Condemning the sludge in the public service pond

I do not often run ad hominem attacks on public servants. It is often hard to distinguish between their personal failings and those of the system which they work in and, for the most part, it would be like criticising the dog because his treadmill malfunctions, or beating one of those bovine creatures who push a pole round a well because the water dries up. We employ whole offices of people like that – whole departments of state in the case of DEFRA or the Home Office – and can’t really complain because dull unthinking drudges perform dull unthinking tasks in dull unthinking ways.

Politicians are different, of course. They solicit our votes by their claims to competence, honesty and personal charm, and if Ed Balls fails on all three counts, it is proper to say so. Caroline Flint cares about us all so much, but we don’t care for her and I hope she knows it (although she, of course, has more in common, intellectually speaking, with the pole than with the ox which pushes it, and may not notice the general air of mockery and contempt which attends her every pronouncement).

The silly cow of Milton Keynes

Housing Minister Caroline Flint, seeking to justify the so-called eco-towns which the government proposes to dump on rural Conservative areas, tells the Times that Milton Keynes has more bio-diversity than the fields which preceded it.

I remember the fields which used to be there, the lanes which wound around them and the villages which interspersed them. A very attractive place it was too, with more than enough bio-diversity, and real cows, not the concrete ones which gave Milton Keynes its only claim to fame.

Now we have another real cow keen to build more Milton Keyneses, this one with concrete between her ears. Caroline Flint is obviously keen to give a green veneer to Gordon Brown’s vast new housing estates.

Eco-towns – a no-brainer

If you start at the bottom of the tree of intelligent life, you would first find the transport officers of Oxfordshire County Council. You would go up past stones and worms and ferns and come to Caroline Flint and John Prescott, then on up past goldfish and those responsible for planning our railways. After that, you would pass planning officers, Vicky Pollard and reach all the way to Stephen Fry at the top.

All of those except Vicky Pollard and Stephen Fry (and the goldfish of course) have a hand in the planning of the eco-towns which NuLabour intends to dump on areas with Conservative majorities, including Weston-on-the-Green, just down the road from here.

Banning tea, ladders and school outings

Three recent stories show us not only where the world is going but where our money is going.

An art student writes to the Times to say that he had gone into college to find that he was booked in for a two hour session on how to use a ladder.

An art teacher interviewed in the Times said that he cannot take children on a spontaneous visit to the art gallery across the road from the school because of the complex risk assessment forms he would have to fill out.

The School Food Trust suggests that children under 16 should not be allowed tea or coffee because it has minimal nutritional value and because of the health and safety implications.

The people responsible for this sort of nonsense have far greater power over our everyday life than Gordon Brown does. Who gave it to them? Why do we put up with it? What does it all cost, in pure cash terms, never mind the cultural and other losses?

Ladders are a particular obsession with the heath and safety pygmies. They are banned almost everywhere, so that scaffolding or expensive towers must be hired to change light bulbs or to perform similar simple tasks. The people who ordain this are themselves immune from considerations of expense or practicality – it is not their money and every new restriction (which generally need no consideration by Parliament) helps create more work for the expanding public service. In other words, it keeps the civil servants in jobs.

I have come across these school risk assessments or, rather, the parental forms which underlie them. One of my children was due to attend a lecture on philosophy at the Town Hall. The form we had to complete included a question as to his ability to swim, which I was invited to rate on a scale. I said that I thought his swimming ability was adequate for attendance at a philosophy lecture in the Town Hall, and I pictured some dim little “officer” at Oxfordshire County Council diligently typing it all into a computer. I consoled myself with the thought that at least they had the information now and could just look it up when the need next arose. Not a bit of it. Not long afterwards, my son had to do something similarly dangerous, and another blank copy of the same form appeared. The whole thing is a meaningless formality, an unnecessary burden on teachers and no more than a job creation exercise for council officials.

As to the tea, what is the School Food Trust? I think it was set up as a sop to Jamie Oliver after his campaign for proper food in schools (remember that? – the government rushed to announce that it had set money side for a new “initiative”, which proved to be money already budgeted for). Its nutrition director, one Dr Michael Nelson, said that children needed to be encouraged to choose water or more nutritious options such as fruit juice or milk. “If you want children to eat more healthily, then the range of choice in schools needs to be restricted to healthier options only”.

