Public sector pensions

There are a few inequities within the public sector schemes as well as between the public sector schemes and private sector ones. In order of decreasing generosity, the schemes are roughly as follows;

• Police (unfunded)
• Firefighters (unfunded)
• Armed forces (unfunded)
• NHS (unfunded)
• Teachers (unfunded)
• Civil Service / Agencies (unfunded)
• Local councils (funded)

The old argument for high police and fire pensions, with early retirement dates, was that these are physically demanding and risky jobs in which there was limited usefulness after 55 or so. Exactly the same can be said of construction workers - indeed, their occupational risk is substantially greater than police and firemen - but it's never been suggested that builders get generous State provision.

And although councils' funded schemes don't pose the future liability that the unfunded schemes do, they still cost a substantial percentage of tax in employer's contributions. But perhaps the greatest inequality within the schemes is that there is almost without exception no cap to the upper limits.

Thus a 'fat cat' on £150k can retire after 10 years service with a pension of £25k, whilst a cleaner on £13k with 30 years service will get only £6.5k a year. This anomaly has I'm quite sure been behind the explosion in top salaries in the public sector - and the only way to restrain 'fat cat' public service pay is to cap pension contributions and benefits at say £80k. The pressure would then be off these massive salaries, and we will see them start to return to normal levels.

Heffer and Jenkins united in opposition to Clegg reforms

It takes some doing to see Simon Jenkins in the Guardian and Simon Heffer in the Telegraph united in opposition to a proposed measure, but Clegg has managed it with his proposed constitutional reforms.

And to be frank, such distinguished opposition is giving me second thoughts about AV, which I don't support but haven't until now opposed hugely. I've always disliked the idea of fixed term Parliaments for much the same reason I dislike fixed term contracts; any businessman wants both the options to terminate early and the right to extend on the same terms, so a nominally three year contract becomes anything from one to five years. I also hugely dislike the idea of a Lords made up of loyal apparatchiks from the dying parties, so eloquently condemned by Jenkins;

As for Clegg's proposal for an elected House of Lords, this is a cloak for a power grab by the Westminster apparat even more blatant than his attempt to engineer running coalitions. Elections would be on the basis of party lists drawn up by leaders and whips from loyalists and Commons trusties. It would extend the corruption of Wilson's "lavender list" and Tony Blair's "luvvies list". It happens across Europe, where position on the election list holds the key to party discipline. Voting might give such patronage the soft dusting of legitimacy, but only in replicating the Commons.A second chamber should be what John Stuart Mill called "a centre of resistance to the predominant power in the constitution" – resistance but not obstruction. It should be a custodian of diversity and pluralism, as in part the Lords is now, not a reward and resting place for party hacks.

So, I'll now oppose AV as well. That just leaves equalising the constituencies amongst Clegg's measures as the sole one I'll support. And if he tries to sneak in party funding measures, well, then it's war.

Will the CIA charge my account?

News to me that details of all transactions on my bank account are now to be passed to the CIA; not just me, you understand, but all of us. The EU has decided on our behalf. Now where on Earth did I get the idea that I had any say in maintaining the privacy of my personal information?

It can't be long before a new charge appears on my monthly statements as the gutterbanks seek to profit from it all; 'Data transfer £3.50' or somesuch.

And I don't suppose the arrangement is reciprocal, that EU security services have access to the bank accounts of US citizens? No, of course not. Silly of me. They wouldn't stand for it, would they?

If you don't like the 'Mail' try the Court of Appeal

It may be that you will automatically condemn this story in this morning's Mail as fiction; tales of the Turkish, Somali and Portuguese workless taking their pick of public housing at the British taxpayer's expense.

Well, if you don't like the 'Mail', try the Court of Appeal. Our courts are packed with housing cases when just occasionally immigrants of the type that appear in the 'Mail' story get turned down; then the taxpayer has to shell out for ruinous legal costs as decisions taken by councils and Housing Associations are challenged.

