We are going to need a strong judiciary in these dying years of New Labour. Four events reported today remind us how contemptuous Government has become of those who elect it.

The Government announced plans to exempt MPs from a requirement to detail their expenses. The Treasury announced that it would not be hurrying to compensate those who lost their pensions in Equitable Life. The Government said that Heathrow Airport is to be extended without Parliamentary debate. And John Mortimer, fierce fighter for individual liberty, died. I do not suppose there was in fact a connection between this last event and the other three, but it is easy to see one.

The announcement about MP’s expenses shows direct contempt for the law. The story begins with a Freedom of Information request for a detailed breakdown of the expenses claims of 14 MPs. The request was not complied with and the House of Commons clocked up £150,000 fighting to keep secret the sums which we spend on the lifestyle of those we elect to represent us. The High Court upheld the FoI request and ordered disclosure of the details, and the Commons said they would comply. They dragged their feet, complaining of the cost of compliance, and meanwhile refused further FoI requests on the basis that all details would be published by October.

Today’s announcement severely limits the amount of information which will in fact be published and merely increases the headings under which information will be provided. The change is introduced by statutory instrument which means effectively that Parliament is changing the law to grant itself an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, and spitting in the eye both of the judge who ordered publication and the public whose money its members pocket with such abandon.

Even while the Government was announcing that Commons pigs could keep their noses in the public trough in secrecy, the Treasury was announcing a scheme designed to ensure that many of those who lost money in Equitable Life would die before they saw any compensation for their losses. They did not put it quite like that, of course. Just as Harriet Harman had sold the expenses cover-up as greater transparency, Treasury Minister Yvette Cooper, whilst apologising for the regulatory failures (some of them anyway) and maladministration which lost Equitable policyholders their money eight years ago, outlined a compensation scheme so cumbersome that it will take years for any money to reach the victims. Even then, it will effectively be means-tested – a concept which is irrelevant to the losses which policyholders suffered.

The government has rejected most of the recommendations made by the Ombudsman – as with the High Court order about MP’s expenses, the Government simply ignores what it does not like. Twenty odd years ago, Gordon Brown fought fiercely for compensation for victims of the Barlow Clowes scandal. His famed moral compass has taken a change of direction since then.

It is ironic that the denial of money to the Equitable policyholders should have been announced by Yvette Cooper. She and her husband, the ghastly Ed Balls, were reported to Parliaments sleaze watchdog, the Commons’ Members Estimate Committee, for apparent abuse of the perk which allows MPs to claim reimbursement of mortgages on their second home. Cooper and Balls bought a big house in London and were (and presumably still are) pocketing the mortgage costs although the house is clearly their main residence. Perhaps paying out the Equitable victims would reduce the funds available to cover this.

The Heathrow decision is plain wrong on all sorts of grounds, not least the environmental ones which the government is so full of when it comes, for example, to taxing cars – recall the budget change which imposed without notice a higher tax on owners of older vehicles. The environmental effect of those is trivial compared with the effect which the extra take-offs and landings will have in terms of noise and emissions. The plans also involve the destruction of 700 homes which does not sit well with the Government’s urgent plans to dump little boxes all over the Green Belt to meet the housing crisis.

The real issue here is not the exchange of arguments over the impact of emissions and other environmental concerns – if I assume that the Government’s estimates of adverse impact are wrong, it is because where New Labour is not actually lying, it is almost always incorrect in its assumptions. What matters more is the refusal to let Parliament debate a question which is of such magnitude and which has aroused such passions.

So why is the Government so keen to expand Heathrow? One can think of all kinds of reasons why a cash-strapped party, many of whose members face almost certain redundancy by June 2010, would be willing to cosy up to big business interests whilst it is in their power to do so. They will lose all those expenses for one thing. Perhaps some of them had their retirement funds with Equitable Life. Where you cannot see a clear public interest, keep an eye out for the private ones.

Sir John Mortimer was a champion of individual liberty and the rule of law whose lifelong support for the Labour Party was ground away by New Labour’s erosion of ancient freedoms. A Labour Government which defies a High Court ruling by legislating to keep its members’ expenses secret, which deliberately denies compensation to victims of Government neglect, and which ignores Parliament to authorise a bitterly-contested airport development, was not the Labour Party he supported for so many years.  Dying on the day that Labour did all three of these things was almost a form of protest.

