David Farrer from Scotland writes:

We all know that big multinational companies are destroying local and national traditions with their relentless homogenisation of products and globalisation of the world's economy. We also know that this trend can only be resisted by the heroic efforts of disinterested politicians who are free from the blandishments of self-interest. Well, don't we?

Well, no. It turns out that Scottish Parliament is the institution eating away at Scottish culture. It has banned the use of the word "Christmas" in its Christmas cards for fear that it will offend people.

Globalization does indeed "destroy" certain parts of culture. The bad bits. By allowing competition in services, friends of corrupt politicians have their monopolies destroyed. Traditions which force women to act as second-class citizens get wiped away, along with working practices that mean unnecessary back-breaking toil. Globalization is a force for good in the world. Whether the Scottish Parliament is a force for good is less clear.

Stephen Pollard has written a scathing article on the BBC. He does not think it a good use of taxpayers' money that our main state broadcaster is giving £2m to its journalists to compensate them now that it is banning them from writing in newspapers.

Of course it is a waste of taxpayers' money. But I wonder if it really makes sense to stop BBC journalists from writing. The BBC thinks (perhaps correctly) that its journalists are causing it embarrassment. Viewers may indeed have less faith in the BBC after reading Andrew Gilligan's articles. But, from a public service point of view, isn't it good that we, the taxpayers, know the prejudices of the reporters?

Journalists cannot be expected to provide news from an Archimedean point, as though they are looking down from a distant vantage point with no initial views of their own. Not everyone employed at the BBC is a left-winger. Nor, as often claimed, is the BBC "institutionally biased" (as only individuals can be biased). But if the BBC wants to be seen as balanced, maybe BBC News should employ more journalists on the right of the political spectrum?

There is of course a more important issue: why in a multi-channel world is the BBC still paid for out of taxation?

On Friday Tony Blair was in Wales to launch Labour's "Big Conversation" with the British people. Radio Wales got me into the studio to talk about it.

I said that the process is worthless. Labour already gets thousands of letters each week which get ignored. Now, with The Big Conversation, if people don't want to write a letter, Labour wants people to say what they think by text message. Considering that text messages have to be very short, it doesn't strike me as a great way of communicating coherently about policy. Is Tony Blair really going to change government policy if he gets enough messages saying "U R A fool"? Does Labour actually have the resources to properly think about all the letters they are going to receive? And in today's paper, we see that Labour is editing out criticism from the comments they publish online. This is well and truly a PR exercise.

The people Tony Blair needs to be having a conversation with are his own backbench MPs. They, unlike the general public, oppose choice in the public services. They believe that politicians and bureaucrats know best. But ordinary people are not afraid by choice. They make choices all the time about which mortgage provider, electricity company and house insurer to use. Given the option to decide which hospital to use, they would happily rise to the challenge. They would read comparison tables in the Daily Telegraph and Which? magazine, and take advice from others. And for the very small minority who would not, the market pressure of the rest of society will improve their unresearched choices.

Tony Blair says that his agenda has "no reverse gear", copying from Thatcher's "no u-turn" speech. It's a pity his first gear gives him such little speed.

Howard Dean's campaign blog - Dean's team says that Bush's tax cuts are "reckless and irresponsible". Since their effect has been to bring an 8.2% growth rate to the economy, the cuts seem quite sensible. That said, Dean's campaign have a point when they say that spending is out of control, but Democrats - Dean included - seem to want to spend even more.

Andrew Sullivan - "Toynbee is one of the most irritatingly self-righteous pontificators in Britain. She's wrong about the war. But every now and again, even she stumbles onto the truth."

Demos - although Tony Benn has given me the nickname "The Third Way Institute", Demos is rather more deserving of that moniker. On its blog, Demos is talking about "regulating self-regulation". Isn't that an oxymoron?

Harry's Place - a leading centre-left blogger pokes fun at George Galloway MP's new political party.

Today is Buy Nothing Day in the UK. Organised by anti-capitalists, the day is supposed to help poor people in the world. We in the rich countries, they say, consume too much. By consuming, we are effectively stealing from the poor.

This is junk economics.

