Civitas Blog

Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch has been arguing the point for ages. But it took a cross-party House of Lords Committee to join the chorus before what he has been banging on about all this time finally to make it to the front pages of the national press.

What the Lords Committee has joined Sir Andrew in pointing out is that, contrary to the Government’s much vaunted claim about how much economic benefit the country has gained from the huge influx in immigration over which it has presided this last decade, the vast majority of the country’s indigenous population has not enjoyed one iota of benefit from it. Indeed, many of the poorest groups have suffered economically as a result of it.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Celebrate, for a new national agency has been born! “Ofqual will act as the independent guardian of standards across the qualifications, tests and exam system in England.” The mother is the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which henceforth will be known as the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA). The raft of independent and international evidence consistently contradicting the QCA’s now annual claim that exam standards are being maintained has prompted this move. We should, however, remain sceptical that merely splitting up the QCA into two national agencies, both of which still report directly to ministers (rather than parliament), will finally get a grip on grade inflation.

The Department of Health took a blasting a few weeks back from the Statistics Commission for lack of clarity, accuracy, objectivity, professionalism, use of simple language and ease of use in its publication of data. And with good reason; much seems about as clear and accessible as mud.

But here’s an attempt to add a bit of clarity to it. A few days of painful number crunching, data extraction and presentation of various DH and government sources across the spectrum of value for money – spending, inputs, outputs, outcomes and productivity – can be found here.

Some measures the NHS can be reasonably proud of; some it certainly won’t be. Has the 82 per cent real terms increase in funding since 1997 really been worth it?

In this week’s Times Education Supplement (TES), Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of Tony Blair, has a comment piece entitled ‘Low-cost lessons from the independent sector’.

The new, all singing and all dancing, EU visa is on its way! (Available exclusively for the artistically oriented.) Yes. It is official - artists are the latest minority in need of greater EU protection. Apparently, they battle wanton and excessive bureaucracy as they strive to make their gigs / exhibitions on time, writes Claire Daley.

And what is the EU’s solution to this obstructive bureaucracy? That’s right - more legislation!

Last week, in a carefully calculated act of political spite and jockeying for position in his party, Secretary of State for Schools Ed Balls took Jewish voluntary-aided schools to task for having wrongly included in their application forms the information that parents are expected to make voluntary contributions, assuming they have means, to the costs of religious instruction and external security. Apparently, it is OK for them to include the information in their advertising and brochures, but not in their applications forms. Search me why not.

Jewish schools certainly would seem in need of every penny parents of pupils can give them.

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Via Tim Worstall, we learn that Polly Toynbee is falling out of love with the Swedish model just as the Tories are gaining interest in it. In the past, responses to a columnist’s claims could only be aired in a carefully guarded newspaper’s letters page. Now many online editions of columnist articles have comment facilities and the global nature of the Internet means that responses from around the world can be almost instantaneous with the original claims. The Local (which provides news about Sweden in English) has picked up on Toynbee’s article and has picked out a few inaccuracies. It is also worth looking briefly at her comments on the Swedish school reforms…

The British Medical Association (BMA) have just released a survey today confirming a point I remember being made in no uncertain terms to me last year by one of the figureheads of the junior doctor pressure group, Remedy UK. The European Working Time Directive (EWTD) coming into effect next year will cut junior doctors' maximum week to 48 hours; a fact, he said to me, risks serious shortcomings in patient care. It seems his colleagues agree. Two in three (64 percent) believe the EWTD will have a "negative overall effect" on their training.

The news that Poole council used surveillance powers designed to track down terrorists to spy on an ordinary middle-class family they suspected of not living in the correct catchment area for their chosen school is not as surprising as it first seems. The government is, after all, fully aware that there exists in this country an organised group that propagates an infectious ideology which considers government officials to be mere obstacles to their goals. Arranged in tightly knit ‘cells’ (usually of two senior operators and one or more younger members), the group as a whole communicates via an informal network of personal contacts, workplace colleagues and Internet forums.

Some claim faith schools are socially divisive. They want them replaced by mixed community schools where children of all different faiths will be schooled together. That way, so the argument goes, all will be forced to mix and thereby become friends. By so becoming, the theory continues, they will be freed from the prejudices and negative stereotypes about each other caused by their lack of familiarity.

