I’m still morbidly fascinated by the rate we’re inflicting involuntary euthanasia on our old people. When he opened the Independent yesterday, Osama bin Laden must have whistled with envy. Six and a half thousand. It’s a bodycount he can only dream of.

If he’s got any sense he’ll be ordering his footsoldiers to infiltrate hospital cleaning companies so Al Qaeda can grab themselves a slice of the action. These old people are dying needless, pointless deaths so somebody might as well try get some benefit out of them.

Are you watching China? Get back in your box, Vladimir Putin. Cool your jets, India. Britain is back on top:

Ten times as many elderly patients are killed by the hospital superbug Clostridium difficile in the UK than in any other country, a medical expert has claimed.

Can’t produce a politician, a football team or a manufacturing industry worth a damn but we can kill our old people LIKE NOBODY ELSE ON THE PLANET! UK! Bomaye! UK! Bomaye! UK! Bomaye!

Kids, be on the look out for fictional drugs. It can only be a matter of time before Cake reaches these shores.

Update: Yeah, ok. It was hardly original.

The ‘three pints and you’re out‘ rule:

Adults with children are only allowed two alcoholic drinks at JD Wetherspoon pubs in order to limit their stay, the chain has confirmed to the BBC.

Seems fair enough to me. If you had any respect for yourself or your children you wouldn’t be in Wetherspoons in the first place.

What made the panic over Northern Rock (if, as Chris says, it actually was a panic) so infectious was its high visibility. Wall to wall media coverage of people queuing around the block trying to get at their cash passed the virus quickly.

The visibility passed the panic on to the Government and it was this visibility that’s made Alistair Darling move as quickly and as comprehensively as he has, promising that the Government will underwrite all existing deposits with Northern Rock. Equitable Life policy holders and those losing their pensions when final salary schemes collapsed forgot to queue round the block, round the clock, on the box and so were told to go and swing.

It was hard to visualise these people losing their money or the pensions contributions they’ve been putting away for decades. So the Government capitalised on this failure of public imagination. The lesson to learn is that if you’re going to find yourself caught up in any kind of crisis, make sure you’re media savvy. Make yourself as visible as possible for as long as possible. Politicians won’t be shamed into action unless that humiliation is a very public one.

The PR ignorance seems to have been pretty comprehensive in this instance. If only Northern Rock had made their website operation more robust so people could transfer their money online there would have been fewer people queuing and less virulent panic. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost.

And has enough been done? Is the snap election back on? Chancellor Alistair Darling’s media appearances over the weekend were woeful and his assurances only served to fuel Northern Rock customer’s unease. But give him his due, at least he fronted up. Can anybody put their hand on their heart and imagine Gordon Brown - when he was Chancellor - going on the radio on a Sunday lunchtime to appeal for calm. You wouldn’t have bet your pension on it. Some understrapper would have got the gig.

But the new spin is in - Northern Rock customers, justifiably spooked, having the audacity to want their money, are now being painted as greedy, grasping and naive. Poor little put upon Northern Rock and Alistair Darling are merely the victims of circumstance, mugged an ungrateful public.

Seeing certain Tories up close as I have over recent months has given me an almost irresistible itch to vote Labour at the forthcoming local elections. I never thought I’d ever say that ever again.

But then I read this and this (update: and this) from Dr Crippen (via Mr E).

‘And Jesus wept’ is the phrase I think we’re looking for. Could the Tories in their vilest, most wildest dreams of villainy and degradation really be any worse?

As in all these many, many instances of contempt and incompetence displayed by our current masters, it’s worth looking for a useful analogy. Just how to explain why the British public haven’t risen up and grabbed their torches and pitchforks? Why the lack of outrage?

And then it hits me. We’re in a sado-masochistic relationship. The Government is the ‘top’ and we’re the ‘bottom’. We’ve taken so much humiliation that we’ve entered ‘subspace‘, a trance-like state making us tolerant of almost any kind of punishment.

Does anyone remember the safeword?

Update: The MTAS system has now been suspended. But don’t be fooled into thinking the reason for doing so was the Government’s fault:

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: “We have temporarily taken the MTAS website off-line and are investigating allegations that registered junior doctors could deliberately access each others messages.”