Buying goods from poor countries increases the wealth in those countries and lifts their living standards. True, jobs in poor countries may not be good compared to the ones here. But when Western companies set up factories in poor countries, local people are desperate to work for them. This is because these factories offer better wages and work conditions than existing businesses – with wages up to eight times what workers would otherwise get.

There is an awful lot of inequality in the world. But as economist Paul Omerod has pointed out, thanks to east Asia adopting capitalism, world inequality has been decreasing. The inequality that is increasing is between those countries which adopt free-markets, and those which do not. The ideologies behind Buy Nothing Day are responsible for that inequality.

One of President Reagan's good lines was 'We don't have a deficit because we haven't taxed enough. We have a deficit because we've spent too much!'

Since 1992, the Adam Smith Institute has been calculating the total tax burden and presenting it as what we call Tax Freedom Day. Basically, if you start work on January 1, how long do you have to work until you have paid off all your taxes and can at last start earning for yourself? The answer, in the UK, is nearly six months, until early June in fact.

Another of Reagan's lines was 'Government is like a baby - an alimentary canal with a huge appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.' And to feed this huge appetite, we've seen the tax burden rise - or Tax Freedom Day get later - in almost all of those years since 1992.

But even that isn't enough to feed our voracious government - borrowing has gone through the roof too.

Now at last, someone's taking the burden seriously. Recognizing the harm that high taxes do the economy. Britain's Conservative leader, Michael Howard, says that if elected Prime Minister, he will make our Tax Freedom Day a public holiday. Bravo!

Alastair Cooke has been a journalist for around 70 years, so he's seen trade wars come and go. On the BBC site right now he reflects on the Smoot-Hawley bill -- which put a big tariff on imports to the US in an attempt to cure the economic gloom that had persisted since the Wall Street crash.

Hoover signed the bill, the market went down, unemployment went up, and the Europeans were furious. They retorted in kind. US unemployment shot up to 13 million, and an economic problem had turned into the Great Depression.

And now President Bush has slapped 20% on imported steel, unleashing predictable outcries from Japan, Europe and Russia. And now the EU and others are threatening retaliation.

Tariffs might look good for domestic consumption, but trade wars, ultimately, don't benefit anyone - even the industries you're trying to help.

The Queen's Speech - where UK Prime Minister Tony Blair sets out his legislative programme for the year - shows a government consumed by its own vacuity. At least 23 new bills are proposed. But being busy isn't the same as being effective. Few measures hit the public's real concerns, none embody the sense of vision and purpose that New Labour had six years ago.

They've clearly given up on a lot: banning foxhunting, joining the Euro, reforming public services...

Indeed, the changes after six years look marginal. Diversity in education: great idea! But all we have is a few new-look schools, a handful run by private managers. Pathetic. Same in health. We could have made every NHS hospital an independent hospital, competing for patients and focused on providing best value. But Old Labour didn't like it, so the heart was ripped out of the Foundation Hospitals bill. Symbolically shambolic.

With so much extra spending on health and education, we ought to be seeing some improvement. But we don't. With all that original New Labour youth and vision, we ought to have seen a radical reshaping of government. But they look and talk just like their predecessors.

It confirms my prejudices: the question is not what sort of government we want, but how much we need. And the answer is less.

The BBC has its Big Read competition, so we've gone one better and launched a Right Read competition where you can nominate your favourite book (sound ones only, sorry).

Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

• Economic Laws of Scientific Research by Terence Kealey - debunks the myth that government-funded research is good for the economy.

• The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg - puts some balance in the environment debate. And he's giving an ASI lecture on 26 February.

• The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek - why central planning also leads to the destruction of personal freedom, and why in socialist economies the worst always get on top.

Bush has done some bad stuff for the American economy. Protectionism and letting public spending get out of control are black marks. But thanks to the good work of Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage and others, he's pursued an economically sound policy on taxation. That is to say, he cut taxes.

Now we can see the results. According to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress: "The economy grew at an 8.2% rate in the third quarter (revised up from the original estimate of 7.2%), the fastest in almost twenty years. Forecasters expect solid growth of roughly 4% through the end of 2004."

