Randomly Selected Article or Link

News that the German and British governments have been paying for information almost certainly illegally obtained in order to chase people who try to stash their money overseas should worry us all. Obviously in this case the amounts of money potentially liable for tax are quite large numerically, although small in proportion to the total tax take - though the fact that it is merely around one fifth of one per cent of the total UK tax take we're talking about should alter our opinion about people who try to beat the system when everyone else has to pay. But it is the means employed that are of concern - paying what amounts to a criminal who has liberated customer personal information from the Liechtenstein bank at which he or she worked.

In a world in which it is ever easier for us to trade with overseas companies and individuals, to live in one place and earn in another and to invest in overseas assets, all of which are a good thing, I have warned previously that governments could try to get more authoritarian about chasing money allegedly stashed away or earned elsewhere:

This means ever more intrusive government, clinging desperately to current understandings of money, income and taxing that income as the only progressive way. We are already seeing huge bites taken out of our civil liberties because of immigration fears, terrorism and taxes.

And of course there is an alternative; that we switch to taxing only things that are impossible to hide - like land, which happens to have the added advantage of being value that the occupier does not create, rather than capital wealth or income which the worker or investor has created.

You might think this is just a bunch of rich people getting what they deserve from HMRC, but their willingness to engage is what amounts to industrial espionage to do so is disturbing and is a message to us all, whether we just trade with Americans on Ebay who then send us "gifts" tax-free or decide to retire to Spain, or further afield, whilst keeping a retirement job working online for a UK employer.

The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published on 2nd December, 1942, in the depths of World War II. The committee, under its chair, the liberal economist Sir William Beveridge, had been established by the wartime government to plan ahead for the challenges of reconstruction of the national fabric after the war.

The report identified what it called the "Five giants on the road to reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". Each was to be enjoined in battle by a major plank of the post-war welfare state - social security, the NHS, expanded state education, the nationwide house building schemes that would produce "homes fit for heros" and Keynesian style economic stimulus programs to maintain high employment respectively. That National Health Service Act of 1946 brought into existence, sixty years ago last week on 5th July 1948, what has become Europe's largest employer, the NHS.

The Beveridge Report indeed made much of its wartime heritage. The war was a turning point in history that deserved revolutionary measures afterwards to ensure peaceful and equitable reconstruction. The battle ahead was couched in terms of a "war on want" (and the others of the "Five Giants"). But as my former university chancellor (as of Friday), news anchor Jon Snow, often says, you cannot win a "war on a noun".

So how has the NHS, and the other key planks of the welfare state mentioned, fared in this "war"? It seems obvious that we have not, sixty years on, beaten any of those giants:

Want: we have a society in which the least well off are dependent on the state. If you believe such things matter, and I do, still a fifth of children grow up in relative poverty and the gap between the wealthiest and poorest is larger than ever. Not only that, but as as with "idleness" many are actually trapped in that dependency, facing the highest penalties if they actually manage to find themselves work that might remove them from that dependency in the form of punitive benefits withdrawals rates. None of the myriad benefits in the system are sufficient on their own to sustain life (particularly the pension, now in its hundredth year), so people are often on multiple benefit regimes.

Disease: whilst quite obviously the range of ailments that are now routinely cured or treated is a huge step on from 1948, there is still a six month waiting list for almost any kind of surgery, hundreds of people denied drugs even their own NHS doctors believe may help them, and the whole headless structure is running around trying to meet centrally set targets, which are fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of the NHS - that it should be responsive to particular local needs. In parts of Glasgow East constituency male life expectancy is lower than in some developing countries for example, which, whether it is an improvement on the state of play in 1948 or not is a pretty terrible indictment.

Ignorance: the state education system has become more comprehensive and more centralized. Students are of course now paying for tuition fees in tertiary education, and we see a constant stream of stories from universities and business leaders saying that many people leaving school are functionally illiterate. The most well off are still using private education and the least well off, as Nick Clegg has constantly complained about, seem condemned to inner city sink schools often with little aspiration planted in their heads.

Squalor: this one was primarily about housing. Sure, we had a post-war building boom but now that's looking quite hollow. In fifty years, the UK's housing has become smaller; the only developed nation on the planet where that is the case - elsewhere increased affluence has seen larger, more comfortable homes. If you are stuck on a sink estate, you probably have as much chance as in 1948 of escaping it. Even the right to buy has often failed to give people who were persuaded that buying their fifties built prefabricated type semi (such as the Orlits design currently being demolished all over Oxford) a meaningful asset. And we are in a situation where those who aspire to ownership currently have little hope of being able to afford it.

...and finally Idleness: it is very difficult for work to help the poorest when getting a job can mean lots of hassles with your various benefits and a punitive regime of clawing back those benefits such that you are often effectively earning very little indeed for all the effort of getting a job in the first place and going out to work once you have. And actually I would argue that we want more "idleness". I realize that in the report "idleness" is something either down to the laziness of the individual, or more likely a state enforced on one by lack of work opportunities in the economy. However as we get closer to the ideal of having many menial jobs and tasks done for us by machines, the idea that the only way of gaining purchasing power with which to participate in the complicated world economy is through work should be rethought in any case. It is nothing to crow about that people still have to remain wage slaves in order to achieve some measure of financial security.

So, on a purely cursory glance, these five "wars" are not going well sixty years on. Some battles have been won, and clearly some things are better in so many ways than it would have been at the end of World War II. But some of the problems are as intractable as ever, others are almost victims of their own successes; for example some of the problems of the NHS of course stem from them now being able to treat far more problems than previously and so creating more demand for itself. But I'd go one step further, and say that the weapons deployed in these various wars have in fact entrenched dependency, reduced choice, stifled innovation and competition. Not only that, but they are hugely expensive, now between them consuming not far off half of all our national income and may be suffering from the law of diminishing returns.

It is time we realized that the approach is itself wrong. That, as Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".

...so, what can we do ...?

I know the Lib Dems are always on about how terrible it is that other parties plagiarise our own policies and take the credit, and I thoroughly approve of today's "Making it Happen" announcement and policy document at least as to direction. But might I humbly suggest that when our people are scrambling around in the bowels of government looking for these savings that seem to have been promised by every aspiring government since Nebuchadnezzar they could do a lot worse than to shamelessly borrow these fellow travellers' ideas on demolishing the QUANGOcracy.

There. £64bn savings. Done!

I caught this on the BBC:

It is this last part that really gets me riled:

What utter bollocks, to use the technical turn of phrase, when applied to a parent. In the public gaze, there will be a parent taking a taxi with their child, acting as parent and under their authority alone as parent. The whole purpose of the CRB type legislation is to reassure those with primary caring responsibilities for vulnerable people, usually parents and other guardians, that others, when put in positions of contact or responsibility for their wards, children and relatives, have been checked out.

Do parents living in council housing have to be "CRBed"? Does a parent waiting with their child in an NHS medical facility waiting room have to be "CRBed"? Or even a parent stepping onto school property to deliver their child right to the door? In what way are those different from this case?