Look at the language. ‘Investigating’ ‘allegations’ ‘deliberately’. Those damned registered junior doctors. It’s good to know somebody’s on the ball, mind. Only the other day Tony Blair said he wouldn’t be ‘investigating’ ‘allegations’ that someone was ‘deliberately’ leaking information about anti-terrorism operations to the gutter press. If you’re a junior doctor desperate for a job, expect to be hunted down. If you’re a government adviser spewing to the tabloid, rest easy.

You see, the system wouldn’t need security if only those doctors would exercise some self-restraint and moral fibre. Why not disband the police and declare we expect people to not deliberately commit crimes? Or close the NHS and tell people we expect them not to deliberately get ill? The possibilities are endless and New Labour could pack it in and take up jobs to which they’d be more suited like shovelling shit in the Shetlands.

The phrase “The status quo is no longer an option” is reliably the leper’s bell of the modern managerial idiot. It is almost always wrong. Like Status Quo, the status quo is often vastly underrated simply because it is unfashionable. The great thing about the status quo is that it is not any worse than the status quo. Surprisingly few proposals for “radical and far reaching reform” can actually beat this standard. If any New Labour leadership candidates are looking for a Big Idea to carry the mission forward, could I suggest “stasis”?

read the rest…

2,099
People signing HP Sauce’s “Save the Proper British Cafe” petition.

1,638
People signing The Euston Manifesto.

* With apologies to Private Eye

More4 News has learnt that the security company Aegis is trying to close down the website which claims to show videos of Aegis employees firing at civilians in Iraq.

more…

Sorry to keep going on about the massive legacy of Government incompetence and profligacy with public money, but…

Silicon.com: National Insurance system costs double to £300m
The Inland Revenue’s national insurance computer system, funded through the controversial private finance initiative, has cost the government more than double the figure initially agreed.

The best bit? The contract to oversee the system has been taken away from Accenture and given to Capgemini of Foreign Office Prism cock-up fame.

…and…

Financial Director: NAO slams Whitehall over IT failures
It will take another 30 years before Whitehall can successfully deliver major IT projects unless fundamental changes are made, says a leading adviser to the National Audit Office (NAO) report on public sector efficiency.

Computing: Foreign Office Prism system problems revealed
Problems implementing the Foreign Office’s Prism computer system included incorrect programming that prevented 20 overseas posts, including British Embassies in Moscow and New Delhi, from using it.

On this occasion, it only cost us £53m to buy the lemon. Still, the culprits, Capgemini, should be added to the ever-expanding list of “service” “providers” it is fervently hoped are given some responsibility in bringing us the National Identity Register.

A full-on assault on the New Labour junta from just about all sides in the papers this Sunday. A veritiable bouillabaisse of bother. Some of the choicer forkfuls:

Yet another abysmal Government computer system turns up in the Sunday Times:

Wolf! Wolf! has been the motto of the National Farmers’ Union for so long that the British public can no longer tell a silo from a subsidy. Yet last week England’s 120,000 farmers had a legitimate grievance. They were stunned to be told that last year’s subsidy cheques are still not in the post. They may not get them for another month, if then.

Only 20% of cheques have been signed, partly because a £37m government computer has declared more than 95% of claims “unvalidated”. As a result some £3 billion cannot be released from the exchequer. Ministry phones go unanswered, forms are lost, banks are preparing to foreclose on overdrafts.

Simon Jenkin’s piece outlines the whole depressing litany - Hewitt’s choose-and-book system (costing anywhere between 6 billion and 50 billion), tax credits, the Child Support Agency, Prescott’s ‘£168m on “consultancy fees” involved in demolishing 150,000 houses in the north of England’, Capita’s turnover rocketing from £112m to £1.4 billion under this Government and how, under Blair, the UK government is now seen as the town bike of computer system procurement by the randy lads of big business. They haven’t brought any condoms with them and won’t hang around when the monthlies fail to arrive.

New Labour, it would seem, are a little coy about their behind-the-bus-shelter bunk-ups with Capita, according to the Telegraph:

The prime minister is refusing or delaying answers to Parliamentary questions about meetings between him, his ministers, his officials and Capita, the support services giant at the centre of the Labour loans scandal.

Still, as the saying goes: If they’ve nothing to hide, they’ve nothing to fear.