This recent case is just one such - from my own borough, Lewisham. A family of Tamil immigrants in which only the mother seems to be able to speak any English, and with the father and three children all suffering long-term chronic health problems, nevertheless knew enough to get themselves on the Council's priority housing list and were given a three-bed flat. For various reasons they didn't like it, and wanted somewhere different. Lewisham offered them a ground-floor 3 bed flat in Brockley, an expensive area of the borough favoured by young professionals. They turned it down because it meant walking up a hill. The Council said it had discharged its duty by making the offer. The court held differently, and allowed the appeal. Go figure. Sprinkled throughout the case are the usual accusations of 'racism' against neighbours and housing officers without which no housing appeals case seems complete.

'Mail' or not, it really is high time we grasped this nettle.

Time to extend the cuts to the Political Class

There has been one class of public expenditure wholly absent from the Coalition's cuts plans.

Every other area in which our taxes are spent is under scrutiny, with cuts ranging from 10% to 40%, but the politicians have reserved just one type of spending from any cuts - the taxes taken by the political class itself. It's time these were added to the pot; we're all in this together.

Union Modernisation Fund

If this has not been scrapped already, it should be. A list of payments made to date demonstrates this was nothing but a thinly disguised measure to siphon tax money to the unions to do things they would do anyway.

Short Money

When Gordon Brown, as a last act in office, slashed the Prime Minister's salary he forgot to alter the payments made to the Leader of the Opposition. Cameron can correct this little memory lapse, along with savings to the rest of Short Money.

Currently, Labour and the other opposition parties get £14,015 for each Parliamentary seat plus £27.99 for every 200 votes, the Leader of the Opposition's office gets £653,000. Travel allowances and salary enhancements are also paid. A 25% cut would produce an annual saving of around £1,250,000.

Policy development grants

Paid to political parties - but just the big ones, you understand. Currently £1.4m annually. 40% cut.

SpAds

The explosion in the number and remuneration of Special Advisors under Labour risked politicising the civil service beyond the point of no return. Clearly a candidate for a 40% cut to the estimated annual cost of £8m.

Councillors' allowances

We're currently paying a bill of about £218m a year for these, with the bulk being paid not to ordinary councillors but to Labour's 'Executive Members', limited to 10 per council. Some of these are walking away with a wedge of £50k - £60k whilst back-benchers get £4k - £6k. A 40% cut here targeted at the fat cats pays a jackpot.

Widdicombe Money

To pay SpAds in local councils - currently costing about £7m a year. 25% cut.

It's a start.

Clegg sneaks in party funding - wait for the Bill

I've frequently said that our politicians need watching like hawks lest they try to sneak in a measure to support their dying parties from public funds; Cameron is not bothered, but Clegg has made no secret of his ambition to prop up the failing LibDem party, which has just 60,000 members, from our taxes. Make no mistake. Political parties are private clubs, and they must either fund themselves or die. I will not assent to a penny more of my taxes being used to prop up these moribund central Statists.

So no surprise then that would be tax-thief Clegg announced today;

That programme includes introducing a power of recall for MPs guilty of serious wrongdoing, tackling the influence of big money as we look again at party funding, taking forward long overdue reform of the other place, implementing the Wright Committee recommendations, and taking steps to give people more power to shape parliamentary business, speeding up the implementation of individual voter registration, and increasing transparency in lobbying, including through a statutory register.Today I am announcing the details of a number of major elements of the Government’s proposals for political reform....

The truth will be in the detail of the forthcoming Bills, and they need thorough reading as they are published. So I'm holding my fire for the moment.

The really good news in the announcement is the equalising of the Electoral Quotient across the UK, with the implementation of the +/-5% limit long advocated here, with the exception of the Scottish islands.

600 seats gives an EQ of about 75,000, with an envelope of 71,250 to 78,750. Many Scots and Welsh seats will disappear.

Then came the curious statement that;

We have listened, also, to those who have very large constituencies – so the Bill will provide that no constituency will be larger than the size of the largest one now.

Um, the largest constituency now is the Isle of Wight, with around 108,000 voters. What can he mean?

Mrs Dale's diatheses

Well, it's that time of the year again when Iain Dale invites us all to nominate our top 10 political blogs - earning, perhaps, one of those little icon thingies in the RH column. For anyone inclined to include 'Raedwald' in their top 10, many thanks.