Everyone knows that governments are spectacularly inept at buying computer systems and getting them to work. But the scale of the cock-ups at Britain's Child Support Agency takes the breath away. Their system cost £450 million, but still arrived 18 months late, says the Daily Telegraph. But only a third of the 150,000 outstanding claims from parents have been processed. And less than 4 per cent have actually been paid any money by this big shiny brain.

In the government computer incompetence stakes, I think this must be a record. Or do any of our readers know of even greater IT cock-ups?

Adam Smith famously thought that professors whose pay came from their students performed better. At Oxford, he noted, "the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching." (Could Oxford students tell us if this is still true?)

When I was a professor at Hillsdale, part of my pay was determined by students. We were all assessed by our students, who could add up to ten percent onto our salary. There were widespread predictions that students would favour the teachers who gave easy grades, the ones who handed out an A if you just reproduced lectures or the book.

In fact it didn't happen. The students awarded the highest marks to the most rigorous and demanding professors, even though it was harder to get an A from them. Most students were paying for themselves, and it was value they wanted, not an easy ride. They could tell the difference a mile off, and didn't want to be fobbed off with second rate.

Maybe if such a system were more widespread, it would impel university lecturers to attend to the quality of their teaching, instead of affecting to disdain it in their pursuit of the higher goal of 'research.'

The student bodies of many of Britain's most prestigious universities refuse to belong to the National Union of Students. Universities like Glasgow, Edinburgh, UMIST, Imperial College London, and St Andrews have disaffiliated. They see it as a Labour Party front group. After all, many former presidents of the NUS - including Stephen Twigg, Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and Jim Murphy - are now Labour MPs.

But it is source of frustration for non-NUS students that many shops and cinemas refuse to give student discounts without an NUS card. When I was a student, whenever I presented my St Andrews student card at Warner Village cinemas, they refused to accept it. They said my card could only be accepted if it said "NUS" on it.

But this is supposed to be illegal. The law specifically bans discrimination according to membership of a trade union. And Warner seems to accept this on its website: "We accept NUS or ISIC cards; or at the manager's discretion a university/college card which contains a photo."

A friend of mine from Conservative Way Forward recently had his Imperial ID card rejected by the ticket office at his local Warner, and insisted on seeing the duty manager, who also refused the discount. Eventually, the cimema manager came and let him in for free.

You may of course think that Warner should be entitled to give discounts to whoever it wishes. Fine. But that does not change my belief that companies like Warner should be discouraged from getting into bed with the NUS. Companies that do not respect the value of customers who don't want to join a trade union may not be worth doing business with. If you are refused the student discount for not being an NUS member, I suggest you write and complain to: Warner Village Customer Services, 10 Chiswick Park, 566 Chiswick High Road, London W4 5YA.

I quite like Tasmanian leatherwood honey. It has an odd, slightly mysterious tang to it. I like most types of honey. Some Normandy honey comes with the honeycomb whipped up with it, giving it a deliciously grainy texture. The flavour depends on the pollen the bees feed upon. Varieties there include forest flowers and lavender.

A friend of mine in South central France is lucky enough to live just above the 900 metres needed for his bees' honey to be classified as 'mountain' honey, fetching higher prices because of its premium taste.

Chinese blossom honey is increasingly common in British shops, and some of the Chilean varieties now seen here are excellent. Of local ones, a beekeeper in a nearby village lets some of his bees draw nectar from rapeseed, some from linseed, and some from the hedgerow petals of blackthorn and rosehip. All delicious.

There are voices out there calling for our choices to be limited. A recent Fabian Society publication said as much. We should be satisfied with local produce, they say, rather than having stuff sent halfway round the world. We should holiday locally, they say, to cut the pollution which transport causes. We should all be content with a simpler life with less choices.

I'd be happy to see us develop cleaner, cheaper methods of transport; but that isn't what they want. It sends the wrong message, they tell us, by giving the impression that technology can solve our problems. Right on. It can indeed, and that's one reason I want to encourage it. I don't want others making my choices for me and limiting me to the one variety of honey (or food, or furniture, or recreation) which happens to be available locally. I want to interact with the world, trade with it, visit it and enjoy all that it offers.

Life would be a lot less sweet without all that honey, and all those choices.