The Observer relates how the Home Office’s “narrative” into the July 7 bombings has discovered what most people have been saying for quite a while now:

Despite attempts by Downing Street to play down suggestions that the conflict has made Britain a target for terrorists, the Home Office inquiry into the deadliest terror attack on British soil has conceded that the bombers were inspired by UK foreign policy, principally the decision to invade Iraq.

Will “narratives” catch on, do you think? “A Government Narrative will try to establish the chain of events that led to the death of five year-old Jane Smith after her father was refused her asthma treatment drugs when ID card validation equipment failed at his local GP surgery” or similar?

Anyway, the narrative of this Government seems to be heading towards several possible endings, all of them unhappy. Although, even at this late hour, with family and friends gathered around the bed, it is able to produce one more thrash against the encroaching darkness - the launching of New Labour’s local election campaign.

One of those to the fore of the London campaign will be Jim Murphy, the minister responsible for the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill :

But the dramas, the soap operas, the comings and goings [at Westminster] - when people go to a ballot box it’s less important than their own life experiences.

Which sounds like the Iraqi information minister denying the presence of US troops in Baghdad just as the coalition tanks rolled into shot over his shoulder. That New Labour party can still produce a rising star is to be admired. But a bit like a soldier in the Wermacht being made a colonel in April 1945, does Murphy really think he’s going places under the current regime?

Lord Sainsbury “forgetting” the difference between a £2m loan and a £2m gift is just another insult to add to the Everest of evasions. What would be worse? That he is genuinely stupid enough to make such a mistake or that he is lying to the public? Or does it depend on what the meaning of “is” is?

Having said all that, we may wait a while for the barbarians to arrive to overthrow the failing empire. If the frankly useless David Cameron and his chinless, braying coterie that currently constitute the political opposition in this country are ever going to hit this cow’s arse, somebody is going to have to buy them a bigger banjo.

Update:

silicon.com: NHS IT delays cost Accenture $450m
The body in charge of the £6.2bn NHS IT project has called for “key personnel changes” at Accenture after the outsourcing company announced a $450m loss on its health service contracts due to delays in hitting delivery deadlines.

And more:

Sunday Times: Blunkett joins the ministers with a ‘black hole’ in their expenses

DAVID BLUNKETT and Jack Straw are the latest senior politicians to face questions over apparent “black holes” in their Commons expenses claims…

Six other cabinet ministers face questions including John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, Geoff Hoon, leader of the Commons, and Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, who all have apparent “black holes” of more than £40,000 in their expenses.

ITV News: Clarke ‘botches race figures’

Home Secretary Charles Clarke has been forced to withdraw new race crime statistics after it emerged they were riddled with errors.

As reported by the Press Association yesterday, the Home Office said racist incidents reported to Dorset Police had soared 556 per cent when the true figure was 56 per cent.

And these people want to control our lives. What next, David Blunkett for Parliamentary Ombudsman? Is there any other walk of life where this kind of idiocy wouldn’t get you fired or bankrupted? A cake shop boasting of selling 556 buns a day when actually it’s only selling 56 would be bust in a week, you would think.

To call this a schoolboy error is a gross insult to schoolboys. There are laboratory chimps who have been taught to process information more efficiently.

More news from the Home Office for those wondering whether ID cards will ever see the light of day:

BBC: Home Office accounts under fire

The National Audit Office said it had not had the evidence to form an opinion on the accounts for 2004/5, and there were fundamental problems with them.

…

There were such “such fundamental problems” with the Home Office’s accounts that he had to issue a “disclaimer of opinion” because of the lack of audit evidence needed to assess whether they were truthful and fair.

Without dwelling on the penalties that would be meted out to an individual who submitted such accounts (ie, severe), this is good news. On this evidence you couldn’t trust a Home Office official to go to the shop to buy you a newspaper and expect him to come back with the right change. And the reason for the shonky accounts? Yep, another sub-GCSE standard computer system.

Watching these clowns try and run an ID card system costing (before the inevitable overruns, revision of estimates and all the other expected incompetence) half a billion pounds a year is going to be spectacular. Pull up a chair.