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A new study shows that government claims about lives saved by speed cameras are overstated. This is ammunition against the free-spending little people who run our local authority highways departments. As recession closes in, councillors and others who have been rubber-stamping big budgets are going to have to start questioning what the money is for and why it is necessary to spend it.

Researchers at Liverpool University have knocked Government claims that 100 lives a year are saved by speed cameras. Whilst speed cameras do reduce accidents, the numbers are exaggerated. The research shows a fall in accidents of 19% compared with the claimed 50%.

Does this matter very much, you might ask. After all, this Government belches out false statistics daily and has, indeed, devoted more energy to rigging the apparent outcomes of initiatives than it has on the initiatives themselves. It does matter, and for reasons which go beyond the actual facts behind this research and beyond motoring. Money is wasted in vast quantities on things which make little difference; things which really do matter are neglected in favour of those which yield apparently good outcomes; the police, who need all the friends they can get at the moment, are tarred with the fall-out of policies to which they do not necessarily subscribe; and any little surviving regard for government (as opposed merely to this Government) takes another pasting.

The Liverpool research recognizes what policemen and highways officers do not – that several factors contribute to an accident, including some which are entirely random. Dr Linda Mountain who led the research put it this way:

“Although some parts of the road network are undoubtedly more dangerous than others, there is also a degree of randomness in where accidents occur – driver error, bad luck etc. – which means that an accident can happen anywhere”.

Mountain used Empirical Bayes to assess the likely effect of random factors on the statistics. This approach to probability theory takes account of known facts and empirical measurements which compare the context being reviewed with other relevant contexts. The approach taken by the researchers allowed them to factor in known and estimated variables and to take account of randomness.

This is all rather different from the approach taken by the police, highways officials and others who make up the speed camera partnerships – or “safety cameras” as they like to call them to give a positive spin on implications of punishment and stealth taxation which their common name implies. The application of Bayesian Probability to road safety is not likely to cut much ice with a Plod sucking his pencil and a county highways officer scratching his bottom in a vain attempt to stimulate thought. Here in Oxfordshire, the expression “thick as a highways officer” is in general use to describe anyone who was at the back of the queue when the brains were handed out, and the police are not renowned for their intellectual skills.

The policeman is motivated by the idea of delegating part of his job to a machine. The simplistic notion that speed equals danger converts easily into the idea that if you can catch people who drive fast – an easily measurable factor – you have solved the problem and can retire to your desk to fill in forms, The biggest single element of randomness – bad driving – is no longer supervised. White van man can tail-gate, overtake on blind corners and do all the other things which cause accidents without fear that he will be caught, as long as he knows where the speed cameras are. The cameras also have the plus of raising revenue without difficult subjective decisions (all that thinking!) and contested court hearings.

The highways officer is driven by a number of factors, none of them actually based on a proper assessment of hazard and risk – these are, in fact, interchangeable terms to people who are this stupid. “Risk” has become the possibility of being blamed for something, and is defined by two things – whether an accident has happened at least once before at a particular place, and the number of people who cry that “something must be done”. A single accident, whatever its cause, is enough if it is followed by lots of shouting.

The best example of this is on Oxford’s Eastern Bypass where a woman caused a serious accident when her over-laden car crossed the central reservation and hit another. The woman was clearly negligent and was jailed for it. Speed per se played no part as a cause of the accident. Yet within days, Oxfordshire County Council agreed to spend £600,000 putting concrete barriers down the middle of the reservation and imposed a speed limit of 50 mph. No consideration of causation, probability, cost or balance against other priorities played any part in informing the decisions. An accident had occurred, people were whining about it, and the officers’ recommendation to do something – anything – was hastily rubber-stamped by the hopeless little people we elect as councillors. The difficulty here is the reluctance of elected councillors to ignore the technical people they employ, however incompetent those people turn out to be.