It's been an odd year. Archbishop Cramner has been silent since mid-June, leaving the web without the voice of Anglican conscience, and Letters from a Tory signed off for good shortly after the election result. Both are grievously missed. Newmania in Lewes is too wrapped in work and swaddling clothes to blog frequently, Chris Mounsey, aka the Kitchen as was, has adopted a newer, kinder persona and the bike-shed gang of Old Holborn, Obnoxio, Anna Raccoon et al are somehow becoming mainstream and, well, a bit 'establishment'. The experts - Richard North, Tim Worstall, Chris Dillow, the team at Adam Smith, and others - remain as steady pacekeepers.

The lynch-mood on the right of the blogosphere so evident in the run-up to the election has been largely earthed; the hempen ropes (for now) coiled and back in the shed, and as the overall levels of indignation on the webosphere's right drop to 'background' levels there is plenty of room for spicy invective and cutting anger from the left - but somehow it's not yet materialised.

Ah well, still alive, as a chum of mine used to say. Link to Iain's thingy on the clicky below.

Time to focus on Eurosleaze

With domestic budget reforms well under way and due to take concrete form in October, and with enough stories of ongoing sleaze and corruption amongst the political class bubbling up in the press to remind them that we haven't forgotten or forgiven them, it's probably now time to shift the national focus to Eurosleaze.

Eclipsed for a while by revelations of the Home Secretary's porn videos and suchlike, the fiscal misbehaviour of MEPs and officials in Brussels has largely escaped under the radar. With an efficiency that would have been admired by Goebbels, the EU propaganda machine effectively buried the 2006 Galvin report into MEPs' theft and corruption, peculation on a truly international scale, evidence of a shameless and blatant criminality amongst these bent Euroscum.

At £76,000 a year, MEPs are on a better basic wedge than their Westminster superiors, but that's not all; your MP pays higher rate tax, but under a special deal your MEP pays only 15% income tax under a special 'Eurotheft' deal. And then there are expenses on a scale that new Westminster MPs can only dream of.

With the most delicious irony, the Green Party's Jean Lambert MEP has recently called upon the EU to help tackle corruption in Nigeria; as ministers' mouths hang open in Abuja in disbelief, you can almost hear the response of "But everything we do we learned from you ..."

So let's keep our eyes and ears open for those tales of Eurocorruption.

Labour's NHS snouts bankrupting Britain

The NOTW has the sleaze story of the day; in 1997, before Labour came to power, just 6 NHS bosses earned more than the Prime Minister. Today, 320 of them earn more than Cameron.

Add to these the sleazy fat cats from the quangos and local government and you get a picture of unalloyed greed and self-interest at the heart of the public sector.

We've all got to feel the pain - so when, Dave, are you going to cull these obscenely paid plutocrats?

ACPO too posh to walk

Whilst Cameron and his cabinet happily trot the 400m between Downing Street and Parliament, whilst Boris is happy to cycle everywhere within ten miles or so and whilst even the sovereign at the age of 84 is happy to walk a street full of well-wishers, it seems the bloated plutocrats at the head of ACPO have forgotten how to use their legs.

These gilded jades, eager to avoid any contamination by contact with the British public, arranged an executive coach and police escort to carry them a few hundred yards from sty to piggery at a recent conference.

A police chief too unfit to walk is clearly not the man to understand the public's concerns about policing. But then we knew that.

AV: The wrong reform at the wrong time

The biggest danger of a successful referendum on AV is that it will give the illusion of political reform without actually having changed very much. I can't summon any great reserve of opposition to AV; it preserves the constituency link, and even allows voters to vote honestly rather than tactically for their first choice knowing that a second choice will ensure their vote isn't wasted. It also allows the gap between winner and runner-up to close-up enough not to allow the winner to be complacent about their majority - never a bad thing.

No. The problem is that it leaves the most damaging and pernicious faults with the electoral system intact. Firstly the deviation from a national electoral quota; we urgently need to recognise that a Scottish or Welsh vote should not be worth inherently more than an English vote. So the same EQ should apply right across the UK. Secondly, the envelope of constituency size around the EQ; like commentators on this blog I would allow only two exceptions, the Isle of Wight and the far highlands and islands. Every other constituency should be in the envelope +5% to -5% of the UK electoral quota.