Not content with messing up future development, Britain's planning authorities are now wrecking ancient ones too.

Friends of mine - I am editor of Current Archaeology - persuaded the Discovery Channel to fund them in reconstructing a Roman villa in Hampshire. Whereupon the planning authorities stepped in. And now it has been reconstructed all wrong.

The classic Romano-British villa is what is known as a winged corridor Villa. There are wings projecting forward at either end, and a low veranda running along the front. In this case, the wings were abandoned on grounds of expense - well, OK, some of the smaller villas have no wings.

But it got a lot worse when the planners stepped in. First they said that only one-story buildings in the modern style are allowed in such an area of outstanding natural beauty. Then the veranda, instead of being left open at the front, had to be built in. Finally they insisted on having a continuous roof instead of a double roof (one over the main building, and one over the corridor, with clerestory windows above the corridor).

The result is a complete farce: looking more like a boring modern farm building than a Roman villa.

And now generations of schoolchildren will visit the site - to say nothing of the millions who will see the TV programme - and get a totally false impression of what a Roman villa looks like. All because of Hampshire County Council's planning officials.

Hasn't something gone wrong if planners can even insist that Roman villas should be built how they say, and not as the Romans actually built them?

Edward Leigh MP, the chairman of Britain's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), gave a insightful Adam Smith Lecture on Tuesday. He talk was an insider's guide to the PAC, Parliament's spending watchdog, and there was a fun reception afterwards. Being technologically minded, we've put the talk up on the web. But it's a big file - 72Mb - so I wouldn't recommend you try and view it unless you have a fast internet connection. Click here to view.

You'll need QuickTime installed. Chances are that you'll have it already. If not, ring your IT department and beg, or click on the button below.

A couple of months ago I needed to see my GP (for our overseas readers, that's a "General Practitioner" or family doctor). I phoned up on a Saturday morning, and they said I couldn't arrange an appointment at the weekend. I'd have to call back on Monday.

I did indeed call back. Being in work, I want to see a doctor first thing in the morning, in the evening or at the weekend. Not during office hours. But Britain's state-dominated GP system means that my GP practice wouldn't see me in the evening or weekend - unless I was dying. They could do 9am, three weeks later.

Being young, it's rational for me not to have private healthcare insurance, particuarly as the government taxes me a lot for the National Health Service. I'm betting on the fact that I won't need any hospital treatment. But for GP services, in future, I might well go private. I'm interested in the MediCentres that have appeared in London railway stations. Disappointingly, the number of private GPs is small because the state sector has a crowding out effect.

When I'm ill, I want to see a GP at a convenient time. I want a healthcare service that is geared around me, the patient. The GP system is fine if you value your time at nothing, but for working people, there's something very wrong.

Gordon Brown says that when you go into a supermarket, the customer is king, but that this can't be the case with healthcare. Why not? Why should we have a healthcare system that puts producers before patients?

A pattern is beginning to emerge here. Two weeks ago, Britain's Home Secretary, David Blunkett, announced plans to make police chiefs directly elected. Some of us were a bit surprised, because we thought that we had heard the Opposition spokesman Oliver Letwin say just that three weeks before at his Party's annual conference. And we had.

Now I hear the Health Secretary, John Reid, telling BBC Radio 4 listeners that he wants to give every NHS hospital in the land the devolved freedoms of 'Foundation Hospital' status. Funny, I though we heard the Conservative health spokesman say exactly that at the same annual conference.

I suggest that journalists and policy analysts should look carefully through the policy announcements made at the Conservative conference in Blackpool in October. Then we will all be able to anticipate what the government is going to announce next.

Prof Tim Congden makes some interesting points in this month's Lombard Street Research bulletin, which he's making into a Bruges Group pamphlet shortly. Here's his argument.

We all said that a one-size-fits all EU interest rate policy would mean that monetary policy would never be exactly right for any country, and there is ample testimony to that now, with huge inflation in Ireland and near-deflation in Germany, for example.

Meanwhile, the Growth and Stability Pact prevents member states for the active fiscal policy that might offset these strains.

So what are EU policymakers to do?