Highways officers are driven by other things beside fear of being blamed. They love signs; imposing restrictions gives them a power they otherwise lack – look at me, they are saying, I may only be a despised little pen-pusher with a whining voice and a clip-on tie, but I can screw up your journey for you; and they get to be responsible (at least in the narrow sense of that word) for spending a lot of money.

We need not, of course, apply this degree of thought to every highways alteration, whether by academics at a university or dim little highways officers. Speed cameras are rather different to other works in that they raise revenue and are not merely an expense. Nevertheless, it would be good to have some sort of risk/reward analysis made before money is laid out on what are often patently unnecessary works. As we head for recession, with billions in public money already pissed against the wall by low-grade local authority people, Oxfordshire’s highways officers are still tampering with road layouts with no perceptible benefit in mind, at least not one which could be described as necessary.

In that context, it is important to know that the government’s statistics on deaths prevented by speed cameras are seriously overstated. Just now, when money is short and when companies and individuals are having to make serious assessments as to what it is necessary to spend money on and what is optional, even, those high-spending but largely useless leeches who work for local authorities are going to start having to make serious judgements as to what really must be done. We don’t expect Exponential Bayes from them (the merest glimmer of intelligent thought would be a start), but elected councillors have some ammunition from the Liverpool study to begin questioning some of the highways officers’ assertions that this or that expenditure is really necessary.

The brighter policemen are beginning to get the point. Last week, Ian Johnston, President of the Police Superindents’ Association said that public confidence in the police had been “dented and bruised”, and singled out speed cameras as having erected a barrier between public and police. That has to be balanced against the recent bad news that Richard Brunstrom, the deeply stupid Chief Constable of North Wales known as the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban, is not retiring this year as had been hoped. On balance, perhaps Mr Plod is beginning to learn that he needs some measure of public support and that street crime and burglary deserve at least as much of his attention as motorists going a little over the speed limit.

As for the Government, there have been occasional signs that even New Labour is wary of upsetting the large motoring lobby more than it has to and that criminalising decent people as well as soaking them in taxation is not a vote-winner. If Gordon Brown is looking for economies, he could start with the dead-heads in local authority highways offices. Perhaps he could start with Oxfordshire County Council’s highways department.

The tail end of Summer has seen a spate of stories about minor officials with an acute grasp of the regulations and no brain. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency would rather see a girl drown in compliance with the rules than save her by breaching them. Chichester Council declined to pick up rubbish in a four inch deep stream because they had no-one qualified to wear Wellington boots. And a Canterbury council official threatened a 13 year old boy with an ASBO and an £80 fine for putting up notices about his lost cat.

When Gordon Brown looks back over New Labour’s failures he will find that much of the hatred which he and Labour have inspired will derive from the uncontrolled zeal of stupid officials like this. Labour has created the context – an avalanche of petty regulation and armies of petty pen-pushers to enforce them. There is an economic cost to add to all the other economic costs – compliance amounts to an additional tax and all these dim little people have to be paid for – but the cost in popular support is greater.

By “popular support”, I don’t just mean what people do with their votes. Every incident like this erodes public backing for authority and distances rulers from ruled. If everything you do is an offence, why bother to try and comply with the rules? It makes it worse that whilst minor infractions of rules and of law are pursued with vigour and apparent disregard for their cost, there are no resources for street crime and burglary.

Who are these people anyway, these minor officials with major powers over our daily life? If you are not bright enough to be a bank clerk or shop girl, not sufficiently dedicated to be a teacher, not brave enough to join the police, or the army, not skilled enough to lay bricks and not strong enough to carry them, and insufficiently commercial to flip burgers or stack shelves, you join a local authority or one of the many agencies to which public functions are devolved. You do not have to think, you will not get laid off however useless you are and however bad the economy gets, and you can retire early with a fine pension. Such bodies become the dustbin of the job market, sweeping up all the dross which no-one else wants to employ.

The Maritime and Coastguard Authority is a statutory body whose web site claims that it is “committed to preventing loss of life”. It has a mission statement and a diversity policy and all the other crap which public bodies love. Its responsibilities include supervision of coastal safety and inspection of vessels. On the whole, as government agencies go, it has a useful function and is – or was – despised less than most of them.