Secondly, the state of the electoral register. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky has estimated that for 45m voters, the register is 7m voters out; there are 3.5m voters registered who shouldn't be, and 3.5m missing who should be. many of the latter will be natural Labour supporters - so they should support moves to regularise the register. A one-off validation, perhaps coincident with the 2011 census, in which either passport or birth certificate is required, will correct the register.

Finally, we must with reluctance withdraw the right of Commonwealth citizens to register on the electoral register and vote in general elections. This is an anomaly from the days of steam liners and has no place in an age of jet travel when we are host to at least a million Nigerians.

Some action from Cameron on these desperately needed reforms would be welcome indeed.

Nye Bevan, gulag-apologist, slated by his own

The truly repulsive Nye Bevan, gulag-apologist extraordinaire and Soviet agent, on whom Gordon Brown bestows his adulation, is coming in for a slating from New-Labour apologists as the comrades get down to the sort of leadershit infighting that only Labour do so well.

I've written before on how Bevan stood on his hind legs in the Commons and praised Stalin's Russia to the rafters long after the facts of the Holodomor were known. As millions died in agonising starvation, Bevan feasted with tales of Stalin's munificence.

Now Hywell Williams in the Guardian demolishes the reputation of the Old-Labour saint even further. Bevan switched from disarmament to developing the UK's nuclear arsenal only because his Soviet masters told him to. For this treason alone, Bevan's rotten corpse should be dragged from the grave, burnt to ash and scattered in the sewers. And Bevan lied to both the nation and his cabinet colleagues in setting up the NHS on Stalinist central command lines; it was only the basic human decency of others within Labour that prevented him implementing the murder of the chronically sick and disabled so strongly advocated within sections of the Labour Party at that time. *

Reading the comments to the Guardian piece is to realise the hardline Stalinist left is alive and well, and out in force to preserve Bevan in the socialist hagiography. But this loathsome and treasonous man deserves nothing but universal opprobrium and the contempt of history.

*In 1933, in a preface to On The Rocks, Bernard Shaw derided the principle of the sanctity of human life as an absurdity to any good Socialist, calling for extermination to be put 'on a scientific basis'. Shortly after, in the Listener, Shaw wrote;

Appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly: in short a gentlemanly gas - deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel. It might be useful in war, but if another war does not come, we shall find a use for it at home.

Shaw reasoned that to kill off the acquisitive classes is "quite reasonable and very necessary" since 'no punishment will ever cure them of their capitalistic instincts'.

Though Shaw was more concerned with the extermination of the idle, the unfit and opponents of Socialism, he defended the rights of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews - but preserving the clever ones. Writing to Beatrice Webb in 1938, he said;

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do it as humanely as they can afford to

With a 'humane lethal gas' no doubt.

Along with Shaw, the Webbs and HG Wells, even Virginia Woolf was a supporter of State murder; after passing a line of the profoundly mentally ill, she wrote "Imbeciles - every one of them a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

Rickets - when breast is not best

Following on from the piece below, the Evening Standard tonight publishes the findings of Tower Hamlets GP into the health of the heavily immigrant population; "It's very similar to what you would find in developing countries in big parts of our communities."

In nations with greater solar exposure than the UK - including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Somalia - the native population's exposure to the sun is enough for the skin to convert Vitamin D from an inactive to an active state, in which it assists in absorbing calcium from the gut. Here, in the absence of so much sunlight, our traditional diet provides the same Vitamin D to our northern European population. Without Vitamin D you get rickets - bowed legs from soft bones. Rickets is alive and well in Tower Hamlets and the rest of this part of East London.

What we should advise mothers immigrating from 'at risk' nations is this; expose as much of your skin and your children's skin as possible, spend lots of time outdoors with your skin exposed, use formula milk instead of breast and eat oily fish such as herring and mackerel, and switch to the same diet as the native English.

Sadly, this all goes against the superstitious and primitive religious teachings of the at-risk groups, goes against the harridan shrieking of distaff Guardianistas that 'Breast is Best!' and is condemned as 'cultural imperialism' by the cerebrally challenged left.

And so we have Rickets.

It's not just years that kill

Draw a horizontal line eight miles long with its centre on Westminster. At the Western end, folk will live about ten eighteen years longer than those at the Eastern end, have less than a quarter of the infant mortality, Tuberculosis will be rare and they will tend to be lean as whippets on a diet of olive oil and lettuce. In the West, bedbugs and body lice are virtually unknown; in the East, bus and tube upholstery is riddled with their eggs.