An Observer investigation has found that the child health information system, introduced last summer as part of the government’s £7 billion IT programme, has derailed the country’s entire vaccination programme, leaving health staff resorting to slips of paper to work out who needs immunising. Several women whose babies were stillborn have received letters asking them to take their babies for their first vaccinations.

more…

So we’re in the big Tesco in Hove this morning picking up a few bits. In the store, they have those cashier-free cashier desks that allow you to scan your own shopping, feed your money into the machine and leave without so much as clapping eyes on a member of staff. All very convenient. All very “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

Except. Except. The computer system is of such glacial ponderousness, the bar code scanner is so temperamental, the touch screen that allows you to key in how many packets of lard and cans of budget lager you’re buying is so unsensitive, the “jolly” splosh! noise the machine makes when you scan an item is so ulcer inducing, that by the time I was feeding my twenty pound note into the machine - like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a test tube - I was on the verge of going Krakatoa. From soup to nuts the whole transaction took at least three times longer than if we’d gone to a human cashier and the stress it induced has probably shortened my life by considerably more.

And then realisation. Which didn’t help my temper. The machines aren’t there to make the customer’s shopping experience any more quicker, more easier, more pleasant or any less dispiriting or less soulless or less “In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward“. They’re there so Tesco doesn’t have to employ so many drones with all the overheads that that entails. It’s about buying yet more fur-trimmed solid jade commodes for the corpulent amoral shysters at the top of the tree.

I’d be tempted to try and comfort the rest of us by saying they can’t take it all with them when they’re finally dragged screaming to the new and exciting circle of Hell that’s currently being built for them*. But in my darker moments I think that they’ve probably worked out a way to do it. I bet when the likes of the chairman of Tesco or Digby Jones or Tony Blair or Polly Toynbee are inducted into The Greater Good, right after they’ve had their HIV/AIDS and bird flu vaccinations and been measured up for their jetpacks, they’re shown the teleport technology - powered, literally, by the sweat of the lower classes - that will allow them to send their wealth into the afterlife.

I think the reason nothing works in this country - trains always late, government computer systems always vastly overdue lemons, our troops dangerously and criminally undersupplied in battle, and the rest of the fourth-largest-economy-in-the-world-my-arse incompetence - is that the cream of the scientific community have been commandeered for the likes of building said teleporter or making Blair’s hair just the right shade of Statesman Grey or making Digby Jones look just that little bit less smug (you should have seen him before the £600m was spent).

Welcome to the 21st Century.

*The bastards have probably got a nice, fat, dripping slice of the PFI pillage being used to build it.

So, Charles Falconer, the UK’s foremost unelected flatmate sounds off on ID cards:

BBC News: ID cards ’should be compulsory’
Lord Falconer told BBC Radio Four’s Any Questions: “The question is should you require - and I think ultimately, unless there is compulsion, you won’t get the benefits of an ID card system - is it right to compel those that don’t have a passport also to get an ID card?

“I think it is, I think it will become inevitable that you need reliable means of identification, both to stop people stealing your identity, and also making it much, much easier for you to deal with the state.”

He neglects to mention it’s also to make it much easier for the state to deal with you.

New Labour should ditch ID cards and divert their energies into ensuring their Thousand Year Reich - play the long game. The rate at which they’re cataloguing our children means they’ll probably have most of the population on file within a couple of generations.

The Prime Minister was 24 carat on the subject of ID cards at Prime Minister’s Questions this week…

As for the calculations made by the LSE, I think that I am right that, although the report was put out under the LSE’s name, it was actually written by the leading campaigner against ID cards on the ground of civil liberties. So I do not think that it is an entirely objective assessment.

…showing all the self awareness of a man who’s main line of persuasion on war with Iraq reduced down to little more than “you’re going to have to trust me on this” and “it’s what I believe”. Still, playing the man, what a bastard trick, eh?

The reasons for having ID cards are ever narrowing. They won’t save anyone’s life for a start. But the Prime Minister is adamant that they will stop a new breed of “early 21st century” crime. It’s a disease and biometrics are the cure. Let’s see if we can spot what it is from his answers in the House this week:

Because if we introduce an ID card scheme and reduce identity fraud, that makes a major difference to the costs of Government and the costs of doing business. In today’s world, if we want to tackle illegal migration, crime and identity fraud, using the new biometric technology to have ID cards is an important part of doing so.

…and…

Why are ID cards so important now? Because we know, from all the available evidence, that identity fraud is on the increase—that is bound to happen in the modern world. Many people, including the former leader of the Conservative party, reached the conclusion that we need identity cards, and it is right to do that now because the biometric technology is coming in. Other countries are moving towards biometric passports and we will have to do that. The largest part of the cost of an identity card will be the biometric passport, which we must have. I assume that the right hon. Gentleman is in favour of the biometric passport; perhaps he could elucidate that—we know that his policy tends to shift a little quickly nowadays.

