is as it is, or whether it is right or wrong.

Every year people harp on about the number of state school versus private school children who get into universities, and especially into Oxbridge. No-one ever bothers to publish application numbers, interview and test results, exam results or the personal statements on UCAS forms. No, there are many things weighed up on deciding which students to accept, but if in a given year the number of state school kids going to Oxford drops, the call of "off with their heads" echoes around Fleet Street and Whitehall. No-one asks if enough cricketers got in. Or enough cider drinkers. It may seem to be taking it a bit far, but the point is you can't take a single statistic in isolation when it is viewed alongside many others you choose to ignore. What if record numbers of state school children applied that year, but were not deemed up to scratch? Universities are there to pick out those with the most potential. They have been charged with encouraging more state school children to apply, but that is where their responsibility ends. If they get loads to apply but they aren't good enough, they've done their bit, and the state schools have not done theirs. But we all know how it would play out in the media.

So I expect the public sector censuses will "tell" us that women don't get paid enough, and white men are unfairly dominant. Unfortunately, in doing so it steps well beyond what it can know. It does not know if any of that is warranted or needs redressing, because all it is is a bunch of numbers that cost you and me a bucketload of money. It won't have asked how many women took breaks for motherhood so have lower salaries commensurate with their lesser time at work and lack of continuity. It will just tell us that women are discriminated against. It will tell us that it is unfair that the British Army doesn't recruit many Buddhists. It will not have asked how many actually applied, and whether the ones who were turned away were any good.

It is no surprise the Government wants nothing to do with the results, devolving responsibility for interpreting these random numbers to the Big Society. According to the Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, we are all meant to look at the results and then "be in the front line for holding public bodies to account." At best one hopes that means everyone will give it all a damn good ignoring, at worst it will give bad ideas to those in local government with the dangerous combination of a little power and a little brain. You wonder whether the Tories let this one go because they have bigger fish to fry or are still worried about the "nasty party" image that the Grauniad and others would happily run if they amended this codswallop. Either way, all the "Equality Duty" will ever be is an embodiment of the truism that there are "lies, damn lies and statistics."

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor...

Well I'm back. No doubt you all missed me. I have had my basic human right to an internet connection reinstated. My employers will be off for a court appearance in the Hague some time soon, no doubt. I often start these blog posts with "just a quick one" which continue to be anything but, however tonight, I mean it. I'm a little tired and I've already said the bulk of this one - think of it as more of an update. Tonight, my specialist subject is the apparent inability of rich politicians to understand their poorer underlings.

I blogged the main body of this a few weeks ago (here). The long and the short of it being that there are some people who think that if you aren't poor, you cannot understand any politics to do with the poor and so will always make terrible decisions regarding their welfare. Following in this logic, Mrs Thatcher should only have been allowed to make policy on greengrocers, chemists and lawyers and Churchill had no right whatsoever to be First Lord of the Admiralty with only an Army background. It is, of course, total and utter bunkum.

The next person to add themselves to the list of people criticising the Cabinet because of their privileged backgrounds and financially successful lives is prize plonker and crusader for all that is ill-thought out, David Davis MP. Yup, Davis signs up totally to the fact that the current Cabinet can't understand the financial strains on a £40,000 pa earner facing child benefit cuts because they're all loaded.

Davis states "they are who they are - they come from their own background, they don't actually come from backgrounds where they had to scrape for the last penny at the end of the week." Several points here. The most crushingly obvious one is what a load of bigoted crap. Since when was it ok to criticise someone because of their background? Imagine, if you will, the clamour for heads to roll if this were reversed; if this were about inheritance tax and a politician (or anyone) said, "well, so-and-so isn't rich, they're from a poor background so they don't know what it's like to try to pass on your multi-million pound estate to your children - they never had to work out what to do with all that spare cash even after paying for the stable of polo ponies - so they're not in any position to really make policy here; they just can't understand." It is classist, mean-spirited, discriminatory drivel at its worst.

The next point is how lovely it must be for Mr Davis to be able to talk about this having come from modest roots in London. However, for the last 24 years he has been a serving MP, raking in a pretty above-average wage to say the least. His basic wage these days is a touch over £65,000, plus expenses (but they never make any profit there). I would say he has long since forgotten what it is like to search around for pennies at the end of the week. This is also true of any MP - none of them are on the breadline, but apparently it's ok for the adequately rich but not the very rich to make policy that governs the poor.