The Hope Cove inflatable rescue boat had failed a safety test for defects which certainly needed attention but did not render it unseaworthy. The volunteer crew, alarmed at the MCA’s failure to do anything about the defects, had paid from their own funds to have it repaired so that it would be available for the busy Summer season. The MCA had not managed to find the time to come and reinspect the boat.

When a 13 year old girl was carried 150 yards out to sea and was in danger of drowning, the crew tried to get permission to go out and rescue her. They lost radio contact and went out anyway, saving the girl’s life. It would have taken the nearest lifeboat 20 minutes to arrive, by which time the girl would almost certainly have been dead.

Brave men, you and I would say, gratefully. That was not the MCA’s reaction. Some little prat came out to tow the boat away and the men are threatened with discipline. The inevitable spokesman said:
The health and safety of the boat crews and those who they may render assistance to is of paramount importance.
‘We have identified a serious breach of health and safety procedures and they are currently being investigated.
He estimated that it would take eight weeks for the MCA to investigate repair or replacement. Those eight weeks covered the peak of the holiday season.

We have heard stories like this before – the fireman punished because he risked his own lives to save another’s in breach of some technicality in the rules, and Police Community Support Officers standing around as a boy drowned in Wigan because they had not been trained to step into water

The latter point recurs in the Chichester story. A parish councillor rang the council to get them to remove rubbish from a bin which had fallen into a 4 inch stream causing rubbish, including dog faeces, to gather where children walked to school. The council’s first shot was to say that the bin was a private one and not their concern. When challenged on this, they said that they had no-one qualified to wear Wellington boots and that safety harnesses would also be required. The parish councillor collected the mess himself in ten minutes and took it to the tip.

The third story, the boy putting notices on lamp-posts advertising for his missing cat, illustrates what happens when you give power to dim people. You cannot give them discretion because discretion requires a certain level of thinking capacity and, as with traffic wardens, the people who deal with our rubbish are… rubbish. There are, of course, laws and by-laws which prohibit fly-posting. Strictly, they apply equally to a concert promoter plastering the town with advertisements and a 13 year old boy desperate to find his beloved cat. Most of us would see a distinction and would treat the two circumstances differently.

Not the little plonker at Canterbury Council, who threatened the boy with an ASBO and a fine. You can just picture him, can’t you, from your own experience of council officials? Thick as planks, whiny voice, clip-board in hand and pens in shirt pocket, unloved by his wife, despised by his children, and determined that someone should take notice of him. Fortunately, someone higher up the tree spotted the potential for embarrassment and over-rode the official, conceding that he had been over-zealous and apologising to the boy.

Chichester Council recently ordered its staff to avoid expressions like “man in the street” and “manning the switchboard” because they are “inherently sexist”. How much publicly-funded resource goes into this sort of nonsense whilst rubbish lies uncollected? Has Canterbury fixed all the things which really matter, that its staff have time to pursue heart-broken boys looking for their cats? How many deaths by drowning would the MCA consider a fair trade for strict compliance with its regulations?

I would tie the MCA official to a stake and watch the tide come in. I would make the Chichester bureaucrat eat the dog poo and his Wellington boots. The lamp-posts of Canterbury would be a good place to hang the Fly-Post Prevention Officer from.

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We have a dislikeable man with no interpersonal skills in a coastal town in Suffolk. Although thought by some to be skilled at his business, his biggest achievement was thrown away when the climate turned against him. He is particularly unpleasant to junior staff. Everything he touches turns bad and his attempts to describe his vision for the future turn into repetitious rants which no-one listens to or believes. He is hated by almost everyone as much for his character and demeanour as for his inability to handle events. After his latest disaster, even his few friends advise him to push off and sink out of sight. His departure is barely noticed save that the sun comes out as soon as he is gone.

So much for Gordon Brown. This is also, of course, the plot of Peter Grimes, and it is a happy chance which took me to see Peter Grimes whilst Gordon Brown was sulking in Southwold, a few miles along the coast from the Borough (Aldborough) where Grimes is set.