We need the identity card to fight crime, illegal migration and identity fraud in the early 21st century and the costs will be largely met by the biometric passport.

I love the “we need identity cards, and it is right to do that now because the biometric technology is coming in”. We can so we should. He’s like James Bond nemesis Blofeld and his plans for world domination. In the next Bond film, the villain will be a middle manager with a god complex promoted to his level of incompetence:

We need to blow up London, and it is right to do that now because the satellite made of diamonds is coming in.

And onwards…

With the greatest respect, he should think again about the matter. We will have to introduce biometric passports—I know that he agrees with that—and we will therefore have to make enormous changes in the years to come for the vast bulk of people who have passports. Identity fraud is also a major and growing problem. People throughout the world are moving towards identity card systems because they are necessary to tackle the problems of today’s world. Of course there is a cost to identity cards but there is a cost to identity fraud in so many different ways.

He does go on about it, doesn’t he? I hope it’s all to do with him desperately trying to sell a pup and not something more deep-seated and festering. Imagine him before a public appearance splashing cold water on his face and chanting “You are Tony Blair, you are Tony Blair, you are Tony Blair” into the mirror. His ID card could be a little mirror he takes everywhere. Some positive reinforcement that he isn’t just a uncomfortable grin and a thinning bouffant, a bucket into which business pours its interests.

Anyway. Identity fraud. It’s a problem. It would, of course, be less of a problem if the Government’s tax credit system wasn’t the “low hanging fruit” of the identity fraud racket.

BBC News: Tax credit fraud hits Job Centres
Up to 13,000 Job Centre staff may have had personal details stolen by criminals making fraudulent claims for tax credits.

…and…

BBC News: Treasury denies tax fraud ‘chaos’
The Treasury has denied a fraud carried out on thousands of Network Rail staff shows the tax system is in crisis.

The system gives nothing more than the impression of having been written for someone’s GCSE Computer Studies project.

So the solution is to sit another massively complicated computer system (with all the overruns, bugs, recriminations and budget bloat that that entails) over the top of the old, massively complicated computer systems, like a filthy rag on a weeping sore.

When I worked in IT, bugs and system crashes caused by programs we had written were know as “factoring in the overtime”. New programs and fixes had to be written and overnight callouts to fix system crashes were paid at double time. The ID Cards are merely this thinking factored up beyond the dreams of the avarice of an IT contractor.

Further to this, I thought I’d attempt to make my own contribution to Anti-Social Behaviour Czar Louise Casey’s webchat this afternoon. I thought keeping it civil was the best approach:

Louise, nobody would deny that something must be done about anti-social behaviour. But I am concerned about the increase in summary powers that, it is proposed, will be given to the police. If an innocent person is wrongly punished under these summary powers, surely this will foster a feeling of resentment rather than respect for authority? Also, a person on low income (innocent or not) may find themselves in real difficulties, particularly if they have family, if forced to pay a spot penalty. Do we not risk making the poor poorer and more desperate?

If other people have a go as well, we could offer a special prize - a rosey glow of self-satisfaction at having struck a blow for webocracy, participated in a shiny new future and accepted that the respect agenda is not driven forward by gimmicks, perhaps - to anyone actually getting their question answered.

A holiday in the Seychelles for anybody getting a straight, satisfactory answer.

UPDATE: Well, we knew it was going to be a big pile of vetted astroturf but this bad? (The transcript is still up for any other self-harmers out there.) You know things are going to be pretty abject when the woman who’s supposed to be conducting a webchat about respect turns up a full 20 minutes late.

Kudos to the number of Daily Mail readers who conquered their fear of the modern age in order to submit questions to an interweb chat though. And hearty congratulations to our boy Backword Dave Weeden who actually had a question answered (of a fashion). Salut!

So, critics of Gordon Brown’s “Britishness Day” headline grabber didn’t so much shoot the fish in that particular barrel as take an anti-tank weapon to them. As Gordon picked the sushi and splinters of wood out of his porridge this morning, he must have wondered what the hell’s gone wrong. Are the fish getting larger, the barrels smaller or the marksmen sharper?

