ja_mageia

The coalition government outperformed most expectations in its first 100 days. The document that set its agenda contained measures causing unease in both parties. It did not just highlight areas of overlap; there were few of those. Instead it represented horse-trading, with Liberal Democrats agreeing to some policies they opposed in return for Conservatives doing likewise.

It has been a surprisingly firm government. George Osborne has impressed the City and most analysts with his resolute approach to spending cuts. He reassured the financial community that Britain is serious about bringing the budget to balance and eliminating the huge deficit run up by Labour.

Education reform is radical. With the state allowance per child going to finance free places at new schools founded by parents, teachers and business groups, parents can escape from under-performing schools. It will restore much of the social mobility lost with the grammar school closures.

Some talk of lowering university admission standards for applicants from poorer schools, but the planned reform outflanks the issue. The new schools should raise standards sufficiently for their students to win university places on merit.

The welfare details have yet to be filled in, but Iain Duncan Smith stressed that welfare dependency as a career option will be closed off. This is as it should be, with welfare to help people without trapping them. Duncan Smith's principle, that work should always be worthwhile, is a good one. Coupled with the raising tax thresholds, the work/welfare balance looks set to shift dramatically.

Critics say that the reviews and commissions established simply kick difficult issues into touch, but what the government has been doing is laying down markers in key areas while it still enjoys some honeymoon popularity. There will be tax simplification. There will be much unwinding of Labour's surveillance state. There will be a power transfer to local levels. There will be reform of financial regulation. There will be a thorough shake-up to make our armed services better able to do their job.

People want from the government a clear sense of purpose and a determination to put right much of what is wrong with Britain. Business still awaits news on how over-regulation is to be curtailed. And we still wait to hear how our police forces are to be made more user-friendly and efficient.

But the early news and the omens are good so far, and better than many people expected. If the coalition carries on as it has started, and survives the faults and fissures of in-party manoeuvring, it could well go the full term.

Friends of mine whom studied Media at A level typically filmed mock-music videos of themselves performing their favourite artists’ tracks and opening shots to horror movies. Such inoffensive productions are not, however, for the sixthformers and teaching staff of The Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive School, Rochester.

As Big Brother Watch reports, students at the school have instead filmed themselves harassing smokers. Puffed up with self-righteousness, they take to the streets as self-appointed “ciggy busters”, illegally snatching cigarettes from the hands of ambushed bystanders. This is not without their teacher’s encouragement. In a display of her own prejudices, their media teacher, Margherita Gramegna remarked to the Medway Messenger: "The adverts don’t work, so we are going to make you stop smoking."

This is appalling. The school receives taxpayer’s money in order to educate the children that attend it, not to harass the general public. Teachers are employed to develop the their pupil’s minds, not to stunt them into Stasi-light.

It gets worse. The constabulary, led by the Chief Constable of Kent Police, Ian Learmonth, seems happy to condone this school’s encouragement of violent behaviour towards a part of the public; Kent police knew of the planned filming well in advance and did nothing to prevent it.

This event, both worrying and shocking in its own right, is also a microcosm of a more general problem. Our public services, grown bloated and distant, are increasingly failing to serve the public. The problem seems caused by centralisation, and the resulting inability of the public to directly hold public servants to account. One wonders whether this could have happened were parents, rather than Whitehall, to determine schools’ priorities and locally elected sheriffs, rather than remote officers, to set the objectives of local policing.

In his most recent open letter to the Chancellor, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, wrote that inflation was expected to remain above its 2% target until the end of 2011. Inflation was running at 3.1% in July. The current bout of above target inflation was attributed to a series of temporary shocks: the VAT hike, energy price rises and increased import prices following a depreciation of the pound. The Governor paints a rosy picture, saying that the effects of these shocks will gradually fade away and that spare capacity in the labour market will ensure inflation returns to target. This outcome is predicted even though the Bank’s current interest rate policy, in more ordinary times, would have caused substantial inflation. The problem with the prediction is, as ever, to do with inflation expectations.

If people and businesses expect higher inflation, they demand higher wages or charge higher fees; this in turn causes inflation, which again increases inflation expectations and so on. The Bank’s interest rate is at its lowest level in three centuries. Quantitative easing has seen the Bank effectively print 200 billion pounds. Presently, most of this 200 billion is part of the monetary base and not yet ‘real money’ and so is exerting only limited upward pressure on inflation. The low interest rate and quantitative easing are signals that the Bank is not serious about tackling inflation, caring more about bolstering GDP figures.

These twin policies may be the thin end of the inflationary wedge. First, by behaving as though it doesn’t care about keeping inflation in check the Bank could well be increasing inflation expectations and so risks becoming a cause of higher inflation in its own right. Second, as the economy returns to growth, there is every possibility that the huge amount of newly printed base money will be converted into real money. This would decrease the purchasing power of each pound and cause upward inflationary pressure, particularly if combined with a low Bank interest rate. What compounds these two pitfalls is that the Bank is unlikely to act against rising inflation soon enough. The Bank’s interest rate policy has its maximum effect on inflation two years after it is enacted. If the Bank has to wait to see rising inflation before it does anything it will already be too late.

A study has pinned the blame on bad management for lazy council workers. The average town hall employee spends just 32% of the day working, compared to 44% of those in private companies – which is still exceeded in better performing countries.

Executed by management consultancy group Knox D’Arcy, the study suggested that increasing working rates of council workers would eliminate the need for savage governmental cuts to frontline council services. Instead, up to 27% of workers could be cut.

