Civitas Blog

Parents with children in their final year at primary school will today learn how successful they have been in securing for their children a place this coming September at a secondary school of their choice.

Those who have been through this process will know what a trying time it is.

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ID cards are being re-branded. The objective remains exactly the same, to create a national database with an associated biometric ID card. The difference is the softly, softly approach to introducing them to keep the scheme associated with the public’s security fears. It will cover first non-EU migrants, then ‘sensitive personnel’ such as baggage handlers, followed by those who work with children. Very similar to the plan as set out in a leaked internal document from earlier this year.

While the new structure to the scheme will certainly be easier to spin, the more essential problem remains how government can be trusted with more of our personal data. Just yesterday, a National Audit Office report found that the criminal justice system handles data so poorly that two-thirds of parole cases are deferred because necessary information is frequently unavailable. Perhaps Jacqui Smith should be trying to sort out this wasteful mess before spinning for creating a brand new one? The government line tends to be ‘this will be different, this uses biometric information which will keep identities secure’. However, as the Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre explained last year, remarkably cheap methods for fooling fingerprint scans have already been discovered. And once your biometric data has been stolen, it is rather difficult to get a new set like one can with bank security numbers!

It is a dull refrain, but again the education news conveys a troubled picture for England’s schools. Take just three of this week’s main education stories: a record number of children not getting into their (or rather their parents’) first choice of school; research evidence that faith schools are taking a disproportionate number of middle-class pupils (read being chosen by middle-class parents); and finally reports of former education secretary Estelle Morris’ attacks on the government’s initiative overload which has failed to impact on the gap between rich and poor.

More than enough, perhaps, has already been said about the speech given last week by the Minister for Culture Margaret Hodge in which she criticised the Proms and other unnamed iconic cultural events -- the Henley Regatta?, Glyndebourne? -- for not being sufficiently inclusive.

So well does the Culture Minister's speech epitomise a central flaw in so much current governmental thinking about community cohesion as to warrant a brief re-visitation.

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But not quite. His latest article on Comment is Free is headlined ‘Making GPs more accessible is just a disguised concession to big business’. Although his ideology is almost unparalleled in its economic illiteracy, it looks on the face as if he might have happened upon something important. He starts off well, pointing out that the government’s move to force GPs to open out-of-hours, lacks the significant public backing that is claimed, with evidence cooked up by a cabinet office report and a CBI poll.

A new report, published in the latest edition of the Civitas Review, argues NHS performance on efficiency, quality and - most damagingly so far as its ideals are concerned - equity, has flailed badly over the past ten years despite record increases in funding.

The problems are systemic. The undeniable talents of doctors, nurses and health care professionals working in the NHS are being stymied by perverse incentives created by Whitehall.

The NHS needs to be considering more radical options than those under review by Lord Darzi: it should be looking to Europe, and particularly the Netherlands, for better ways of providing universal and comprehensive health care. To read the report click here.

The question at the heart of Lord Goldsmith’s review of citizenship, published this week, was essentially how to unify a diversified population through the school system. (Via a virtually unanimous ridiculing of his proposal that teens pledge allegiance to the Queen, was undoubtedly not what Goldsmith had had in mind.)

2008 is European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. I bet you didn’t know that.

According to its own dedicated website, the purpose of the year is ‘to encourage all those living in Europe to explore the benefits of our rich cultural heritage and to learn from different cultural traditions’.

A flavour of the sort of thing being aimed at can be gathered from the list of those whom the European Commission describes on its own website as “personalities from the cultural scene from across Europe and beyond who have offered their services as ‘European Ambassadors for Intercultural Dialogue’”.

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Disagreement is still evident over the exact role of competition in healthcare, but a consensus is emerging that the ‘type’ of competition being pursued in the NHS is too narrowly focused and must facilitate greater service integration and clinical leadership.

That was the finding of a high-profile seminar organised by Civitas last month, which debated one of the key drivers of system reform in the NHS: competition.

With due credit to ‘Mr Eugenides’ whose frequent use of colourful metaphors renders him unsuitable to be linked to here, we can see the level of conviction with which the government is leading on criminal justice.

May 2000 - Straw plans `short, sharp jail shock' for young

March 2008 - Too many short sentences - Straw

At present, approximately a third of all schools in England and Wales are denominational, a status that permits them, when oversubscribed, to select pupils whose parents avow the same faith as these schools.

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The EU: is there anything it cannot regulate? As Cato alerts us, apparently not. This week a wine business faces costs of £30,000 to comply with one of latest petty regulations while a bus route has to be artificially cut in three in order to comply with another, pointlessly wasting passenger time.

The Guardian features two blogs on health inequalities that are, to be frank, almost completely non-descript. They do a good job at listing the damning evidence – that life expectancy for those in poverty has been falling further behind the national average over the past decade, that infant mortality 19 per cent higher for "routine and manual groups" than for the total population, and that this is worse than it was in 1997-99 when it was just 13 per cent – but offer no real assessment of the problem, let alone posit a solution.

The EU’s leg of the Olympic relay race has begun and a couple of mistimed exchanges when passing the baton (buck) of foreign policy has already left it without a hope of winning gold, writes Claire Daley.

As the Olympic torch shuffles its way across the continents, a parallel relay race is taking place within the EU. Actually with more characteristics of a giant game of ‘hot potato’, member states are passing the buck on an apparently “apolitical issue” - China’s handling of protesters in Tibet.