Civitas Blog

A report alleging that ‘rogue’ state schools are selecting children on the basis of their parents’ income is published today. In Sins of Admission, Chris Waterman, Chief Executive of ConfEd, a body representing local education authority leaders, argues that if there isn’t a crackdown on school selection - that is, schools selecting pupils – the already gaping achievement gap between better-off pupils and the deprived will widen.

You can’t help feeling a little bit of schadenfreude. Staunch supporters of the comprehensive schools in this country are up in arms that their sometime champion, the Labour Party, should now be the agent of their destruction. For the rightwing to start singing Ruth Kelly’s praises would be absurd, but her announcement, as The Times reports today, that not-for-profit educational charities, faith and parents’ groups will be given public money to take over failing schools looks like a step in the right direction. There are, however, causes for concern.

Today’s Times, contains a letter to the editor from Professor Bernard Crick, the man who more than any other is responsible for having foisted upon today's school-chilldren compulsory classes in citizenship which are, apparently, as unpopular among them as they are among the teachers required to provide them.

In his letter, Professor Crick gently berates the Prime Minister for having mounted a £90 million raid on the budgets of his Deputy, the Home Secretary, and the Secretary of State for Education to find cash to fund his new Respect Task Force.

Professor Crick argues a culture of respect more likely to be restored by government sticking to the two e’s of education and example than by any new gimmick such as the Prime Minister's new on. These are education in citizenship and a good example from public figures and celebrities.

Professor Crick omits a third e more likely still to be effective in restoring a culture of respect than any of the other ways and means to which New Labour has, with his collaboraiton, resorted in pursuit of this elusive goal. This is enforcement of the law.

The incidence of disruptive and badly-behaved children is far higher among single-parent families than among married couples. Anything, therefore, that reduces the incidence of such families is likely to reduce incivility and anti-social behaviour among the young.

A report in today’s Times reveals nearly a half of all lone parents have yet to receive their first maintenance payment that the CSA has ordered from the other parent of their children. Meanwhile, 40% of single parents who have applied to the CSA y for an assessment of what they should be receiving in maintenance from the other parent have yet to receive one, so it is also reported.

Given the lamentable track-record of the CSA in enforcing the financial obligations that parents incur by having children, it is small wonder that the rate of single-parent births in thei country continues to soar and now exceeds 40%. With such large numbers of single parent families comes such a huge incidence of anti-social behaviour in children and the young.

Rather than making citizenship classes in school compulsory, or calling for a good example to be set by public figures and celebrities, something which goes without saying but probably would pass unnoticed by those most in need of being set one, or requiring hard-pressed single-mothers attend parenting classes, the apparent goal of the new Task Force, the goverbnment is far more likely to restore a culture of respect by seeing to it that the law is by properly enforced requiring non-domiciliary fathers pay for the maintenance of their children. Its proper enforcement would make men think twice before siring children outside marriage. That would reduce the number of single-parent families and with that reduction would diminish the kind of domestic environment which is probaly the single biggest enviromental factor responsible for anti-social behaviour in children.

So fearful has Gordon Brown apparently become of having possibly to face Ken Clarke as Opposition Leader at the next general election, by which time he hopes to have taken over from Tony Blair as PM, that he has seemingly called on his friends to spoil Mr Clarke’s chances of becoming Opposition Leader by discrediting his economic judgement.

According to a report in today’s Daily Telegraph, Ed Balls, the Chancellor’s former economic advisor and now his possible successor at the Treasury, has sent an email to the Press Association documenting ways in which Ken Clarke’s judgement has proved misguided. ‘Time and time again’, the Labour MP is quoted as saying, ‘Ken Clarke has been proved wrong on the major economic decisions facing the country’.

Without wishing to enter into the vexed question of how suitable a Tory leader Ken Clarke might make, or how fallible his political judgement is, on several policy issues on which Mr Balls claims Mr Clarke’s judgement has erred, it appears not to have done. Thus, among the various alleged misjudgements of which Mr Balls accuses Mr Clarke is the latter's opposition to Labour’s New Deal and to its policy of tax credits to make work pay. On these two matters, however, Mr Clarke’s judgement appears to have been faultless.