There was no suggestion that tea or coffee was unhealthy – indeed there is evidence to the contrary – nor any supporting evidence to support the alleged health and safety risk, but here you get some jumped-up little pen-pusher seeking to deny children a harmless drink on the grounds that they must be “encouraged” to have things which “they” thought better for them. It is all very New Labour, so very Caroline Flint-ish.

Why do we stand for it? There is more to all this than denial of choice – that choice which New Labour claims so loudly to promote. All these things create unnecessary jobs for people who would otherwise be unemployed, involve expense both to the state and to the end-user, and (as with the abandoned visits to the art gallery), deprive people of useful, educative, or just plain enjoyable things.

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Few no smoking signs in New York

Why do we need all the no smoking signs? Is it because Caroline Flint was herself too dim to manage without signs everywhere, or is it just corrupt government spreading its patronage to buy votes?

New York is famously not short of signs and notices. I cannot put my finger on why, but they do not offend in the same way as they do over here. That may in part be that the context suits them better, but somehow they generally seem more useful. A high proportion of them actually convey information which people need.

New York has much the same laws about smoking in public places as we have. What it does not have is screaming notices to tell you about it. Those places which had such signs anyway – food shops for example – still have them, but there is no equivalent of the statutory obligation to display a sign in every doorway.

Scraping the New Labour Ministerial Barrel

Dim Totty Caroline Flint becomes Minister for Housing in the reshuffle made necessary as disgraced minister Peter Hain’s fingertips are prised from his two posts. Yvette Cooper’s reward for screwing up the implementation of Home Information Packs is promotion to be Chief Secretary of the Treasury.

The Select Committee didn’t put it quite like that, of course when they condemned Yvette Cooper’s performance over HIPs. They referred to another failure of delivery, poor preparation and a retreat, decisions..taken on political rather than economic grounds and a failure of nerve. As the wheel comes off the Brown economic chariot – as Brown and Darling dither and back-track over Northern Rock and CGT – all we need is another Treasury minister with a track record of poor preparation and failure of nerve.

Googling for Caroline Flint’s bits

Time for an update on the continuing saga of Caroline Flint’s body parts.

Regular readers will recall that I have a double interest in Caroline Flint (see the posts here). One was deliberate – as a libertarian smoker, I have a deep hatred of politicians and others who think they know better than I do what is right for me. She also gave me a model piece for testing theories about Google searching.

A useful role at last for Caroline Flint

The Times carries a story about pubs hiring strippers to try and woo back the trade lost as a result of the smoking ban. It wonders of this is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I wonder if stripping in pubs might provide a useful occupation for Caroline Flint before she loses her looks entirely.

Gordon Brown is rather devious

I heard this snippet as I passed an old couple out for a walk this evening. Gordon Brown is rather devious the man said. I have no idea what the context was – perhaps there wasn’t one, maybe she had just said “a penny for your thoughts” and he said the most obvious thing which came into his head.

It is a nice piece of English understatement though, more subtle than the hackneyed ones about the Pope being a Catholic or as to what bears do in the woods. Gordon Brown is rather devious. A host of other examples come to mind.

• Tony Blair is less than honest
• Jade Goody is a little uncultivated
• The Health & Safety officer was fairly cautious
• Caroline Flint is not uninterested in influencing your lifestyle
• The traffic warden was less than understanding
• The Equalities and Diversity officer did not really focus on the opposite viewpoint
• The highways officer was a little slow to grasp the point
• that is not very clever, John Prescott
• Patricia Hewitt did not find it easy to face the challenges of her responsibilities
• Hazel Blears can be a little annoying

And so on. It begins to sound like those tactful obituaries where a wealth of criticism is lightly buried behind a muted phrase, so that “He did not suffer fools gladly” means he was a domineering bully.

Gordon Brown is rather devious. Someone ought to offer a prize for understatement of the year.

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Dressing down for Gordon Brown

I put up a post last night called Up yours, Ms Flint, in which I puzzled over a photograph of former Health Minister Caroline Flint which appeared in the Times last week.

The photograph was deeply unflattering. I could not understand to how a woman whose only asset is her looks, and whose PR is generally slick if unsubtle, could have allowed herself to appear looking like Dracula’s elder sister just after coming second in a Ukrainian tractor-driving contest.