Following Boris Johnson’s lead (he recently had to explain to a Labour MP that Mercutio was a character in a play called Romeo & Juliet by a chap called William Shakespeare) I should explain that Peter Grimes is an opera – a play whose narrative is carried by words set to music – by an English composer called Benjamin Britten. Not all Labour MPs are that thick, of course, but NuLab’s legacy of cultural deprivation means that one has to explain almost everything not to do with football, sex or fast food.

The plotting is not exact. Grimes’s gathering skills lay with fish not tax revenue but in throwing away his biggest catch when the weather turned he differs from Brown only in that Brown had already wasted his (that is, our) money when the economic storms hit.

It is not clear who the apprentices are in this parallel New Labour world. The common element between them in the opera is that they die whilst in Grimes’ charge. So much has died in Brown’s watch – honesty and decency, educational standards, under-equipped soldiers, the Labour Party itself – and the dead apprentices could represent all of them. “Whatever you put into Gordon Brown’s care will die before your eyes”, is perhaps the message.

There are parallels in the way the two men react to adverse events. They have in common that they were already much disliked by those around them before the events which open the story. In Grimes’s case, the general view is that Grimes was responsible for the long-drawn-out death of his companion on his otherwise successful voyage. Much the same was true of the slow political death of Tony Blair. Although the inquest finds that the death was accidental, Grimes cries out that suspicions will always remain that he was to blame, thus showing considerably more self-awareness than Brown did.

Both men claim to be aware that they must change before they will be accepted, but neither has any plan or policy which might achieve it. Grimes bangs on about doing well so that Ellen Orford will appreciate his true worth, but when she tries to get close to him he hits her round the face. Gordon Brown similarly drones on about getting the message across to the voters but then hits them with a 10 pence tax hike, increased car tax and so on. The crucial difference between them is that Grimes at least acknowledges the need for real change whilst Brown thinks merely that that his failure is one of communication.

Disaster strikes. Grimes loses his second apprentice and Brown loses a safe Labour seat with a 22% shift. The advice given to Grimes by his only friend is to take his boat out to sea and sink it. I would guess that Brown’s colleagues are giving him much the same advice.

There is one last parallel. During much of the opera a violent storm rages but the day on which Grimes’s boat is seen sinking dawns calms and sunny. On the day when Gordon Brown finally ousted Tony Blair it started to rain, and it rained solidly for weeks, culminating in last July’s floods. The mere presence of Gordon Brown has brought us disaster after disaster. If, like me, you believe that fate rewards and punishes you for the way you live your life, then Gordon Brown deserves all he gets – I am far from being a fan of Tony Blair, but what Brown is going through now is a fair return for his disloyal conduct during the Blair years and for his dishonesty in economic matters.

Apart from his dislikeable personality, Peter Grimes seems in some sense to be a canker in the Borough, whose presence brings public trouble – the storm – as well as his private difficulties. Brown is an unlucky charm for his party and for the country. The sooner he takes his boat out to sea and sinks it, the better for all of us.

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It is often observed that dogs resemble their owners which, if true, would make me a handsome black chap, friendly to everyone he meets, always thinking the best of everyone and eager to please, absolutely none of which is true of me (nor, indeed, and perhaps fortunately, do I pee on every bush and rest my head on visitors’ knees under the table). Have you noticed, though, that public servants somehow acquire the characteristics which suit their jobs? Or perhaps people who look like that gravitate to jobs which suit them.

I first observed this when, for reasons now lost to me, I was standing one day near the doors of DEFRA as the working day began. As I watched the little civil servants scurrying in for their day’s paper-shuffling, I was strongly reminded of being taken to Barnstable Market as a child, where we would watch the sheep being herded into pens or onto a lorry – that nervous look as they scuttled round the corner was just the same, and I half expected them to make silly baa-ing noises as they came along the street. In a moment or two they would be at their desks, chewing contentedly amongst their in-trays, safe from the exigencies of real life for a few hours, devising forms and drafting petty regulations to keep them in work until pension-time. Chewing grass and turning it into sheep-shit appears positively useful by comparison.

One expects photographs of Home Office civil servants to have a prison number printed under them. This stems, I think, from their immersion in unlawful activities – fiddling crime statistics, for example, or lying about reconviction rates. It must get to you after a while, this constant evasiveness, living a lie all your life.