It’s right to say that raising productivity levels would mean thousands of workers per council could be got rid of. However, if workers want to sit idle all day and there are people prepared to pay them for it, that’s fine! But local authorities don’t have any money; only other people’s. And those other people, the general public, don’t currently have a choice on whether or not they pay council employees. People will work if there’s an incentive to work and won’t work if there’s an incentive not to – and that goes for managers as well.

Bad management may be the proximate cause of lazy council workers, but the ultimate cause is lack of market competition.

The fact is it does not need to be the council who empty the bins, run the local leisure centre or manage tourism. The UK's 410 local authorities spend over £113 billion on day-to-day services, employing more than 2.1 million people and delivering 700 different services. These are all services (the genuine ones; not pseudo-services like equality and diversity) that could be run and managed by private companies, far more diligently and effectively, in a competitive market.

Today, more than 100,000 students with decent grades, will begin the scrabble for the smallest number of clearing places in decades. Droves of young people will be turned away proving what everyone already knows: university finances are in a mess.

If you are subscribed to The Times, click here to read Madsen's solution.

Eamonn Butler on Platform here.

Steve Baker MP on the Cobden Centre here.

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Our welfare system has lost focus. Originally designed to support those suffering hardship, it has mutated into an unwieldy creature that is increasingly unfit to perform the function it was instituted for. Now that the vast majority of British people are recipients of state benefits, the welfare system diverts valuable resources, both human and financial, to those whom do not need them at the expense of those whom do.

Many of the 51 different benefits and tax credits available, such as Child Benefit, are paid universally; both to those whose incomes are great and to those who struggle to get by on very little. A report published by Reform last year identifies £30.9bn of such benefits that are paid every year to ‘middle-class’ households (where ‘middle class’ households are, conservatively, defined as those whose annual incomes exceed £15,000 per adult and £5,000 per child). Surely it is only a failed system that spends such sums supporting the self-sufficient whilst the number earning less than 40% of the median income is rising?

This lack of priorities becomes even more apparent if we consider what £30.9bn buys us when it is targeted further down the income distribution. Not only can it cover the up-front costs of IDS’ proposed welfare reforms ten times over, it is enough to raise the income of every person in Britain earning less than £12,000 a year by £3,120. Whether it should be put to these exact uses is off the point; these examples only serve to show how poorly welfare expenditure is targeted at present.

Given the dire state of the nation’s finances, it is now as urgent as it is has always been sensible to ensure that our public services perform their intended functions efficiently. Benefits to middle-income earners need to be scaled back so that the welfare system can regain its focus; better helping the unemployed into work and providing support to low-income earners.

With the population of prisons and the cost of locking people up both rising, ministers have indicated that they want to see fewer people serving short-term jail sentences, and an increase in the use of “Community Payback”.

There are three purposes of punishment (and, before we consider any alternative, we are mainly concerned with prison): deterrent, reform and retribution. The first two do not stand up to logical consideration and the third must always take second place for restitution to the victim.

There is a fourth purpose of prisons, protection. This is not punishment at all; it is protection of the individuals from the criminal. Recalling that, in a libertarian world, all land is private and there is no public space, criminals are excluded, by the land-owners, from all land – except the residual areas we call prisons. They would be essentially the same as prisons as we know them, but their rationale would be exclusion from everywhere except them; not locking people up in them for the purpose of punishment, reform or deterrent.

According to libertarian principles, there are only two parties to a dispute in law: in this case, the victim and the alleged criminal. There is no place for “society”, whatever (if anything) this means. The idea of somehow “paying back a debt to society” (or to the “community”) is spurious. On that basis, there is no place for Community Payback.

It would be different if it were “Victim Payback”: the offender works directly for the victim, doing gardening, housework, or odd-jobs. But this assumes that the victim needs any work done, that he or she wants a criminal about the house (the very same one, perhaps, who has burgled it) and that the offender has the aptitude for the work. And who would pay for the supervision?

Enter, as always, free market principles! Drop “unpaid” from the specification of Community Payback. Let the offender work not for the community but for a private employer (at the moment private companies are often paid by the state to oversee work) and for a pittance (if necessary, below the minimum wage); work which nobody else would be prepared to do. Aggregated over 300 hours, that pittance might go some way towards giving restitution to the victim.

Yesterday it was announced that, as part of the government’s seemingly ironical ‘Freedom Bill’, private property owners are to be banned from clamping cars parked illegally on their property. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength.

If an unwanted someone breaks into my house I am, quite reasonably, entitled to restrain him. Few would argue that I am doing wrong, fewer still that I am interfering with his freedom. He did, after all, make an informed choice when deciding to crowbar open my window and slide into my living room.

Is it so unreasonable, then, to detain his car when this uninvited someone parks on my driveway? It is an equal trespass upon my property.

Advocates of this new ban, including Lynne Featherstone, the Equalities and Criminal Information Minister, have supported their case by highlighting that many clamped drivers were either unaware that they were parking on privately owned land or unaware of the penalties attached to their decision to park. They argue that it is unfair to hold people responsible for their actions in these cases, because they were not aware of the consequences.

This seems a reasonable position. However, even once we accept it, the proportionate solution is still not an outright ban. If clamping is unfair because people do not have adequate information, we need only mandate landowners to provide adequate information (say, in the form of a visible sign reading ‘Private Property- parked cars will be clamped’) to make clamping fair.

That this is a superior policy option is obvious. Drivers not warned of the penalties would not return to clamped cars and landowners could still protect their property against intentional trespass.