In the same issue of the Daily Telegraph as the report about Mr Balls' email is a two-page centrepiece feature which delivers a searing indictment of New Labour’s record in office and strongly suggests it is Mr Ball's judgement that is unsound not Mr Clarke's.

Entitled ‘Why New Labour’s state machine isn’t working’, this special feature documents how ineffective the present government’s policy initiatives have been judged relative to their declared objectives. Among its initiatives argued to have had little positive benefit, but to have greatly added to costs, are its New Deal and tax credits.

Labour intended its New Deal to increase youth employment. Since it was introduced, youth unemployment has fallen, but, according to the Daily Telegraph feature, not because of it. A National Audit Office report of 2002 is cited which found that only 14% of under 25-year olds who found jobs under Labour gained employment because of the New Deal. Most who found jobs did so simply because the economy grew and would have done so anyway. Moreover, as the Telegraph points out, since New Labour took office the number of under 25’s in receipt of incapacity benefit has increased by 60% and now exceeds the number of this group on the New Deal. Even more damming is the ONS statistic showing there to be today more young people out of work not studying than there were when New Labour came to power. So much for Labour’s New Deal, which has cost the taxpayer between £5,000 and £8,000 for every job found under it.

The effect of New Labour’s tax credits has been even worse than useless. Supposedly designed to help less well-off working families, they have made the tax-benefit system so difficult to administer as to have caused numerous wrongful deductions and misallocations. The latter have been especially painful for the families who have been ordered to repay them after they have spent the credis they had wrongly received. Additionally, the Daily Telegraph feature reports that, as result of their introduction, it has been estmated that a full-time employee on the minimum wage faces a marginal rate of tax of almost 70% after deductions of the credits and national insurance are taken into account. This hardly amounts to a recipe for encouraging less advantaged family members take up employment opportunities to become independent of the state.

The Daily Telegraph feature documents several other areas in which New Labour’s track-record appears to have fallen woefully short of the mark judged against its stated objectives of reducing inequality and poverty, increasing employment, especially among the disabled, and reducing benefit-fraud. In none can New Labour be judged to have been remotely successful, given the statistics documneted cited in the Daily Telegraph feature.

Meanwhile, New Labour has kept piling up the cost of administering the welfare state and introducing more regulations and red-tape that reduce British competitiveness by adding to labour costs.

By the time of the next general election, whoever is PM will have an up-hill task on their hands whoever their opposite number in the Tory Party might be. But whoever the PM is, one fervently hopes that he or she will not allow, on the subject of their party's track-record whilst in office, any more speaking of Balls.

They're all the same to Ken
The Times reports today that Ken Livingston, who has stridently supported Sheik Qaradawi against all criticism of extremism (the evidence indicates that Qaradawi is not exactly al Qa’ida but hardly moderate either: he supports suicide bombing in Israel, is anti-Semitic and anti-gay), has restated his opinion in interesting terms. Not only, he says, is the Muslim figurehead a leading Islamic scholar calling for Islam to engage with the world and accept the changing role of women, but he is a reformer on the scale of the late Pope John XXIII. It’s difficult to see what is gained by making such a comparison. It is not to the benefit of Ken’s crony and it has already caused outrage within the Catholic community. This is precisely the kind of foolish cant that the debate about religion in our society can do without.

The High Price of Public Sector Pensions

Public sector pensions currently differ from private occupational schemes in two significant respects. Private pensions cannot be drawn on before contributors to them reach a retirement age of 65. Public sector workers can draw their pensions in full as from the age of 60. Second, private pensions are fully funded in that they met entirely from funds created by contributions to them. Public sector pensions are heavily subsidised from general taxation, contributions to them increasingly falling short of their costs.

So concerned has the present government become about the tax liability that public sector pensions impose as they currently stand that it has announced its intention to reduce their costs by increasing the age at which public sector workers may draw a full pension to same age as that at which private sector workers can.