Well, the Growth and Stability Pact probably isn't enforceable. Germany - once its main advocate - or France would be unlikely to face real sanctions if they just ignored it, citing temporary problems. But then the dam has burst, and the basis of monetary union would be ruined.

But the proposed Constitution steps into the breech. It talks about 'multi-lateral surveillance of member states' fiscal policy' - in other words, more control of taxes from the centre. Easy, isn't it.

Of course, to make that stick you need an EU-wide enforcement apparatus, including army, police and intelligence services, but isn't that what political union is all about? Monetary union inevitably means closer political union. All very convenient.

The normally-socialist Liberal Democrats seem to be having an image change. Today, at the CBI Conference, the party's small business spokesman, Brian Cotter was sounding decidedly free-market when he called for the UK's Department of Trade and Industry to be scrapped:

Millions of people operating through the market produce better outcomes that government bureaucrats can. The DTI, and its army of Sir Humphrey's, should be scrapped. Business would be better represented in cabinet by a Minister for Deregulation responsible for cutting back unnecessary regulation and red tape.

It could have been me saying that! In fact, it is difficult to think of a single useful thing that the DTI does. It spends its time issuing business with unnecessary paperwork and compulsory surveys, bullying business leaders and trade bodies, and imposing costly regulations that don't achieve their objectives. It truly is the Deterrent to Trade and Industry.

President Bush and entourage sweep into London for a State Visit this week. Of course, the usual noisy rentamob are planning demonstrations against the war in Iraq (even though it's a bit late).

Despite all the sneers of the UK chatterati, I think Bush deserves all credit for his bravery, determination and vision in leading the world's war on terrorism. And by making certain countries more nervous about the terrorists they harbour, he has made the world a safer place.

No: what we ought to be demonstrating against is the US trade tariffs that have been raised in order to protect US steelmakers, farmers and others. This policy helps no-one. US users of steel, like car-makers, have to pay more for lower-quality domestically produced steel. Their products become more expensive and harder to sell both at home and abroad. Farmers in developing countries, often dependent on monoculture, cannot sell their produce to the United States. Indeed, the whole environment for trade liberalization is poisoned. The EU starts saying that from mid-December it will retaliate with trade restrictions of its own. The prospect of trade liberalization gets even more remote.

All politicians face domestic pressures for protection against better and cheaper foreign imports. They have done for centuries. A really great world leader should be big enough resist them.

Britain's Home Secretary David Blunkett MP thinks that forcing us all to carry identity cards with our fingerprints or eye-scans on them would make life a lot easier for the police. Well, it might. That is why identity cards were scrapped after the Second World War - because officious policemen used the requirement to carry them as a way of lording it over the public.

It is also interesting that those New Labour politicians who so vehemently attacked the South African pass laws plan to introduce just such a regime at home.

These are the same politicians who once backed the 'can't pay, won't pay' campaign that urged us all to ignore our poll tax bills. Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: if Blunkett's ID cards do come in, let's all refuse to carry them and see what he says then.

Yesterday's FT says that the European Commission wants to prevent prevent people in Britain opting to work more than 48 hours in a week. The British government opposes the Commission's plans.

There are two problems with the Commission's approach. Firstly, it gives us in Britain little faith if, when we sign up to European agreements, they later try and take away our negotiated opt-outs.

Secondly, those who want the opt-out removed fail to understand the complexities of the modern workplace. In Britain, with our fairly flexible labour markets, and largely decentralised economy, we do not have the problem of big employers who can dictate the terms in the labour market. Our economy places huge value on the supply - that is, on the employees. Employees switch between jobs all the time: no longer do we do the same job for life. Jobs involving more than 48 hours are a minority thing anyway.

It is for these reasons that we do not need legislation stating how many hours we can work. The marketplaces enables us to make those choices ourselves. I, for example, normally work more than 48 hours in a week, but that's my choice. If the opt-out were removed, I would be breaking the law. Some people like to do jobs where they spend some of their time on standby watching TV or playing cards, ready for when they are needed. That might involve them being on site for more than 48 hours, but shouldn't they have that choice?

It boils down to the Commission imposing their view that everyone would rather have more leisure time and less money. Surely we should be allowed to decide our own priorities?

