Scotland has set up an official inquiry into why its new Parliament Building in Holyrood is 10 times over budget and 2 years late. Why bother? This is just the norm for public-sector projects. Westminster's grand Parliament Building was three times over budget and 24 years late!

Here's how to make sure any project follows this great ignoble tradition:

1. Hold a competition. Then the world's leading architects will enter their most eye-popping design concepts, just to gain the publicity. Eye-popping, but impractical.

2. Appoint important public figures to judge it. They don't know anything about building costs, so will choose the most spectacular of the impractical designs. Ideally, get them to choose one by an architect from a dry country, who has had rainwater described to him but has never actually seen any.

3. Don't consult any builders about things you might do to make the design work, just put it out to public tender. Each firm will then put in ridiculously low bids just to get the contract, knowing that they can charge for cost over-runs later.

4. Fix an early opening date with the Queen. Then everything has to be rushed to make things ready, the builders are on round-the-clock overtime, things go wrong and even more workers are needed to fix them.

Simple, isn't it? Alternatively you could just rent cheap and efficient space from the private sector, but that wouldn't get you a K, would it?

A few years back, I got to the Post Office just before 5:30pm, the closing time. I handed over my package which I wanted to arrive quickly. But they refused to take it, pointing out that the frank had the previous day's date on it. (For American readers, a frank is what postage machines print.)

What did it matter if the frank had the wrong date on it? I was still paying them for delivering the parcel. I offered to change the date with a pen. They said they still couldn't accept it. They would get into trouble with management if they accepted it. I would have to go away and print the date again on the machine, by which time the Post Office would be closed.

What private sector firm would survive by rejecting custom for such a trivial reason? Why wasn't management pushing the staff to sell more, rather than to be more anti-customer?

I'm reminded of this because of the problems faced by lots of Londoners this week caused by postal service staff being on strike. I can't wait for real postal competition which Postcomm, the regulator, is planning for 2007. Then we'll be able to reject bureaucratic, producer-centred postal companies, and go with the ones that really want our custom.

We've been speculating what kind of team Britain's Tories might put together. This is our first effort, but we welcome suggestions and comments.

Prime Minister - Michael Howard
Foreign Secretary - Dave Davis

Chancellor - John Redwood
Home Office - Oliver Letwin
Party Chairman - Eleanor Laing
Deputy Prime Minister - William Hague
Defence - Iain Duncan Smith
Environment - Francis Maude
Education - Lord Woodhead
Transport - Bernard Jenkin
Trade & Inward Investment - John Whittingdale
Health - David Willetts
Culture, Media & the Arts - Michael Portillo
Welfare & Pensions - David Trimble
Attorney General - Bill Cash
Lord Chancellor - Lord Rifkind
Lords Leader - Baroness Hogg
Commons Leader - John Bercow
International Development - Baroness Cox
Local Govt & Regions - Tim Yeo
Wales - Nigel Evans
N Ireland - Tim Collins
Scotland - Lord Forsyth

This seems quite a strong team. Their opposite numbers in government are by no means as talented, outside of the few obvious celebrities. Could this be a winning team?

Armed police in Westminster. Not an unusual sight at all. But passing one the other day made me and my colleague, Dr Madsen Pirie, reflect on how quickly things had changed in Britain - which once prided itself on having a police force that did not need to be armed with anything more dangerous than a whistle. Without any great national debate, we now have an armed constabulary.

Sure, Westminster is full of terrorist targets. But I can see why coppers everywhere else feel the need to be armed too. The latest "International Comparisons of Criminal Justice Statistcs" show that Britain now has the worst record in Western Europe for killings, violence and burglary.

In 2001, UK police recorded 870,000 violent crimes, far more than the next worst, France, at 279,000, and nearly five times Germany's 188,000. Burglaries, at 470,000, were again well ahead of France (210,000) and Germany (133,000).

You can probably suggest reasons why things have got so bad. I can think of several possibilities - and they start with a state-monopoly school system that is no longer prepared to instill in kids that some ways of living are simply wrong, because - as we are now discovering to our cost - they are socially pathological. Insist on parental responsibility and, through parental choice and competitive supply, put parents back in charge of education: that, I think, would have more long-term effect on crime than any number of razzmatazz government "initiatives".

Diane Abbott - the very left-wing member of parliament - used to be a vocal opponent of choice in education. She attacked Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for sending their children to selective state schools. Harman's choice of school, she said, made the Labour Party "look as if we do one thing and say another."