Over at Education, they are like Primary School kids – a constant stream of new ideas and shiny initiatives, but no notion of following things through, of learning from mistakes or of doing better tomorrow. Every day is a new opportunity to do something different, and there is that child-like lack of responsibility or blame – if this experiment doesn’t work, we can do another one tomorrow.

The Treasury makes you think of treasure and thence of pirates – not the cuddly Hollywood variety, but the cruel, callous ones of reality. Let’s close this hospital and deny people that treatment. We could make the shares in Network Rail or Northern Rock valueless and simply steal the assets – who cares if a few grannies lose their blouses? If we tax pension funds then a lot of people will suffer reduced pensions but they will get used to it. Our own pensions are secure.

Of all the images of illness or disease which might characterise the civil servants at the Department of Health, the one which comes to mind is obesity. Bloated with public money, they stagger along, unable to move quickly, to change direction, or to control themselves.

As for the people at the Department of Transport, they are as thick as bitumen as it pours onto the road, as slow as a train taking commuters to work, as dim as an unmended street light, as welcome as a hole in the road.

And so it goes on, public money pouring into services manned by people who would be unemployable in the private sector. The outputs from my dog are more valuable than the contribution made by most of these people.

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A self-employed van driver in Wales has been fined for smoking in his own van. What is it about the local authority mindset, why is it even worse in Wales, and do the local police have nothing better to do?

In my post Smoking Snoopers of 25 February 2007, I commented on the fact that the government had handed £29.5 million to local authorities to help them enforce the smoking ban. It coincided with the news that the police no longer bothered – as a matter of policy – to attend at the scene of a burglary. I did not know it at the time, but the sum so allocated was exactly twice the amount which the Treasury (Gordon Brown Prop.) had shaved off the budget for flood relief.

My focus was on the sort of people who would become smoking snoopers, getting their thrills from lurking to catch people enjoying themselves. They would include, I said:

The sludge which collects at the bottom of every local authority pond who get moved from department to department because they are really unemployable even in that undemanding environment, but who cannot be dismissed through political correctness or union strength.

Imagine being all that and Welsh with it!

A year on from the institution of the ban, the officials of Ceredigion council (that’s Cardiganshire for those who do not read Welsh) have leapt into action to mop up some of their share of the equivalent Welsh budget. A petty-minded official is a petty-minded official everywhere and perhaps one from Ceredigion came across the regulations at his remedial reading lessons and set out to find someone to catch.

The trap was apparently part of a “multi-agency operation”, and you can just imagine the excitement of some dim little council runt at being involved in something which sounds like the SAS joining forces with the Drugs Squad. The other half of the “multi-agency operation” was the police force. Whilst one knows that half the staff at local authorities are only employed to keep them out of the dole queue and have plenty of time on their hands, one might hope that the police would have better things to do, even in Wales. Perhaps rustling, or whatever else it is they do with sheep up there, has dropped off.

The real issue here is one of priorities – if Dyfed Powys police really have nothing better to do, then perhaps they should focus on some of the training deficiencies identified in the Home Office audit report of July 2008 – though my attempt to read it came unstuck at a sentence about ”developing a scrutiny of strategic resource leverage”, which might as well be in Welsh for its value as a piece of communication.

To be fair, the report seems to say in summary “Sod all happens here and Dai Plod has it under control”. Even so, there must be more important things to do than to pursue a chap smoking in his own van.

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We used to mock the Germans for the devotion to the outward forms of authority. Back in the days when everything was allowed which was not forbidden, and when Britons were allowed to make their own assessments of risk, we laughed at Fritz because he would do nothing without a notice to tell him he was allowed to and felt adrift if his next step was not laid out in a manual.

Jerome K Jerome summed it up neatly in Three Men on the Bummel, written in 1900.

…your German likes his view from the summit of the hill, but he likes to find there a stone tablet telling him what to look at… If, in addition, he can find a police notice posted on a tree, forbidding him to do something or other, that gives him an extra sense of comfort and security

We don’t laugh at the Germans now, at least not for that reason. Signs and notices litter our every street, every public building, every view, erected by some tiresome little nobody pursuant to some regulation or for fear of litigation. Parish churches bear notices telling us not to smoke, our roads are littered with metalwork erected by highways officers for whom notices are a tangible sign of their power, Health & Safety goons warn, admonish and direct our every move. Port Meadow, on the rural Thames near me, now bears big notices telling us that it is dangerous to use the footpath when it is under water, erected by some thick little man from Oxford City Council.