Theory does not always work out in practice, as the mother of a fifteen year old pupil at a community school in Swindon tragically learned a year ago last January.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Gala Launch Night Event - ‘Lessons learnt teaching excluded youth in a boxing academy'
from 6.30pm Thursday 24th April
Williamsons Tavern, Bow Lane

If anyone ever wanted a clear exhibition of the damage this government has done to the medical profession, look no further than this post by Dr Crippen. Doctors' professionalism and sense of intrinsic reward replaced by crude economic calculation of value leads, unsurprisingly, to inferior service. Here, it's out-of-hours care...I'm sure there are many more.

The irony is that the DH now has a 'Social Enterprise Unit' to encourage the very ventures, such as the one he describes, it has crushed by central direction and 'one-size-fits-all' policy. And it's the patient that suffers.

The NHS Confederation today publishes a report looking at polyclinics, widely anticipated to be recommended as part of the conclusions of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review in the summer.

The Confed puts a pretty strong case for them, describing the principles behind them as ‘in line with the way that healthcare is developing across the world’ and listing the potential benefits: larger groupings of primary care professionals, economies of scale, a reduction in expensive hospital activity, better integration of services and space created for community health care. It thinks, with all this laid out, that the proposal has ‘generated a surprising level of opposition’. Really?

Yesterday, on the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Trevor Phillips urged us to hold a calm and measured debate about immigration. Despite his good intentions he still managed to malign the British people. On ‘the right’ he said that the issue became taboo because conservatives feared being branded racist. And ‘the left’ thought that a free and open debate would stir up reactionary sentiment among their working-class voters.

Public debate was suppressed, it seems, for purely self-serving political reasons. My recollection of the period since the 1960s is different. The bond that unites British people has never been based on race. It has long been an allegiance rooted in support for shared beliefs and institutions. It is a civic allegiance, symbolised by the Crown, and one of the core beliefs is moral equality. Everyone is not only equal under the law, but also entitled to fair play in any face-to-face dealings.

‘What legitimacy is there in a Parliament which makes crucial decisions on immigration with just fifteen ethnic minority MPs when there should be more than sixty? How can a House of Commons expect its decisions on counter-terrorism to be taken seriously by Muslim communities when there are only four Muslim MPs in the House of Commons? ‘

Trevor Phillips posed these rhetorical questions in a much publicised speech he delivered at the week-end to mark the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Crime in Middlesbrough is nearly twice the national average so it is surprising to see the police there have the time to detain members of the public for crimes that do not exist. Perhaps they need reminding that crimes (in a free country, at least), with few exceptions, involve theft or damage of property or the harming of another person. [via Samizdata]

Writing in the British Medical Journal in February 2008, Allyson Pollock and Sylvia Godden lambasted the quality of care provided in independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs). They are right to raise concerns over data quality and collection, but a report released this week by the LSHTM and the Royal College of Surgeons allay many of the fears they proclaim.

It is of no great surprise to read in the Times Education Supplement (TES) today that a majority of parents were not sympathetic to the National Union of Teacher’s strike yesterday. Aside from the obvious reason – having to make childcare arrangements for the day – a large number of parents felt that teachers should be satisfied with their pay. (A teacher’s basic starting salary in the UK is currently £20,133, with an additional £4,000 London weighting, whilst the average experienced teacher’s salary is around £34,281).

Patriotic history harmful to pupils; St George’s Day celebrations cancelled over spurious health and safety concerns; postal voting fraud on epidemic scale; Britain being carved up by Brussels into a set of regions of which the parts of some lie across the Channel.… With each day comes news of some fresh assault on the body-politic of this once great country.

What is the cause of this spiral of self-destruction into which Britain seems lately to have chosen to descend? How could such a once justly proud nation so speedily have reduced itself to a herd of bewildered sheep being tamely led by a pack of Scottish sheep-dogs acting upon the silent whistles of some far-off European shepherd?

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

As a date for the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty looms ever closer (and at times then drifts further away, depending on the political climate and EU’s chances of securing a ‘Yes’ vote) it seems the tussle for votes has become smothered in political confusion, writes Claire Daley.

Yesterday evening, I attended the Fabian Society’s debate ‘How can we defend the inheritance tax?’ although it might have been more aptly labelled a strategy meeting on how to set-up a pro-tax alternative to the Taxpayers Alliance. For when I had a chance to speak, the only one present to deny the explicit premise that inheritance tax was morally justifiable, the room itself seemed briefly to close in on me. While responses to my argument were never less than polite and well mannered, the initial incensed glares from the front of the room gave the impression that in a less civilized age I could have wound up being sacrificed inside a giant wicker construct of George Bernard Shaw.