Now, faced with the question of what to do about her own son, she has decided to send him to a private, fee-paying school.

Has she turned into a believer in school choice?

One of today's lead stories on TV and Radio is that Britain's official Commission for Health Improvement is to poll everyone who works in the National Health Service (that's about a million people), asking about the state of their morale and what they think about their conditions of work.

I think it's headline news because nothing like it has ever happened before in the 50-plus years the NHS has existed.

Frankly, if the Human Resources department of any big private-sector company didn't know the mind of its employees - not just from half-century to half-century, but from year to year, month to month and even day to day - they'd quickly find themselves overtaken by competitors who did.

It just shows how lax this public monopoly has become. And it's why the NHS spends so much money buying in temporary 'agency' nurses - because it can't organize its work schedules to fit in with the needs of nurses with families, who can only work odd part-time schedules. The organization is too lumbering to think about the needs of its main asset - its personnel.

It's the same in state education. I know a company who took over the management of a failing state school. The first thing they did was to interview all the teachers, to ask what their hopes, ambitions, and career goals were. Some started weeping: they'd never been asked that before!

Somehow I managed to escape school without reading Lord of the Flies. I've just watched the 1963 film version, which I think is great. The hero of the story, Ralph, gets voted as leader of a group of children who are deserted on an island. He stands for decency, friendship, and loyalty. He's one of the people in this world who will talk to anyone, the sort who at parties aren't constantly looking around the room trying to find someone more important to speak to. A thoroughly decent chap. But his downside is that he is too authoritarian. His emphasis on rules stands in the way of the children having fun. Ralph seems to be an authoritarian Tory.

Most of the children are lured by Jack, who says "Bollocks to the rules!" and promises them utopia for all by joining his 'tribe'. But Jack's utopia soon becomes much more oppressive than Ralph's Toryism. Instead of being a more egalitarian, less top-down society, it becomes a dictatorship, with children being beaten, and people staying with Jack out of fear. It quickly turns murderous. Jack, for all his progressive-sounding speech, is even more authoritarian than Ralph.

If both models - Ralph's and Jack's - are flawed, is there a better way? Well, yes. It is a free society. Free societies let individuals make choices about their lives. The power of politicians to tell people what to do is limited (either by constitution, or by precedent and culture). But free societies rely on impartial institutions like the police and the legal system to protect the rights of individuals. Only a combination of freedom and the rule of law provide a truly progressive society.

When I learned French as a schoolboy I was struck by the way they didn't pronounce the consonants. A word such as aiment is pronounced merely as 'em.' Ils jouaient (they played) is pronounced 'eel zhew-eh.' (Connoisseurs might note all of the 5 vowels next to each other. Can anyone name an English word in which this happens?)

Naturally we all felt slightly superior to the French who wasted all of those consonants and quite a lot of vowels. Not any more. As I listen to the English language as spoken in England, still perhaps the world's third source of English after America and India, I notice how like French it is becoming. I don't mean its incorporation of words such as 'souvenir,' which is English for le keepsake. I refer to its pronunciation.

The various class and regional accents have been bowled over like ninepins (US readers should note these are like ten pins). The conqueror has been Estuary English, in which consonants are dropped to affect ordinary parlance, and to avoid 'talking posh.' One of its characteristics is the use of the glottal stop to elide consonants. It becomes 'glo'al' stop in Estuary English. Butter becomes 'ba'a,' and so on.

People from privileged backgrounds and expensive schools affect Estuary English to avoid standing out. Indeed, where once people took speech classes to make them sound more refined and educated, now they attend them to dumb down their speech.

I suppose it is part of England becoming a society where class and background matter less than ever before. With such a cultural melting pot, I suppose it is an advantage to have a unifying language which everyone can learn. Especially since English is now the world's lingua franca. And even if it does sound awfully French with its willful disregard for so many letters, it does have the advantage of being incomprehensible to foreigners, including the French.

Ross Clark writes in The Spectator that - contrary to the claims made by environmentalist interest groups - the science is on the side of GM foods.

The field of medicine is constantly changing through innovation. In turn this innovation has been exploited through profit-making ventures that lead to re-investment and more innovation. Unfortunately this has only been the case in universities and private medical facilities. Until now. As of last year patent rules for the NHS have been loosened, allowing NHS bodies and hospital trusts to invest in private ventures which market and research innovations developed within the NHS.