Which is really the last point, and the one I made extensively in the aforementioned post. Government is about putting the best people from a cross-section of society, through a fair and open voting system, in a position to take the decisions they think best for all the citizens of the country. Churchill came from a very wealthy background. He ate, drank and socialised with the highest of society. He holidayed in exclusive and prohibitively expensive locations and did much to excess. He was no flat-capper, no working men's club regular. I should say that might not seem 'in touch' with the poorer voters, only back then people cared far more about substance than show. Was he a good leader? Was he a good politician? Was he good for the country?

It is not about who is poor or rich, black or white, tinker, tailor, soldier or sailor. One can do nothing about one's background - it is where they have been. What should always be of infinitely more interest is one's present and one's future - it is where they are, what they do, where they intend on going, and what they intend on doing; and if they are a politician in power, we're probably all going too. Politics, for all its point scoring on who has done what, is about what we should do now. I would like to say this shady subject can be consigned to history and we can move on with getting the nation back on its feet, but I think we all know we shall hear this drum beaten again before the next Parliament.

Tricky Differentials

The word discrimination gets bandied about a lot these days. It probably gets a rather harsh press though. It has had a couple of meanings for well over a hundred years, but one has become far more prevalent of late. In particular, its meaning has become subverted in the last decade or two of political correctness. It is still correct to say "it is hard to discriminate between these two options" meaning just that it is hard to choose between them. That is, in essence, the meaning of the word: to choose or to differentiate. However; that is no longer common parlance, more is the pity.

With a casual glance at a newspaper, one would be forgiven for thinking that discrimination is a crime. That is, choosing one thing over another. Here we come onto the other meaning of discrimination - to choose between two options not based on merit but on the basis of the class or group to which they belong. As much as I would love to launch into the etymology, I highlight the change because I think it indicative of an error brought about by political correctness.

The crux of the matter is that I do not believe discriminating on the basis of class or grouping is necessarily wrong. Before you clap me in irons and declare me a bigot, I shall explain. The law has gone too far in discrimination in that it is a blanket law, not allowing dicrimination, or choosing at all. The law is there, and rightly so, to stop discrimination when it is motivated by a dislike of a particular class or group. It makes no allowance for when that discrimination, or choosing, makes perfect sense and the thrust behind it is sensible and not of malevolent origin.

A couple of examples will perhaps help to clarify the point:

1. An asian man applies for a job as an accountant. He passes all the tests and interviews better than the other candidate. The employer, who hates asian people, gives the job to the second candidate - a lesser qualified white man.

Clearly he has made a choice, he has discriminated and decided why he should choose the second candidate. His motives for employment are broadly: clever, good with numbers, not asian. No issue with the first two, but the motives behind the third make this illegal discrimination - it is unfair because of the motive behind the choice. Some would argue it is unfair because it is not fault of the asian man that he is asian. True, but to use that as the test leads us down a tricky road. See the next example:

2. An asian man applies for a job as an actor. He auditions fantastically well and is the better of the two candidates. The employer, who likes all races of people equally, gives the job to the second candidate - a black man who is a poorer actor.

Again, the employer has made a choice, he has discriminated and decided why he should choose the second appllicant. His motives are: easy to work with, good actor, black. No issue with the first two, but what about the third? Why does he have to be black? Ah, he's casting Martin Luther King. So, it's not the asian fellow's fault he's asian, so by the same logic as some, it is unfair to discriminate against him here. Is it? I think not - if you go with the motivation-based test, the employer's reasoning behind choosing (or discriminating) on the basis of class or group (in this case ethnicity), is not pernicious. It is sensible, as sensible as also wanting the actor to be good or easy to work with.

So, where does that leave us? Is discrimination ok if it is motivated correctly? I think so, but it is certainly a lot harder to legislate for that, but should that be an excuse for lazy legislation?

Other examples:

1. A bar manager runs a bar generally populated by young men. Is it right for him to want a young, pretty girl serving behind the bar to attract more punters? If the law says no and he loses revenue with reduced footfall, is that fair?

2. A foreman runs a working site. Is it right for him to want strong large men, not frail old ladies?

The point is, discrimination makes sense when it is stripped back to simply meaning choosing. The act of choosing always requires thought, subconscious or otherwise - it is one of the things that defines us as sentient beings. It is what motivates those choices that is important. Racism, sexism, bigotry, you name it - all wrong, because they represent sinister reasons behind choices - but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

This rather leads me onto a general rant about genetics and indeed positive discrimination, but I think I shall leave that for tomorrow...