Over 500,000 migrants came to Britain last year, the highest number on record, according to new official figures. This is the sort of thing that gets a lot of people very agitated, especially since Britain is a 'small and crowded island' as shadow Home Secretary David Davis MP puts it.

Well, I welcome immigrants. They tend to be young, ambitious, keen to seek out opportunities and perhaps more able than the domestic population to see those opportunities. Like the late Prof Julian L Simon, I'm certain that immigration has benefited just about every country which has experienced it.

But there's a catch to the British figures.

The net inflow of migrants actually fell over the period of last year, due to a sharp increase in the number of people leaving the country. With the tax burden up 50% in just six years, I can't say I blame them!

Poor people I have met, both in my own country and abroad, are less interested in relative poverty than in whether they get enough to eat, access to decent services, and a few simple enjoyments. Those who campaign on their behalf focus instead on the gap between rich and poor. A popular definition has it that those in receipt of less than half the average income are living in poverty, and their children are 'brought up in poverty.' Others talk of the gap between rich and poor and say that if inequalities in society increase, then so does poverty.

Their surveys point to huge numbers who 'experience poverty' at some point in their lives. In their terms this is true. Many students would be included, as well as other young people struggling to get by on starting salaries while facing the costs of accommodation and travel. I have certainly been there.

But even on the relative definition, there is not a fixed pool of people 'mired in poverty.' It is a rotating pool which people move into and out of. It is also true that as society grows richer, inequalities tend to increase. If in a society of two, I earn 80 dollars and the other guy gets 20 dollars, there is inequality. Indeed, since he gets less than half the average, he is poor on the relative definition. Now if we both get twice as rich, I am on 160 dollars, while he is on 40 dollars. The gap has grown from 60 dollars to 120 dollars. So even though everyone is twice as rich as before, 'poverty' has increased. It is a poor definition which allows this.

Perhaps we should forget this relative stuff and try to make sure people get enough to eat, decent accommodation, and access to services.

We are invited to buy 'fair trade' coffee to sustain small producers against the giant multi-nationals. The fair trade stuff costs more, but we are told we can buy it with a clear conscience.

The fair trade movement believes that small growers are not receiving enough for their crop. Certainly world coffee prices have declined rapidly over a decade, and the reason is simple: since 1990 supply has increased by 15%. International aid was given to Vietnam to set up the coffee plantations which have produced much of the over-supply. In Brazil and Columbia, producers were encouraged to switch from cocaine to coffee.

By introducing efficiency and good management, some producers can pay good wages, and provide education and other benefits. Some have switched to the high quality beans instead of the low quality 'robusta' variety. But the coffee cannot be labelled 'Fair Trade'. Their farms are deemed too big to be eligible. Conversely, the typical fair trade producer is small and inefficient, with the coffee produced often of low quality. It is why such producers find it difficult to earn a decent living.

One obvious solution is to get them to switch to something else. Instead of trying to keep inefficient production going by paying higher prices, we should be letting their alternative products into our markets.

Trade has hugely improved things for poorer countries. The list of countries which have climbed to prosperity in the last half century shows one striking fact: the countries which traded became richer, some spectacularly so. The others stayed poor. The problem is that there is not enough free trade. Many rich countries protect their own farmers either by subsidy, or by keeping out food products from poorer countries, products more profitable than over-produced coffee, if only we would allow them.

Thus we keep the poorer countries poor by our trade policy, and then try to salve our consciences by pretending that our extra 10p for fair trade coffee is helping them. Free trade would help them, not fair trade.

Michael Howard has blazed a new trail. As Britain's new Tory leader he has cut down his team to a very lean 12, half the usual, and put the former leaders onto an advisory panel. After 13 years of incompetence and dither, a single week has made the Tories look fit and dangerous. At a time when people are growing tired of Labour and edgy about Tony Blair, the Tories have to persuade people they are worth voting for.

1. They have to be a low tax party, and let people keep as much of their money as possible.
2. They have to be a growth party, making it easier for people to get on with the business of creating wealth and jobs.
3. They have to let people make most of their own decisions instead of trying to boss them into a favoured lifestyle
4. They have to solve the problems of poor schools, overloaded and decrepit transport, and a health service which doesn't deliver quality care.
5. They have to allow people the space to express, fulfill, and improve themselves. They have to be the party of those who aspire and those who strive.

