Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

.

Quango Britain is flooded by policy failure


By Douglas Carswell
Politics Last updated: February 10th, 2014

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/douglascarswellmp/100258653/quango-britain-is-flooded-by-policy-failure/


Replacing Lord Smith with a Tory will solve nothing

In fairness to Lord Smith of the Environment Agency, he can't control the weather. Any more than Lord Turner of the Financial Service Authority was able to control the credit cycle. Or Lord Rooker of the Food Standards Agency was able to control the food chain.

From flooded levels to tanked banks, public policy failure comes not because quangos control things, but because we presume that they can.

No central government quangocrats – no matter how worldly or wise – could gather enough information in any one place to know where to dredge to withstand every winter gale. Nor could they know precisely when to raise bank reserve ratios to withstand a financial one. Thus we eventually get overwhelmed.

For a generation or more, under successive governments, public policy has been handed to central quangos.

Sea defences, once left to district authorities and land owners, became a county responsibility. Then it became the responsibility of two or three Whitehall bodies. And finally in 1996 the preserve of just one, the Environment Agency. Has more land been reclaimed or abandoned to the sea since that process of centralised policymaking began?

It’s been a similar story for everything from financial service to food regulation.

"But at least these quangos are independent", I hear you say. "Instead of playing politics, the experts can just get on with it”.

Letting the experts get on with it never works out quite how we imagine.

With only experts running things, there’s no one around to ask those dumb, non-expert questions that need asking like: “why aren’t we dredging, like we used to?” Or “what happens if Northern Rock, which borrows short term to lend long term, couldn’t borrow for a while?”

Worse, leaving things to “experts” means that faddish ideas that excite such people become the basis on which wider public policy interests are decided. The public rarely has much say.

If you work for the Environment Agency, you might well believe in elevating the natural over and above the interests of the human. But does that mean that the rest of us really want “managed retreat”? After centuries of reclaiming land from the sea, are we to now prioritise salt marsh over farm land?

If you work at the Financial Service Authority you might well believe, like so many “expert” economists, that low interest rates are a cause of economic success. What happens if low rates are a consequence of economic success instead? What about the interests of savers?

If you run the Food Standards Agency, it is much easier to insist that every last sandwich shop in the land has a five star rating on its front door. Checking that those cottage pies aren’t really cheval pies seems a bit tedious.

Some have suggested that Lord Smith should resign. Replacing leftie Labour placement with Tory placemen will not solve the problem. Passing responsibility back to local government, and making government agencies properly accountable to Parliament, just might.

Britons 'too ignorant' for EU referendum: Top official says debate on Europe is so distorted that people could not make an 'informed decision'

Viviane Reding, vice-president of European Commission, made comments

Speaking in London, she said British people must know 'the facts' on EU

She boasted about how 70 per cent of UK's laws are now made in Brussels
Her comments were attacked by critics for 'dangerous' assumptions


By Jason Groves

PUBLISHED: 01:25, 11 February 2014 | UPDATED: 01:25, 11 February 2014


Britons are too ignorant about Europe to vote in a referendum on the subject, a top Brussels official claimed last night.


Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, said the British debate about Europe was so ‘distorted’ that people could not make an ‘informed decision’ about whether or not to stay in the EU.


Mrs Reding - who boasted that 70 per cent of the UK’s laws are now made in Brussels - also rubbished David Cameron’s bid to curb immigration from Europe, saying it was incompatible with membership of the EU.


Europe Minister David Lidington criticised her comments, saying that pro-EU points of view received a wide airing in the UK, including on the BBC.


He added: ‘It is very dangerous to start making assumptions about what makes someone qualified to cast a vote.’

Pawel Sidlicki, of the think tank Open Europe, said: ‘Mrs Reding epitomises the EU elites’ approach to dealing with the public -superficially embracing debate with citizens while dismissing any substantive criticism.