The positive points of this policy are obvious. The NHS will be given an opportunity to profit from its medical research and give doctors more of an incentive to come up with new ideas. Unfortunately, extra revenue for Britain's ailing public healthcare system will not fix the inherent flaws of socialized healthcare. To make matters worse the NHS research budget is only £343 million, an amount that needs to grow if there is to be any benefit to the NHS.

Opponents of the policy have taken a moral stance against the patenting of medical procedures and technology. The argument is that charging people royalties to use these innovations increases the cost of healthcare and negatively impacts its patients. The reality is that healthcare will always be expensive whether patents are involved or not. The injection of these free-market principles into the NHS will increase the rate of innovation and help achieve the quintessential goal of healthcare; treating individuals in the best way possible and improving and saving lives.

Watching Disney's latest animated blockbuster, Finding Nemo, I was struck by the subtext of the film. On the face of it, the film seems to be a typically innocent Disney adventure, in this case featuring the trials of a neurotic clownfish as he combs the oceans looking for his lost son. However, beneath this façade lurks a distinctly political agenda.

The leading fish, for example, is a single parent father, and his son is disabled with a stunted fin. A young seahorse has an intolerance to water. At the coral reef playground, all the anxious parents are male, with no women in sight. The male turtles are responsible for childcare. Even the sharks are struggling to become vegetarian.

Should we be worried by this obvious attempt by the American entertainment industry to brainwash children into believing this kind of post-modern disingenuousness? Are children being conditioned at an early age by the media to view political correctness as an unassailable secular truth? Are we setting them up for a fall in later life?

I don't think we should be too alarmed. In the playground, the highs and lows of adult life are played out in microcosm. Children are hard-wired to be competitive. They are sometimes nasty, but they learn human interaction, awareness and tolerance. This is all perfectly natural, and part of the process of growing up. It's going to take a hell of a lot more films about fish being nice to each other to change this biological fact.

Borders come in for a lot of stick these days, but they do some good. I like being able to go across from the UK to France to buy stuff, including drink, at lower prices and rates of duty. I really like being able to cross the Oresund Bridge between Denmark & Sweden and buying in each country what costs more in the other.

In the US I like to cross state lines to go for the lower sales taxes and duties. It is reckoned that 'leakage' (cross border shopping) will be a significant factor if there is a 3 percentage point tax differential. And it's not only competition in sales and purchase taxes which works. I love French food and wine, and the priority they are given, but I don't feel the same way about their income tax and social insurance. The Danes do pickled fish on rye bread superbly, but there's no way I want to pay Danish taxes. I enjoy the Swedish forests and lakes, but not their government.

Borders let me enjoy the best of each country, while being able to avoid the worst. Beware of Eurocrats speaking with forked tongue about tax harmonization. It's tax competition we want.

One of the criticisms levied at the free-market is that it leads to an "I want it now!" society. Everyone is too demanding and expects everything done straight away. Our rampant consumerism is destroying the environment. Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a slower, less stressful society?

Well, no. I rather like shops being open on Sundays, same day deliveries, and companies resolving problems quickly. I love sending documents instantaneously across the world by e-mail and watching 24-hour TV news. Consumerism lets us make more choices and puts us, rather than bureaucrats, in control of our lives. Yes, we may live in a more stressful society, but I'd prefer that to a more backward, less dynamic society.

As for the allegation that consumerism is destroying the environment, the reality is a little different. Consumerism acts as the great preserver because it prices scarcity. As a natural resource starts to run out, the price goes up, giving incentives to develop more efficient technologies or switch to cheaper forms of production. And as countries get richer, people value the quality of the environment more. That is why London's air is cleaner today that at any point since 1585. Similar results can be found in developed countries all over the world. On most measures, the environment is getting better.

The "I want it now!" society, though widely attacked by social scientists, is far from being a vice.

Well, bravo! The UK government says it's undertaking the biggest review of the legal profession for years. About time this dusty, state-run, state-supported, state-featherbedded nationalized industry got a firework down its gaiters. Like all government monopolies, it's hugely old-fashioned, wildly inefficient, incredibly costly, and run for the convenience of its providers rather than the public who have to use it.

But oh, no! The first news item I read on this says that the government thinks a new regulatory agency might be needed. Oflaw, as it's being called.

We don't need more regulation of the justice system. That's the problem, not the solution. We need more competition. We need new people to come in and run courts and arbitration in completely new ways that are quicker, cheaper, more reliable, more accessible. Yes, even competing to run courts. And as we said in our report Silk Cut, we need to kill off the lawyers' cosy professional closed shops and let new people and new ideas in, so people have a real choice over who represents them. Then at last people might just get rapid access to justice at a price they can afford.