There is a load of stuff they also have to do, and I’m sure they are open to suggestions. The above five make a good start, however, and could get them elected. The smart bet to place now, while you can still get long odds, is on Howard leading them to victory at the next election.

Since 1997, the Labour government has been trying to push through legislation that would give police powers to board private yachts under way and breathalyse their skipper. A weekend's sailing could, if these terrible nannyists get their way, become a sterile and sober chore.

Luckily, the valiant Royal Yachting Association has resisted the onslaught, arguing that existing local byelaws are sufficient to deal with hiccuping helmsmen. They are right in assuming that yachtsmen are generally a responsible lot that as a rule try to avoid mowing down small children in crowded harbours.

The British yachtsman is the most lightly regulated in the developed world. Yet independent study for the New Zealand Government concluded that, of all the countries and North American States surveyed, the United Kingdom had the lowest boating casualty figures per participant. What's the point in introducing regulations when there isn't a problem?

The UK enjoyed an exceptionally fine summer and a dazzling autumn. Environmentalists blame global warming. Scottish & Newcastle shares dipped last week because of poor beer sales by its Eastern partner, Baltika, in Russia's coldest summer in 40 years. It's global warming, of course. If we have the mildest winter on record, it will be global warming. Likewise if it is the harshest. It will be bad news for environmentalists only if winter is unremarkable, because it makes for poor scare stories.

Think of environmental organizations as businesses which sell fear in order to gain subscriptions and support. The GM food scare came just in time, and they have marketed it well considering that 60 percent of US foods have contained GM material for a decade, and no-one anywhere in the world has yet experienced so much as an upset stomach.

The toxic ships are a good runner. Ignore the fact that the British firm has an excellent record of handling such work, including the break-up of oil-rigs, and can safely deal with the asbestos and other bad stuff. Facts don't come into these stories because "Britain used as garbage dump!" gets more subscriptions.

There is no point in trying to argue it out, because they parrot out scare catch-phrases instead of rational discussion. Best to give in quickly before the story runs and gives you a bad name. And remember not to announce in future what your plans are. What they don't know about, they can't scare about. Pity about open government, though.

Cutting the speed limit in residential areas to 20 miles per hour would save 13,000 children from death or serious injury, says Britain's Health Development Agency.

Cutting it to zero would save even more.

Trouble is, though, that there are pros and cons in all of this. Slow-running car engines generate more pollution, which of course aggravates kids' asthma. Journeys use more fuel, and take more time: deliveries, and therefore goods in the shops, become costlier. People who need to get around town for their livelihood - delivery drivers, plumbers, electricians - will be able to do less, or may even lose their jobs.

As John Adams says in his ASI report Risky Business, managing risk is not straightforward. Make people wear seat belts and they'll kill more pedestrians because they feel safer. Cut speed limits and you can be sure to cause other harm elsewhere. The arguments are more balanced than the DHA bureaucrats suppose.

Oh dear. According to today's Computing newspaper, the UK's Ministry of Defence has flushed £120m of taxpayer money down the drain by mismanaging an IT project. Predictable, isn't it? Apparently, this is due to "poor financial governance, weak benefits management, poor communications and a failure to establish an effective programme of management organisation."

This reminds me of Milton Friedman's Four Ways of Spending Money. When you spend your own money on yourself, that's the most efficient way. And when you spend other people's money on other people, that's the least efficient way.

All my family love rugby (except me), so I've been forced to sit through umpteen national anthems. Scotland now has its own, the maudlin 'Flower of Scotland', enabling Scots to weep into their beer as they recall the (brief) supremacy they once held over the English 700 years ago.

But forlorn England still has to use the UK one, God Save the Queen.

Isn't it time that England had its own national anthem? Ideally something that is as anti-Scottish as Flower of Scotland is anti-English, with a tune as stirring as the Marseillaise? Any suggestions for how the first verse should look?