A few years ago I lived in Staines underneath the Heathrow flightpath. For the first few weeks it was hell as seemingly every few minutes a jet would roar past. But slowly I acclimatised until one day I realised I hardly notice the noise at all any more.

I wonder if that’s what’s happening with New Labour initiatives. Other than those with blogs and newspaper columns to fill, who gawp at these things wondering how the hell they stay up, who’s really paying attention to Brown wrapping himself in the flag or Blair barking, “you have 20 seconds to comply“? Most people busily get on with their lives while yet another focus-grouped idiocy screams over their heads.

Does anybody wake in the night, fretting about what it is to be British? Aren’t we more likely to crawl from bed in the morning sagging under the crushing melancholy of the thought our crap jobs, or our roaring hangovers, or the nagging purposelessness that is our post-millenium existence than whether there are enough union flags fluttering in the breeze? Brown, if anything, is to be envied because if this really is close to the top of his agenda he must be just about as carefree as it’s possible to get.

Did he really stand at the Cenotaph last November and think, “what this rememberance of all those young men who were shot, bombed, shrapneled and bayonetted needs is the sight of a large black lady dancing with a policeman and wearing his helmet, or maybe a bunch of Chelsea Pensioners jigging arythmically with Girls Aloud”?

I was over in Australia and everyone’s like “Are you proud to be an American?” And I was like, “Um, I don’t know, I didn’t have a lot to do with it. You know, my parents fucked there, that’s about all. You know, I was in the spirit realm at that time, going ‘FUCK IN PARIS! FUCK IN PARIS!’ but they couldn’t hear me, because I didn’t have a mouth. I was a spirit without lungs or a mouth, or vocal cords. They fucked here. Okay, I’m proud.’”
Bill Hicks

And as Roger McGough said, patriots are a bit nuts in the head. It’s all down to an accident of birth, after all. Brown’s idea is like calling for a day of celebration for being white or male or having two ears - inherently ridiculous - and if he’d picked any other concept, he’d have been laughed out and/or lynched:

You must have a clear view of what being a brunette means, what you value about being a brunette and what gives us purpose as brunettes.

Why pundits speculate over whether the handover from Blair to Brown will be a “smooth transtion”, I’m not quite sure. If Brown’s speech is anything to go by, we won’t be able to see the join:

[W]e have no constitutional statement or declaration enshrining our objectives as a country; no mission statement defining purpose; and no explicitly stated vision of our future.

Mission statement. As pleased as I’d be to see a written constitution for the UK I think we can be certain that no one with even an ounce of romance in their souls would be allowed within a hundred miles of the drafting process.

Brown’s brainchild should certainly keep the honours system ticking as well:

I am meeting all faith groups to discuss community service. And shortly I will meet business organisations.

And I thank businesses who have already signed up as pioneer sponsors for this idea and today I invite and urge businesses to match fund £100 million – £50 million each from government and business – for long-term funding for this new idea.

I wonder how many peerages, knighthoods and C/M/OBE’s £50 million buys.

I downloaded and printed off New Labour’s Respect Action Plan planning to give it a right old bollocking. To be honest, I’m now regretting the loss of the paper and electricity used to do so. I wonder if it’s worthy of my time or yours.

The whole thing is peppered with nuggets of the most excruciating management-speak - “The Only Person Who Can Start The Cycle Of Respect Is You”, “The Future Depends On Unlocking The Positive Potential Of Young People”, “The Foundation Of Our Future Is Our Young”, and my personal favourite, “Everyone Is Part Of Everyone Else”. I mean, what happened? Did the fortune cookie industry go tits-up and New Labour take up the slack? All it needs is “Take A Swim In Lake You” and the true cringing horror would be complete.

From the outset, the document doesn’t say who it’s targeted at. Journalists? The poor work experience kids are the only ones who’ve read it, feverishly précising it in between doing the photocopying. Joe Public? Who has the time to read twenty-odd pages of tightly-spaced text? Me, if I’m honest, but I resent the monopoly on my time. I started reading it but couldn’t escape the feeling I was the victim of some kind of elaborate hoax or plot to divert me from more important matters. I checked the last page just to make sure it didn’t say “Congratulations on making it to the end, sucker. Did you know that ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary?” Maybe the plan is to eradicate anti-social behaviour by making every child in the country read the damn thing. There’s no executive summary either - they want you to read every single word.