There are reports that police are so preoccupied with targets that they have little time left to deal with crime. They have quotas for speeding fines and motoring offences. They seem more anxious to pursue the middle classes who don't fight back than the rather more aggressive muggers and rapists.

We did a poll with MORI and discovered that the public's priorities are very different from those the police devote resources to. The police ones are of the easy to do and easy to record variety. What the public wants is a safer and quieter life.

The problem is that the police are reaching the stage where they are regarded as the enemy. Most people's encounter with them is not seeing them catch muggers and rapists, or bringing burglars to justice. It is after a motoring offence, and is breeding a new spirit of disrespect for the law.

Maybe part of the answer is to take police out of motoring altogether, and use upgraded traffic wardens instead. This would free huge numbers of police to concentrate on the crimes which people think matter.

To us in the UK, it came as a shock when, a week ago, HSBC Bank said it was transferring 4000 back-office jobs to India, China and Malaysia. We're used to manufacturing jobs going abroad - nobody batted an eyelid when inventor James Dyson moved his washing-machine factory from Malmesbury to Malaysia.

But for years, we've been telling ourselves we're good at services. So why are we suddenly losing them too?

Simple. We've priced ourselves out of back-office jobs which - thanks to plummeting IT and telecoms costs - can be located anywhere in the world.

Five years ago, the UK was business investors' favourite location. Now that is no longer true. Taxes in the UK are rising faster than anywhere in the EU, and business now faces a raft of costly new regulations such as the minimum wage, the working time directive, parental leave and the part-time workers directives. Worthy, maybe - but expensive.

And let's face it, many of the jobs we're mourning only existed because governments threw subsidies at them. Why are so many of the threatened jobs in Wales or Scotland? Because the UK and the EU has long subsidized firms to go to Wales and Scotland. But it never works in the long run - not with steelmaking, nor with microchips. Now we're realizing that it doesn't work with call-centres either.

It’s a big and competitive world out there. The only sustainable strategy for the long term is to cut your costs - and move on.

Here at the ASI, we're busier than we've ever been. We could easily have five times as many people on the payroll and still be sweating blood. But we're a lean organisation, with a limited budget. Instead of massively increasing the headcount, we prioritise on what's important, think up ways of being more efficient, and use new technology to increase our productivity.

The problem with the civil service is that there is little incentive for it to be efficient. Last year, its headcount increased by 4.5%. I doubt that many of these new civil servants are lazy, sitting in offices all day drinking sherry. They're hard at work. But do we really need them? An extra 7000 were taken on by the Inland Revenue, mainly to work on tax credits. Of course, civil service management and unions love tax credits, because it enables them to employ more people.

What if the government had implemented a policy of cutting each department's head count by 5% each year? The civil service would have been sick all over the tax credit policy. It would have pressured the government into doing something less complicated, like saying that people shouldn't pay income tax for their first £10,000 in earnings. Leaner government and better government go together.

Recent field trials in the UK have shown that (surprise, surprise), GM crops that are designed to resist weeds do precisely that. The trouble is, there then aren't enough weeds and seeds for various birds and caterpillars to feed on. So this is seen as a great failure, and the eco-fascists want no more GM crops, nor even testing.

But how is it a failure when a crop does exactly what it's supposed to do? On the contrary, more efficient crops are good news. Good news for humans (including those in the poorest countries) who need food, and for the farmers who grow it.

And even the environmental issues are not exactly one-sided. It may be bad news for moths and skylarks, but it's good news for everyone concerned about the use of chemical herbicides in agriculture - and what they might do when the leach into our watercourses.

I think these trials are even good news for GM itself. By manipulating a single gene, the natural herbicide in the crops can be tweaked up or down to whatever level seems to bring the best environmental balance. Much quicker, easier - and safer - than with conventional breeding, which manipulates hundreds of different genes all at once, with much less certain results.

If we are going to feed ourselves, and save others in the world from crop failures and starvation, GM is a technology we need to embrace.

Milton Friedman said that the government solution to a problem is usually worse than the problem. It's certainly true in the area of unsolicited e-mail. There are two government approaches being advocated, neither of which will work.