Public sector unions are up in arms at this suggestion and threaten what would amount to a general strike in defence of the current age at which their members may retire on full pension. These unions insist the costs of these pensions will have to met elsewhere.

There are just two ways in which the government can meet the ever mounting costs of public sector pensions without increasing the age at which public sector workers may draw them in full. It can raise taxes or … reduce the size of public services.

It is difficult to see any case for substantial tax increases to enable public sector workers continue to be able to retire on full pension five years sooner than private sector workers can. When the terms of their pensions were originally agreed, no one could remotely have anticipated by how much average longevity would have increased by now and with it the size of the blank cheque the government was signing on behalf of the nation. The public might conceivably agree to higher taxes to enable public sector workers continue to retire before private sector workers, but it is difficult to think they will take kindly to the idea.

Far more likely than any tax increases to meet the costs of public sector pensions will be the only other option government has in face of them. It will have to find the money by making cuts elsewhere in its budget: so public services will be obliged to be cut.

Current public sector workers might not be afraid of the prospect of such cuts, calculating it unlikely they will be adversely affected by any, especially when negotiated voluntary redundancy packages are taken into account. However, if they believe the propaganda of their unions as to how vital to the nation’s health and well-being public services are, especially in the case of those on low incomes, they might well want to think twice about forcing the government to implement such cuts.
Today’s public sector worker is tomorrow’s NHS patient and recipient of other public services.

Sadly, public sector unions will have to wake up to the fact that, just as in the case of lunch, there is no such thing as a free supper before bed-time.

Like the Ministries of ‘Peace’ and of ‘Truth’ in George Orwell’s 1984, ‘social housing’ is a term used in public parlance today to denote the very opposite of what it might at first sight be thought to. What the term designates is the publicly owned housing estates on which are accommodated many of the lowest income groups, among whom single parent households form a disproportionately large part.

It is a mark of the extent to which the government recognises much of the anti-social behaviour stems from this quarter, or rather from these quarters, that, as is reported in today’s Times, David Miliband, the minister with overall responsibility for super-intending the government’s culture of respect campaign, is to announce today two new government initiatives to improve the behaviour of residents of these estates.

The government is to adopt a sticks-and-carrot approach to the problem, so it is reported.

Its carrot will be improvements to the infrastructure of currently deprived areas so as to attract owner-occupiers to them or the vicintiy of them by whose increased presence there the government hopes to raise the tone of these neighbourhoods.

Its stick is to be greater use of ASBO’s, and, no doubt, also of parenting orders that, it has recently announced, are to be about to become able to issued by anyone in authority against the parents whose children they judge at risk of sliding into anti-social behaviour. These sticks are to be wielded by ‘wardens, neighbourhood managers, youth facilities and childcare’.

This second measures is bound to make life on these estates increasingly resemble that in a prison camp, albeit a slight improvement on their often current greater resemblance to Thomas Hobbes' state of nature.

Moreover, the suggestion that introducing owner-occupiers onto these estates, or into the vicinity of them, will improve their tone, rather than worsen the behaviour of the children of those owner-occupiers induced to buy homes on or near them, displays a degree of optimism the sincerity ofwhich, I will believe, only when David Miliband and Tony Blair set us all an example by moving their families into one of these deprived areas to be given improved amenities.

Having said all that, there is a germ of truth contained in these new proposals. Owner occupiers have a greater stake in their neighbourhoods being free of anti-social behaviour than do residents in social housing: that greater stake is the equity in their properties which will fall, if their neighbourhoods deteriorate socially.

Rather than trying to improve the quality of life in sink estates through inviting owner occupiers to move to or near them and raise their tone, with all the attendant risk they will merely be dragged under, it would make much better sense for the government to encourage new low cost housing for owner occupation and make it available to the most responsible of residents currently in social housing through very favourable mortgage terms. Only currently vastly inflated land-values by over-regulation makes the cost of building high quality homes as prohibitively expensive as it currently is.