Admittedly, the printed document does drop onto a table with a satisfying thump. No doubt Tony and the rest will look impressive when it they bang it down at the next brainstorming session.

In his “Prime Minister’s Foreword” to the document, Blair says:

If we are to achieve the vision of the Britain that we all want, then there is no room for cynicism.

The trouble of is, after nearly nine years of dossiers, initiatives, war, evasion, obfuscation and downright lies, cynicism must be hard wired into the psyches of half of the newspaper reading public. For me, at least, pure opposition to this shower is becoming a pavlovian response. I found myself thinking, “Did he write this himself? If he didn’t then it’s a lie to call it the ‘Prime Minister’s Foreword’, isn’t it?” I think I may be ill.

On page 3, in the “Summary: A Modern Culture of Respect”, it says:

We are not starting from scratch. Since 1997 over 700,000 fewer children live in poverty, over two million more people are in work, educational attainment has improved at all key stages, the number of people sleeping rough has fallen by 70%, there have been reductions in crime and fear of crime, hospital waiting times are down and there are signs that the gap is narrowing between our most deprived communities and the rest.

To which the reply has to be: prove it. Show your working. Where are the footnotes and figures? If a student or researcher were to write the same paragraph in a dissertation or report without supporting data, they’d get hammered but we’re still supposed to take this from Trust me Tony on the nod. Hasn’t the government learned that there are many (journalists aside, naturally) who don’t take this stuff at face value any more? We’ve been 45 minutes from doom too many times.

And “there are signs that the gap is narrowing between our most deprived communities and the rest” is so vague as to be practically meaningless. Is the gap narrowing up or narrowing down?

At the bottom of the same page comes:

There are significant resources in programmes supporting the Respect drive, including £155 million neighbourhood element of the Safer Stronger Communities Fund; £45 million additional resources for the Youth Justice Board and £140 million resources for the Single Non-Emergency Number.

In addition we will invest up to £80 million of new resources over two years.

That’s just £80 million of new money for the next two years with no word of what happens after that. That only buys you half a Bloody Sunday Inquiry, for God’s sake. So much for investing in the future.

Needless to say, the rest of the document is safely short on detail - nobody’s going to lose their jobs if these vague promises (if that’s what you can call them) aren’t kept. It’s also true to say that as well as little new money there are few new ideas in the document. The Safer Stronger Communities Fund? Announced April 2005. The Youth Justice Board? In existence since 1999. How many crackdowns on truancy have we had since 1997?

As to where the evicting anti-social families from their homes for three months and leaving them to fend for themselves - that everybody’s gone tonto over today - came from, well, it’s certainly not in the Respect Action Plan. The earliest reference to it I can find is - surprise, surprise - in an interview with the Prime Minister in The Sun on January 5:

Blair: I’ll boot out louts
NEIGHBOURS from hell are to be EVICTED and left to fend for themselves in a crackdown on yobs planned by Tony Blair.

Obviously, Blair doesn’t actually say in the interview, “I’m going to evict people for three months” - he’s not stupid enough to say anything directly attributable. Others in the media dutifully picked up the story almost verbatim: here, here. By the time the idea reached the Independent yesterday, all mention of The Sun interview had gone. Blair didn’t mention three month evictions in his launch speech today either (transcript here). It seems, and I’d be happy to be put straight, that this idea emerged from the single unattributed source. To, you know, try and make Tony look like a hard bastard for the new year.

(Incidentally, Blair’s speech ideally needs a post of its own, particularly with regard to his his dangerous love of summary justice. His recurring, “we’re fighting 21st century crimes with 19th century methods” schtick is just bizarre, as if theft, graffiti and drug addiction appeared on the stroke of midnight December 31 1999. Somebody blogged this in a fine fashion a while back but I’m damned if I can find the link. UPDATE: It was Chris.)

The nearest the plan comes to mentioning evictions is after the fact, on page 23:

ACTION: Consider sanctions for households evicted for anti-social behaviour who refuse help
One option would be to introduce sanctions for those people who have been evicted for anti-social behaviour and then refuse to take up offers of help. Sanctions could include financial penalties or housing benefit measures.

We’ve heard this before. “Welfare disincentives” were mentioned last May after the election when New Labour had a bee in its bonnet about hoodies. We’re still waiting for an explanation of how making poor people poorer drives them away from criminality and anti-social behaviour.