The better of the two approaches is to make spam-sending illegal, and make it easier to sue spammers. The European Union has tried to do this with a directive that comes into effect this month. But it is problematic because, as Spiked has pointed out, it defines spam so broadly that some legitimate e-mail is technically illegal. The EU says that common sense will prevail in how it will be enforced. However, it is unlikely that the law will make much difference to the amount of spam received by people anyway as it only applies to senders in the EU.

The second approach is to have a tax, or some form of fee, for every e-mail sent. Quite correctly, those who advocate this recognise that if spammers had to pay even a few pence for every e-mail, they'd soon give up. The problem is that spammers would never have to pay. Spammers mainly rely on hijacking other people's servers and increasingly using computer viruses. The victims would be the people paying - both those whose servers get abused, and the end user who now has to pay per e-mail. I'd prefer to receive spam than pay for each e-mail I send. Besides, it wouldn't work unless it were implemented globally, and that just isn't going to happen.

Essentially, government solutions to spam either don't work, or make things worse. So what do we do? Well, the market is already making huge steps to solve the problem. I used to get 40 spams a day. Now I get five a week. My e-mail provider runs SpamAssassin, a very good filter program, on its servers. And filtering technology, along with other anti-spam technologies, is getting better. Technology, not the government, is the answer.

Apparently (says Hamish Macrae in the Independent newspaper), the Treasury is very worried that the UK economy seems to be doing OK but tax revenues aren't rising as quickly as they were hoping for. "Where have all the tax revenues gone?" they wail.

Well, we taxpayers think that's a darn cheeky question. This government has raised the total tax take from £360bn to nearly £500bn in just six years. That's an extra £4000 for every household. Tax Freedom Day is now two weeks later than it was when they took office - that's how much longer we have to work just to pay tax.

The UK used to be a low-tax economy. Now, as a ASI think piece showed, taxes are rising faster than anywhere in the EU. Britain used to be top in attracting foreign investment. Now businesses are going elsewhere - along with the profits, jobs, and taxes which they produce.

And here's Gordon Brown in the papers this week, talking about his ambition of making Britain an 'enterprise economy'. The very man who has poisoned the natural habitat that enterprise needs to survive!

European leaders are thrashing out final details of the proposed European Constitution. It changes the relationship between the EU and its member states, with some powers currently exercised by nations being decided collectively. The ability to veto EU proposals is also reduced in important areas.

The new constitution has to be ratified by all 25 EU countries, including those about to join, or it cannot take effect. Denmark and Ireland will hold referenda, as will the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Lithuania. Other countries which have indicated their intent to consult their populations include France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Others will doubtless do likewise.

Does anyone spot the glaring omission? Right. The UK government has announced there is "no need" for a referendum. Other countries will have a say in their future, but not the UK. The reason is not that it is unnecessary, whatever the government says. It is that it might be unwinnable. There is resistance in Britain to further European integration, reportedly including the Queen herself. People says in polls that they want existing legislation to settle down, and see how it goes, before going into "ever closer union" (as the EU treaty puts it). If there were a UK poll, it might well go down to an historic and embarrassing defeat.

I think the UK will face insuperable pressure to concede a vote. In the meantime, could any other Europeans out there tell me why they will get to vote on this historic step, but the British will not?

Congratulations to China on their manned space mission. It reminds us that China will be an economic power of major importance, and will raise Chinese morale as they go through difficult changes.

Great though the achievement is, it isn’t where manned space flight is going. It looks back to the early capsule launches which Russia and America achieved 40 years ago. Future space flight will have to be in re-usable vehicles, low stress, and above all cheap. That means private.

Space has been a government operation, cumbersome, expensive and exclusive. Look how hard NASA fought to prevent Dennis Tito becoming the first space tourist because he wasn’t in their program. Now Space Adventures are offering similar trips at 15 million dollars. I have signed up for their more modest 100 km high sub-orbital hop at 100,000 dollars.

The X-prize foundation is putting up 10 million dollars for the first vehicle to take passengers to 100 km, and make another trip within two weeks. More than a dozen private teams are in the race, and it looks as though Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites might win. He has already flown the White Knight lifter, and his little rocket plane flies this December. This is exactly the sort of creative, out-of-the-box thinking that the private sector does so well.

The multi-billion dollar space tourist industry is a powerful incentive to set human ingenuity to work. The day of the government monopoly in space is ending, and not before time. Well done, China, but I expect private rockets to carry more passengers than Chinese ones in the coming years.

It seems that some daft folk (New Economics Foundation among them) want to regulate home-service credit just like bank lending. They complain that people are charged 'rates of 170 percent' on loans that are repaid each week to agents calling door-to-door, often in the poorest inner-city estates.