The contrast is remarkable in anyone's eyes. For socialists, it is a powerful argument for taking lots of money from the people in the West and giving it to the people in the East. In fact, they've just spent thirteen years doing just this, and the result is that ..... all the inequalities have got worse.

But read the National Audit Office Report in detail. All the areas in the country with the worst all-age all-cause mortality rates, and with the worst life expectancy at birth rates, are areas with high immigrant populations, and particularly with high first generation immigrant populations. Strip out all those not born in the UK from all-age all-cause mortality rates and they dramatically equalise - not wholly, but significantly. And look in detail at infant mortality rates, for these too are distorted, with infants born to recent immigrants being more likely to die than those born to the established population. The situation suddenly stops looking like one due largely to income inequality and starts looking like one due largely to immigration status.

London's East End is the insanitary melting-pot for new arrivals that it always has been. Peasants from rural Pakistan, Somalia and Bangladesh crowd over-populated housing, bringing with them long-term chronic health problems, parasitic infestations and all the health risks that living crowded together in tiny council flats bring. In fact, as the NAO study reveals, 44% of the UK's immigrants live in the handful of spearhead local authority areas with the worst stats.

And this of course explains why all the cash thrown by Labour at the problem had absolutely no effect whatsoever - for at the same time, they were holding the immigration door wide open, and a flood of poor and very unhealthy people from the world's most primitive nations just swamped the health services in the target areas.

Which is why of course the BBC is spinning the report to demonstrate that if only we all stopped smoking, lost weight and gave up red wine this health inequality gap will disappear. Go figure.

The Smoking Ban three years on

Trimdon Working Men's Club held its inaugural committee meeting back in 1919, in the drear shadows of a draining war and a flu pandemic. The war memorials had yet to go up in the small villages known as the 'Trimdons' and men were still tricking back to Durham from Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Club remained open during the dark years of the great Depression and again as war brought urgency and importance to the work of the mine. It provided warmth in the marrow-freezing chill of the Winter of 1947. It survived the virtual closure of the coal industry and the post-war depopulation of the county. It finally closed last week, a victim of the smoking ban, as Tony Blair earned another £100,000 to add to his substantial income.

The townscape here in South London has become bleak indeed. Four pubs within walking distance of my front door have closed, one is already razed and the others due for demolition. They have been scooped up by opportunistic Housing Associations to provide shabby slum bedsits for Nigerian village girls, and before very long will be on credit blacklists and 'no deliveries' zoned by all the local fast food outlets, with torn bags of putrescent waste littering the weed-strewn gardens.

Everywhere I go the depredations of the smoking ban are apparent; boarded up pubs, empty clubs, deserted and poisoned oases that once made walking the streets a pleasant adventure in search of the elusive perfect pub. The survivors are the chain multiples, the Weatherspoons, soulless and depressing haunts of emaciated benefit ghosts and devoid of even the slightest hint of individual character or ownership, heavy with the cloying stink of unwashed underclothes and hoover dust.

There are a few beacons to emerge from this gloom; pubs where the landlords have fought back, places where the newly-built smoker's shelter pays scant heed to the constructional requirements of the 2006 Health Act. In time these garden rooms, now complete with heating, insulation and a full set of doors and windows, will segue into the rest of the pub structure as fully fledged internal smoking bars. The gardens are now the property of smokers by moral right, and non-smokers venturing outside during the Summer months are conscious of the society they've excluded themselves from - a good humoured and sparky group, easy in eachother's company and with the shared bond of a now-internalised hatred of the Petty State.

I sense no great appetite amongst this government for strict enforcement of the ban, and no allowance should be made for doing so in the calculation of the government's grant to local councils. If they want to employ smoking inspectors rather than binmen, fine - they'll face the public at the ballot box.

The insidious lies from the morally righteous wing of the medical non-profession and lies and fake statistics from the fake charities continue to support the evidential con that gave rise to the ban, but they are proving to be the real losers from the Smoking Ban. Their reputation with the public is in shreds, their funding and bloated grasp on the public purse at risk. Frankly, people just don't believe them any more.

Three years on and the ban stands as most things that came from Labour - an expensive and divisive failure.