Now I've heard everything. According to the Arab News newspaper, the Saudis fear a sand shortage and have imposed strict border checks to enforce a ban on its export. They fear that the growing demands of the construction industry could lead to a shortage in the government-dominated desert kingdom.

Bizarre. They say that crime wouldn't pay if the government ran it, and now it seems that when governments run the deserts you get a shortage of sand.

Even more bizarre, I recall that Saudi Arabia used to import sand from the UK, though I don't know if they still do. Leighton Buzzard has made a good living out of it, and likewise a man I know on the Isle of Arran. It seems that British sand is sharper than desert sand and therefore better for making cement. So why are the Saudis worried that their own useless soft sand is going to go walkabout anyway? Ah well, I suppose regulators have to have something to do.

John Prescott wants to strong-arm local UK councils into building wind farms - against all the evidence that renewables cannot deliver the 20% of Britain's energy needs targeted by the government.

Wind is a risky, intermittent source of power: what happens in midwinter when demand is high but the wind is not blowing? Hence the decision of Denmark, famous for championing wind power, to cut its subsidies for three proposed 150MW offshore wind farms (effectively canceling them) for fear of destabilizing supply.

The government brashly plans that only 1 of today's 16 UK nuclear stations will remain by 2025. But Parliament's Science and Technology Committee determined that renewables were insufficient to meet that gap. Sweden was forced to do a u-turn on its nuclear closures when it discovered that: so will we.

Future governments will have to return to building nuclear power stations, both to protect security of supply against rising gas imports from less-than-stable countries, and as the only realistic means of significantly reducing carbon-dioxide emissions in line with Kyoto. This whole policy is a mess.

Last night was the monthly meeting of our Next Generation group. Newspaper supremo Andrew Neil gave an engaging ten-minute talk, discussing the chances of the Conservatives under Michael Howard's leadership. He said that to gain support the Conservatives need to appeal to Britain's strivers, promoting opportunities for everyone in society to get up in life.

We recorded Andrew's speech and you can watch it here as a QuickTime file. You'll need QuickTime installed. Chances are that you'll have it already. If not, nag your IT department or click on the button below.

The 'grant maintained' policy of the late 80's and up to 1997 (when Labour scrapped it) showed how effective that policy could be. Then it just applied to some schools, those that chose it. The next government should pay all schools the equivalent of school fees based upon the number of pupils in the school, and upon a clear, unambiguous per-pupil-per-year funding formula.

All state schools would then have the freedom to manage, freedom to educate, within the allocated budget. They would not have (and would not need) control from the local authority nor the Department of Education.

All the circulars, instructions, regulations, targets, and the rest of the present DfES paraphernalia would stop. Ofsted, the school inspectors, could continue, but more on the lines now applied to the independent schools.

Parliament would, as always, vote each year the money allocated to schools; the Treasury would pay it to the funding agency; the funding agency would pay it directly to the schools. No job left for a Department of Education. We do not need a Department of Education. Nor a Secretary of State for Education.

Stuart Sexton is Director of the Education Unit and a former Special Adviser to Secretary of State for Education.

One of the mysteries of politics is why the Royal Mail retains its monopoly. The word "Royal" evidently confused Mrs Thatcher into thinking it was part of the Constitution. Yet we do not seem to need a Royal Newspaper service nor a Royal Milk Float service for our other household deliveries.

The Post Office used to run a monopoly telephone service too. Sir Keith Joseph exploded that by privatizing it and bringing in competition. We can all see the dynamic force he released in the phone market today.

Robert Burns remarked the only truly urgent mail items are love letters and cheques. It may be that speed is not what the market needs. The present 28p 1st Class is a rip off. Rivals say they could deliver for 5p.

Maybe we do not really need doorstep delivery. We may prefer to blether at pick up points. Maybe postmen, liberated from their license to snooze, could become couriers for every retail company at every home.

The Royal Mail's standards dissolve every year. Its losses mount. We flee it for phones, then fax and now e-mail. But all that is needed to create a full and open market in letters is to amend the Statutory Instrument threshold from its present £1 per envelope to, say, 5p.

We have an open market in parcels. Civilisation did not tumble, but prices did. So let us remove the Royal Mail's antique status. The paradox is it may then focus on the future and thrive.