Full story here:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2556397/Britons-ignorant-EU-referendum-Top-official-says-debate-Europe-distorted-people-not-make-informed-decision.html#ixzz2syldG56h

Britons 'too ignorant' for EU referendum
sadly rather too close to the truth for comfort i'm afraid, but one could say exactly the same about them at a general elkection

Yes, that's right!


We're all thick...I mean, just look at the government we elected.

I thought it was the Cameroon firstly.

I cannot see the point of a EU referendum ....to me it's too late to change anything major....perhaps it would bring a better deal for the UK in terms of financing and immigration/border controls...but that's it....but asking the average Brit (including myself) about a referendum....answer : it's a pain in the arse !...also...what's this blinkin' Scottish independence nonsense....allegiance to the Queen and keep the pound but separate country.....doesn't sound right : it'll end in a shambles !...

Hadrians Wall is too low.
2517

Britains most hated??????

wasn't workfare a Noo Lab concept?

re: #36389


That's the problem rf, you cant change any of it.

GF.

Here is another beauty for you.

Imagine having her screeching at you all day!

The gruesome twosome. YUK.

Right required field..................... that article I promised you yesterday on Tory lies about the recession.

Labour really must refute constant Tory canard that Labour’s profligate spending caused the recession
February 2nd, 2014

Once more in this last week Cameron and Osborne have been at it again saying all Britain’s current troubles come from ‘profligate’ expenditure by the last Labour government. It is a straightforward lie. In Labour’s years in office before the financial crash in 2008 the highest deficit in real terms was 3.3% of GDP in 2004-5. If this is supposed to be a mark of ‘profligate expenditure’, why on earth doesn’t Labour point out every time this is raised that by that measure Tory governments have been much more profligate than the Labour government ever was. During the Thatcher/Major Tory years the deficit actually exceeded 3.3% of GDP in 10 out of those 18 years! If this is the measure of economic competence, then Labour comes out incomparably better than the Tories. Moreover, whilst Thatcher/Major ran deficits in 16 years out of their 18 and produced minor surpluses in only 2 years, Blair/Brown produced 4 years of surpluses. Nor are these facts just an academic matter. The Tory lies, ignoring these facts, are part of a relentless propaganda campaign to persuade the electorate that Labour wrecked the economy and is therefore ultimately responsible for all the austerity being imposed on the British people. It is not too much to say that if this enormous canard isn’t forcefully refuted, Labour could lose the election on a lie.

So if Labour didn’t wreck the economy, what did? It is too readily assumed it was the bankers’ bailout. In fact the buying of stakes in the banks (to the tune of £68bn) did not directly have an impact on the revenue budget and the deficit. What did have a huge impact on these was the dramatic drop in public tax revenues which was a direct result of the global financial crash and the consequent recession. In the 5-6 years leading up to 2007-8 there was a remarkably consistent straight line trend in public revenues of about 6% a year, i.e. real growth plus inflation. That public income in 2007-8 was £549bn. Based on this trend, any reasonable forecast would have predicted further increases in income in the next 2 years, leading to a predicted income of about £620bn in 2009-10. But as a direct result of the global financial crash and the consequent recession, actual public income was only £512bn in 2009-10.

That massive loss of public tax revenues of around £110bn was the key cause of the deficit, not excessive expenditure. The Tory sound-bites about ‘profligate expenditure’ before the crash are just fanciful inventions designed to undermine Labour’e economic credibility. A simple examination of the deficit figures each year in the decade to 2007-8 exposes them for what they are – a Goebbels-sized lie which needs to be stamped on and eradicated by every Labour spokesman, especially Ed Balls.

There is a new Populus poll out today which shows Labour’s lead over the Conservatives being cut to a mere 2%:

Conservative 34% (up 1%)

Labour 36% (no change)

Lib Dem 11% (up 2%)

UKIP 12% (down 3%)

well she's a huge improvement on having our resident pedagogue preaching at you all day

Hays labour only need 38% for an overall majority.