But viewing home credit like bank lending entirely misses its point. Most home credit loans are small - perhaps £200 to pay for a daughter's wedding. So setup costs and risk are inevitably a high proportion of the amount loaned. APR-style interest rates therefore look high: but most borrowers would prefer that than being clobbered with additional charges later on (which the banks excel at).

Indeed, the banks are rarely even represented in the inner-city estates where home credit flourishes. Not surprising that people prefer to deal face-to-face with an agent from the neighbourhood than to struggle with the banks' bureaucracy. And though it is again costly for agents to call each week for repayments, many borrowers welcome the self-discipline it imposes.

Home credit is widespread and popular, which is why some home lenders have been around for decades and decades. Many people who could never get credit elsewhere rely on it. Trying to shoehorn it into a Westminster idea of regulation will simply drive out the trustworthy lenders and let unregulated and unscrupulous others move in. As so often with government action, this will harm the very people it is supposed to help.

When Gordon Brown announced that stamp duty on homes over £250,000 would be 3%, I think almost everyone must have assumed he meant 3% on anything above that figure. But no, he meant 3% on the whole sum. Thus the (1%) duty on a house worth £250,000 is £2,500; the duty on one worth £250,001 is £7,500!

This is bizarre, silly, and unjust. A fine example of a stealth tax.

And now to force people to pay it, the Inland Revenue is being given new powers to crack down on those who quite reasonably try to avoid it. From December, everything (like carpets and furniture) will be included on the sale price, and therefore taxed.

As in other areas, the Revenue is being told - or incentivized - to wring every last drop of cash from each tax in order to feed Brown's voracious public sector.

The result is that instead of the traditional give-and-take, tax payers and tax collectors now see each other as the enemy - not to be trusted, nor any useful information volunteered to them.

A society can hardly be healthy when the public and its civil servants are not on speaking terms. But that is the society that the Chancellor has created.

In the 18th century, fusee movements drove the best watches. Two tiny capstans, connected by a chain as fine as a hair, compensated for the spring which grew weaker as it unwound. By the early 19th century every British market town had its precision watchmaker producing these tiny, expensive, intricate machines by hand. By 1865 Americans invented interchangeable parts and simpler mechanisms which were virtually as accurate but more affordable than fusees. They persuaded the Swiss to manufacture modern precision watch movements. By 1914 the two dominated the world market for watches - while the vast majority of UK watches were still handmade fusee movements.

At the Portobello Road market last weekend, I asked a watch dealer why the UK, home of the industrial revolution, let its watch industry disappear. He gave two reasons. First was protectionism - government charged punitive tariffs on foreign watches, to 'protect' the less competitive domestic industry. Second came the powerful watch-making guilds, fore-runners of trade unions, which opposed any new technology that made watches last longer, or was less labour-intensive. 'They almost stopped the use of jewels in watch movements,' he said, 'because watches without them wore out quicker and needed replacing. Lots of people here don't like change.'

As the rest of the world ploughs ahead developing GM foods, is there a lesson here for modern Britain? Or a lesson in other sectors?

I spent a lot of the week in airports round the UK, and was shocked by the new 'smoking areas' that have appeared. They're not really 'areas', more like goldfish bowls, with curved transparent plastic sides. The idea is to deflect the smoke inward to where a noisy air-conditioner sucks it in. But the effect is to make smokers look like some repulsive creatures in a glass tank at the zoo. The glass tank isn't even big enough to hold all these unfortunates, making them look even more sub-human.

The UK used to treat drinkers the same - pubs had to have curtains so that drinkers couldn't be seen from the street, and pub hours were so short you had to drink as fast as possible, with obvious results. Since we scrapped that illiberal nightmare, alcohol-related disorder, crime, and disease has dropped, thank goodness.

I'm not a smoker, but I hate it that we are now treating them exactly like we used to treat drinkers. I don't even believe that these new smoke-tanks are really intended to save non-smokers from the fumes. They're just intended to make smokers feel bad and look bad. The holier-than-thou designers of such policies do a lot more harm. Put them in a glass tank instead.

Two days after Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in California's "Total Recall" (that never gets old, does it?), those looking for some more direct democracy in action have to look no further than California's northern neighbor, Oregon.