Madame Tussauds in Berlin briefly exhibited a wax model of Adolf Hitler, sitting at a table in the Bunker. Every effort was made to achieve verisimilitude, not just in the figure but in its setting. Affixed to the wall behind the Fuhrer’s head, however, was a big, bright and very modern notice – a camera in a red circle with a line through it, presumably banning the taking of photographs. It quite ruined any sense of realism – all the modeller’s skill and scene-setter’s art thrown away by one crass notice.

It crossed my mind to wonder if this was meant to be ironic – a trivial symbol of authority set up as counterpoint to and mockery of the most authoritative figure in German history. But no – the German does not do irony. It was just a petty notice stuck up by someone with no feel for context, a dull little functionary who was so keen to ban something that he did not mind ruining the tableau with his notice. The Times photographer was clearly unimpressed by the notice – in theory one should never see a photograph of notice banning the taking of photographs.

By then, Adolf had lost his head, victim of an assault by a builder who brought him down with a rugby tackle and twisted his neck. I would love to do the same to the man who stuck the notices along the Thames.

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Hypocrisy is New Labour’s prime characteristic, and Gordon “Heathcliff” Brown’s injunction to us all not to waste anything is a fine example of Labour – and specifically Brownite – hypocrisy

We are, apparently, throwing away £1bn of food each year. That is indeed something to be corrected, with implications well beyond the £420 per family which a Whitehall study has alleged. It deprives others, it generates waste and it inflates the profits of the supermarkets. It is nothing, however, to what Gordon Brown has wasted.

There is government money of course – expensive consultants, failed IT projects, aborted education schemes, Olympic over-runs, overlapping and contradictory changes in the NHS, almost anything planned by Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper, ID cards – a long list of things which were either unnecessary or cocked up or both. Then there are (or, rather, were) the gold reserves given away at knock-down prices to pay for the other waste.

There is the waste of opportunity – a generation’s secondary education sacrificed, a rail system which could by now be beginning to show the benefit of a decade’s investment, a housing crisis which needs to be resolved, unplanned, in a hurry when it could have been met as it developed, a thousand useful things which could have been done with the money and clout of a government with a large majority in a time of plenty.

Lives have been wasted – not just the obvious ones, the lives of soldiers who (whatever one’s view of the rightness of the wars they are fighting) have died for want of the right equipment, but those who have died because hospitals are unclean and essential drugs are rationed, or because their neighbourhood has descended, unpoliced, into violence and the anarchy of gangs and knives.

Political capital has been wasted, not least through Brown’s unremitting war of attrition against his predecessor, his undermining of Blair’s every attempt to achieve reform – I had little time for Blair, but one wonders what he could have achieved had Brown not been blocking his every move.

All this and so much more has been wasted, and now Gordon Brown tells us off for wasting food. He is quite right, but it sticks in the throat to be lectured on waste by a man who has wasted so much.

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Two stories in Monday’s Times show how some of those who affect to care about children are much more interested in the appearance of caring and in the alleged purity of their views than in the actual effect of their actions on the children. Both are cases of do-gooders doing obvious harm.

The first article was headed Price of healthier school meals may be just too high for many. It is about new nutrition regulations which will come into force later this year and which require schools to provide details of calories, fat and nutrients in each meal. As with everything else from this government, there are targets for these things, and with them an extra expense which must be borne by the schools, the parents or the caterers.

430,000 fewer pupils ate school meals last year than in 2006, so the campaign for healthier food kick-started by Jamie Oliver has already driven large numbers of children away from the school canteen and out into the streets, where they buy what they like – crisps and coke generally – and annoy shop-keepers and passers by. They just don’t like the food they are being given. The new regulations will certainly drive more of them down the same route.