Blair has called for a “genuine intellectual debate” on this issue. Who is supposed to be having this debate, what its formal parameters are, or where it’s to take place he doesn’t say. I’d argue it’s also nigh on impossible to have a debate about this because there’s no way of knowing what elements are merely kite flying and never to be heard of again. Much was made last year (especially by me) of the Delivering Choosing Health initiative to get children fitter and healthier via the use of matrons and pedometers. Try as I might, I can’t find any recent reference to this initiative anywhere, nor of matrons and pedometers.

Similarly, I’ll believe people are to be evicted from their homes when it happens. I’m prepared to admit that there might be some good stuff in the plan but all the so-called eye-catching stuff obscures any gold nuggets that may be in there.

I could go on but I’ve already devoted much more time than we both have. We’ve both wasted precious moments we’ll never get back. To continue would be like having a drunken office bunk-up. It might be a good idea right now but would we, you know, respect each other in the morning?

UPDATE 11/01: “Hey presto, you can now take Tony Blair around in the comfort of your trouser pocket to listen to at your leisure.”

Sorry if you’re eating. You can now hear Tony Blair extol his masterplan and exhort Sun readers to “Shop A Yob”* on The Sun’s “history-making” (in the sense that only Charles Kennedy and David Cameron have done it before) podcast. It’s also historic in being the softest interview by a so-called independent journalist ever committed to the records. It manages to smash the previous record set by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer only last Sunday which had set the bar incredibly high. George Pascoe-Watson sounds like a simpering, starry-eyed party hack permitted to join a brainstorming session. I urge you to listen for the full edifying spectacle.

Blair does mention evicting families here although, needless to say, there’s no detail as to how these families are supposed to live once they’re out on the streets and left to fend for themselves. He also talks about confiscating the assets of “suspected” drug dealers with “flash cars”. It looks like black men can look forward to a few more years of, “is this car yours, sir?”.

There was no mention of Hobbes’ Leviathan though, as there was in his speech yesterday. Why not?

*How about this yob, for starters?

UPDATE (again): I will stop banging on about this soon - having belatedly realised that the real story here in the unsettling increase in summary justice that Blair wants to introduce - but this whole thing about evicting people has got me suspicious. Both The Independent and The Telegraph (who mention the unattributed three months again) talk about such families being placed in “Sin Bins” but something doesn’t join up and I wonder if there’s a mutually beneficial fiction being cooked up by the media and the Government - the media get a good story and the Government get to look tough. The principle here is that the public are being sold a line that I’m not sure exists and I doubt this is an isolated incident. This is probably a minority sport for conspiracy theorists only, but anyway…

ANOTHER UPDATE: The case for the defence. Take a deep breath.

It terms of low level punishment for low level crimes, it is BETTER to punish the innocent than to let the guilty go free.

Being innocent and getting a 100 pound fine is not the end of the world.

Maybe not to him. But to others it’s the difference between eating and not.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:

That’s a pure expression of the authoritarian mind. Spraying grafitti on a wall or demonstrating in Parliament Square: it all boils down to cynicism – a refusal to be harmonious. And just as demonstrating peasants are jailed for disturbing social order in China, demonstrators in Parliament Square are arrested under the Serious Organized Crime act.

Excellent, sobering stuff from Jamie K.

AND THERE’S MORE:

The policy implications are ignored: not Blair’s “Neighbourhood Renewal‿ or “the New Deal for Communities‿, surely, but straightforward redistributive taxation. The dirty word of noughties politics. Could it be true? That the PM suspects the answer to this drip-drip of low-level criminality and disengagement just maybe lies somewhere in the gross and increasing maldistribution of wealth and power? That he isn’t bold enough to do anything about it?

Excellent, philosophical stuff from Jarndyce.

Going in:

The Guardian: Bush pulls the plug on Iraq reconstruction
The Bush administration has scaled back its ambitions to rebuild Iraq from the devastation wrought by war and dictatorship and does not intend to seek new funds for reconstruction, it emerged yesterday.

Coming out:

Reuters: U.S. sees more Iraq fuel price rises, privatisation
BAGHDAD, Jan 4 (Reuters) - U.S. officials expect Iraq to make further cuts in subsidies that will generate more unpopular fuel price increases this year, and are also urging the new government to make a quick start on privatisation.

Translation: That’s your lot, pass the the gravy.