After Oregon's Democrats (and many Republican lawmakers) succeeded in passing an $800 million tax increase at the end of August, Oregon's taxpayer's are fuming. If those opposed to the tax increase can gather the required 50,420 signatures they can force a referendum on February 3, 2004 that would allow Oregon’s voters to say no to the tax hike.

The appalling feature behind this issue is the way in which the bill was passed. After secretly gathering enough votes and drafting the tax increase, the two houses of Oregon's legislature voted on and passed the piece of legislation before the public could react. Of course this was the plan all along, as current polls show a strong majority of Oregonians are in favor of overturning the tax hike.

So if you're anything like me, you will have a great time watching another epic tax battle between taxpayer's and a tax-and-spend government over the course of the next few months, and don't forget to keep in mind that Oregonians have the ability to recall their governor as well.

I think it important to set ourselves goals. Among the most famous of the last century were making the world safe for democracy (which we didn't), and sending men to the moon (which we did). In 2020 Vision I set out 100 targets for Britain's future. Now I'd like to suggest two for the world to accomplish as soon as we can in this century.

We should conquer malaria. It kills 2.5m people per year, a majority of them children, and most of them in poorer countries. We could wipe it out. Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on a genetically modified anopheles mosquito which not only is inhospitable to the plasmodium that causes malaria, but which is designed to out-breed the anopheles which are. With effort and resources we could eliminate malaria and earn the gratification of posterity.

Secondly, the rich nations should declare a target to bring clean water to every community in the world. No single program could do more to benefit humankind. It might take an effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project, but it would be worth it. Dirty water is responsible for more disease and death than any other single cause, including Aids.

The cost of doing it would be large, but would be less than the cost of one year's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, as Lomborg has pointed out. Furthermore, it would save millions of lives each year, whereas it has not been established that Kyoto will save a single life. There are doubtless many worthwhile targets, but surely these two cry out for our attention?

Prof. Robert Worcester, head of MORI, spoke at Tuesday's meeting of The Next Generation of the ASI. His theme was that low 59 percent turnout in the 2001 general election in Britain did not indicate apathy. Further polls show that slightly more of the public was interested in the election, and quite large majorities would have liked more newspaper and TV coverage. The low turnout? That, says Robert Worceseter, came about because the political leaders failed to engage the public. It was the lacklustre way in which the campaign was waged and reported, he says, which led to the low poll.

There is another view which says that politics matters less these days. When the UK government provided houses and jobs for many of us, and ran the electricity, gas, oil and phone companies, together with steel, coal, ships and cars, it mattered who was in charge. With less coming from government and more from ourselves and the private sector, it is not as important. People tend to vote heavily in high tax countries such as Denmark, and less so in low tax countries such as the USA.

Scotland's Conservatives are debating whether they should support the Scottish Parliament having its own tax-raising powers. They are in the minority there, but their support could make it happen.

There's certainly a risk in granting tax-raising powers to Holyrood, which is full of enthusiastic tax-and-spenders (the Parliament building itself if now ten times over budget).

But Scottish Tories might be quite cunning to back the idea: because it might actually give Scotland lower taxes than England. After all, Holyrood's parliamentary pigmies could hardly be as suave at increasing taxes than the current Chancellor, the clever and meticulous Gordon Brown!

Brown manages to extract £4000 a year more tax from average households than in 1997. And with the Prime Minister showing no intention of quitting, he could be stealthily piling on the tax burden for some time.

Against that record, even the highest of the high-tax enthusiasts of Holyrood look positively benign!

Many environmentalists and neo-Mercantilists bash progress, but I like it. The computer in front of me lets me do many useful things I could only dream about 15 or 20 years ago - for less than £1000. I edit movies, contact people on the other side of the world, and produce typesetter-quality documents. Would I like to change it for a 1980s computer? No thanks.

Progress enables me to do more at a lower cost. It enables me to live a more fulfilling, more worthwhile life. The idea that progress is bad - that we need to live simpler, more basic lives - is not one that appeals to me. Progress means that my life, and other people's lives, can count for more. It also means that activities that were once the preserve of only the richest are brought to everyone. As such, it is a great equalizer of opportunity.

Those who oppose progress probably have an idealistic view of what a simpler life entails. They picture it involving sherry drinking on the veranda without a care in the world. But this is not how simpler societies work. Simpler societies involve the vast majority of people getting up at the crack of dawn for a long day of backbreaking toil, with only a small elite living enjoyable lives. Such a society - one based on the principle of "anti-progress" - is oppressive, because the only way to stop progress is by force: by keeping people in their place and banning attempts to rise. Would this make us all happier, as some argue? I sure doubt it. I'd rather live in a "complex society" any day.