Should it be complained that it would give government too much largesse to be able to decide which families merit such favourable mortgages, the answer would be to make this a self-selecting matter by stipulating that only those families who personally contributed their time and labour to the construction of these new houses, their own and those of others in the scheme, would be eligible for such mortgages. That requirement would be enough to separate the sheep from the goats, as well as give every inducement for women in social housing to co-opt into the scheme the fathers or future father of their children who are often otherwise unemployed and have time on their hands. Indeed, what better inducement can be given current young residents in social housing to marry before having children?

Gradually building up neighbourhoods of owner occupiers, with a much greater personal stake in the quality of life in their neighbourhoods than have residents in social housing, seems a far more promising way to solve the problem of anti-social behaviour associated with such housing than sinking yet more public money into them, and risking human as well as private capital too!

The buoyant economy New Labour inherited from the Tories in 1997 gave it and the country seven ‘fat years’. Instead of prudently managing national resources during this period by cutting public debt and addressing long-term infra-structural problems in housing and pensions, New Labour went on a public spending-spree. Billions were poured by the government into countless pet schemes to end ‘social exclusion’, increase social equality, and generally improve standards in public services.

The Chancellor proudly boasted of his fiscal prudence and ability to outguess the IMF on what national growth would be. The economy was safe in his hands, he smugly reassured doubters on several occasions, and the country, or at least those employed in or maintained by the public sector from whence comes New Labour’s core electoral support, never had it so good with the result there have been three successive electoral victories for New Labour.

But now the worm has turned, ,and, as with all cases of over-indulgence, the price will be for the revelry a nasty hang-over the following morning. Today’s Times reports that, with lower economic growth forecast for from the IMF whose accuracy the Chancellor looks as if he will be obliged to accept this time, the Exchequer faces a coming crunch when it will be forced to decide between raising taxes or decreasing public spending. This is a Hobson’s choice that is going to discomfort the government as it well as its core supporters whichever option it take. As Patience Wheatcroft remarks in her column in today’s Times, ‘the party’s over’.

And what has the country had to show for this massive spending spree?

Very little.

Recently published statistics from the ONS show the government has, in the last eight years, failed signally to meet its cherished target of reducing social inequality. Likewise, as reported in today's Times, figures recently revealed by the Higher Education Funding Council and the Department for Education show it has been no more successful in its much vaunted campaign to increase the participation rate in higher education of state sector pupils, which has gone into decline and which annually wastes half a billion pounds from the high drop out rate it has manufactured, or to reduce truancy rates which, despite a massive £$1 billion being sunk into this venture, have risen by a staggering 43% since 1997. Meanwhile, it is reported , again in the Times today, that the country faces a massive shortage of housing stock created by the unwillingness of successive government’s, but of none more so than the present one, to relax planning controls.

Truly, the country is in a mess. The only consolation for those who would like to see some kind of retribution visited on those primarily responsible for it is that, through his lack of progress in solving the present budgetary crisis of the EU during his current Presidency of it, the Prime Minister’s stock there has fallen to an all-time low, probably scuppering forever his chances of being able to forge out a future career for himself there, as used to widely thought he had his sights on, after stepping down from the Premiership to make way for the Chancellor. The deserved penalty the latter will have to suffer is surely stepping into predecessor’s shoes just as they are starting to pinch. He shall surely inherit the wind, just as we all certainly shall as a result of his government’s profligacy.

Two vignettes from today’s Times reveal how much of the rank-and-file opposition in the Labour party to the government’s plans to increase private-sector delivery of NHS treatment is grounded in sheer prejudice and how badly greater private-sector involvement is needed.

First, in yesterday’s debate at its annual conference on these plans, a nurse is reported to have questioned whether for-profit companies could be motivated by patient care in the delivery of such NHS routine services as district nursing, health visits, occupational therapy, cancer screening, asthma and diabetic clinics. Mm, pursuit of profit in conditions of competition and customer-care are incompatible, that’s an interesting notion I don’t think.

Second, it is reported elsewhere in the same issue that an elderly couple from Portsmouth who have been attending the same g.p. surgery for a total of between them 137 years have been ordered to move to another practice within 28 days because it has apparently just been discovered they live outside the catchment area for that practice. That’s patient-care public-sector monopoly style for you.