Surely it is time the English re-examined the Treaty of Union with Scotland. After nearly two centuries it may no longer be in England's interest. Scotland became a richer and more modern country as a result of that treaty, while England gained greatly from Scottish talent and from a secure Northern frontier.

Today Scotland is subsidized by English taxpayers. More public money is spent per person in Scotland than in England. Scotland seems to wish to follow a different political course, with more support for state planning and controls than England favours, even under a Labour government.

Since both would remain members of the European Union for the time being, there need be no problems about borders, passports and Customs. England would lose the Scottish Members of Parliament, of course, but it might be a sacrifice worth making.

The Scots have tended to assume that the future of the Union is in their hands alone, even though both Parliaments signed it. There were two parties to the contract, just as there are to a marriage, and either one can choose to end it. Perhaps it is time a referendum were held in England on whether to continue with the Treaty of Union?

So the Iraq investigators found a bit of bad chemical and biological stuff, but nothing you'd call an arsenal of mass destruction.

Why then did Saddam put up so much resistance against the inspectors? Something that made him look so guilty that invasion became inevitable?

Because dictatorships survive on reputation, not reality. Sure, there was some basis in his reputation (he did gas 10,000 people). But he couldn't admit he had no WMD. He would look weak - and no dictator can survive looking weak.

We now know that when Kruschev was blustering about Russia's nuclear strike capability in the 1950s, hardly any existed. The US could have swatted him like a fly. Moscow couldn't even rely on its telegraph office, and had to accept Kennedy's Cuba ultimatum by putting it out over Radio Moscow. Even then, the lift stuck and the messenger nearly didn't get there).

Britain expected a long campaign to shift Galtieri's army from the Falklands. It took days. So did dislodging Saddam from Kuwait.

No, dictators are all paper tigers. Free countries should be more confident about removing them and making the world safe for democracy.

Denmark has just halved its alcohol duties. It was losing just under a billion dollars a year because Danes have been crossing the border to buy in Germany. Even more is lost in Britain as people shop in France for drink and tobacco (as I do myself!). The British approach has been to spend more on customs enforcement, but recent court cases have made that difficult. With an open border, if you put the taxes up every year, you take less revenue every year.

The Danish approach is best. It is what Adam Smith recommended, and what the Younger Pitt implemented successfully. Lower duties brought more trade, and with it more revenue at the lower rates.

Of course the anti-drink lobby has raised a howl of protest. Fortunately the Danes are a sensible, easy-going lot and enjoy themselves. They will probably drink more whisky now the price is halved, so it is good for Scotland, too. Alcohol lubricates social interactions and it lowers stress levels. It is not really up to governments to force its own limits on people, but for people themselves to choose.

The Adam Smith Institute has published on this before. Maybe it's time to give it another try. Meanwhile, to the Danes we say "Skol!"

All the leading aviation policymakers were at the Adam Smith Institute Westminster breakfast on the future of UK airports, and some interesting facts and figures came out.

For instance, economists reckon that 10% of world GDP depends on travel, and that 2m planes land in Britain currently - maybe 3m in ten years' time.

An environmental problem? No, there's been a four-fold reduction in aircraft noise levels in the last 30 years. The noise 'footprint' is a twelfth of what it was then. Particulate emissions have fallen tenfold. Technology, in other words, is solving the environmental problems, not creating them.

The future should be rosy. Except that government planners are involved. Thus London has no more runways than it did after the Second World War. The enquiry on Heathrow's fifth terminal (just a terminal building, not a runway) has taken longer than the First World War. Our transport links don't seem to be much better than they were in the Boer War. Why do we let government interfere in transport at all?

Send kids to a state-run jail and they pick up all sorts of tips to boost their career of crime. We all know that. But I didn't know that the same is true of community-based punishments too. It turns out that low-risk offenders are more likely to re-offend after being sent to do community work.

And two-thirds of those on community punishment orders are... you guessed it, low risk. So we're not doing them, nor the community, any favours.

I picked this up at an Adam Smith Institute power lunch yesterday with Professor Rod Morgan (see photo), head of the UK Probation Inspectorate, and other experts from our Full Stop After Sentencing project.

Adam Smith said that all that is needed for prosperity is 'peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'. Seems we have none of them! Is it time to privatize the courts and stop them doing daft things like sending low-risk types to community crime colleges?