Now, the principle that children should get healthy food at school is clearly a good one. It comes at a price, however, in this case two prices. One is literally a matter of price – someone has to pay for the (allegedly) higher-quality food and, as always with New Labour, that someone is not the government which imposes the burdens (the “extra” money which the government promised in a panic to buy off Oliver’s successful campaign proved, in true Gordon Brown style, not to be new money at all).

The other price is one of supervision. The more time children spend under the eye of their teachers the better, particularly when it is clear that many of them get no adequate training from their parents in the social, as well as the nutritional, value of eating with others.

Of all New Labour’s new laws, the one which recurs most is the law of unintended (though usually foreseeable) consequences. It comes as no surprise that regulations intended to improve diet should in fact result in 430,000 children dropping out of what was probably the only proper meal they had. If it was less than ideal in nutritional terms, it was certainly better than the crisps and coke.

Inevitably, a Labour minister has a prescriptive solution. Someone called Kevin Brennan is apparently the Under Secretary of State for Children, Young People and Families – with driftwood like Beverley Hughes and Jim Knight as Secretaries of State one would not expect too much from an Under Secretary of State. Kevin Brennan has said that children should be forced to stay at school at lunchtime. He did not, it seems, ask head teachers what they thought about this, or he might have found in advance that they consider the idea unworkable. He appears to have no positive suggestions as to how children might be encouraged to stay in school – NuLab is not very strong on positive suggestions, and even less strong on the idea of taking the views of those who actually have to deal with the day-to-day consequences – to say nothing of the costs – of their regulations and pronouncements.

The second article concerns adoption. Headed Social workers are urged to be flexible on ethnic adoptions, it reports that the adoption agencies’ insistence on ethnically matching would-be adoptive parents with children needing adoption is resulting in large numbers of children being left in care, whilst otherwise suitable adopters are ignored. One of those responsible for this stance is quoted as saying “When we talk to couples, we explain that they have to meet all the child’s needs and ethnicity is one of their needs. They would struggle to meet that, no matter how well-meaning and understanding they are”.

Whose perception of needs are we talking about here? Not the child’s, nor the would-be adopters. What this woman is saying is that children are better off in the dubious care of a local authority where some form-filling functionary will tick a box to show that their “ethnic needs” are being met, than in a loving family.

There are of, course, many excellent and devoted social workers. It is not a job I would choose to do. It is, however, a line of work which attracts rather too many who fancy playing God with the lives of others, and who elevate their own ideas of what is ideal and correct over the real needs of real people. It does, of course, have the incidental advantage of creating work for social workers, especially the desk-bound, form-filling kind with a “degree” in box-ticking.

In a perfect world, every child would be offered a meal at school which he or she would positively enjoy eating, and every child of whatever ethnicity would be matched by adoptive parents of the same origin and beliefs. This is not a perfect world. It is the brown, unpleasant, world of Gordon “Heathcliff” Brown. New Labour’s blind certainty that it knows what is best for us has passed down into the hands of a vast army of interfering zealots who have carved out for themselves roles way beyond their abilities – the sort of people who do not care if 430,000 school-children would rather skip meals than eat their virtuous food, and who prefer that children remain in care rather than breach their purist guidelines on ethnicity.

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It was (lack of) service as usual on First Great Western on the day after an unprecedented piece of good time-keeping. If FGW paid as much attention to providing a service as they do protecting their revenue, we might be happier to contribute to their profits.

Something quite outside my experience occurred last week. My First Great Western train into London and the one which brought me out both ran to time.

This is like those fabled happenings which one hears of but never quite believes – Gordon Brown is not always unpleasant to everyone he meets; Ed Balls can let a day go by without either launching an “initiative” or filing an expenses claim; there is a highways officer at Oxfordshire County Council with an IQ in double figures; a Phoenix has been seen in Oxford. None of these seems in the least plausible, but if FGW can run two trains on time in one day then anything is possible.

They made up for it the following day when my Oxford-bound train ran slowly from Didcot to just outside Oxford, and then waited for ages by the cemetery before drawing in to the station. The Customer Relations Manager or whatever they call Guards these days, was duly apologetic, albeit in that formulaic and uninformative way which tends more to increase than to assuage the anger of those who have been inconvenienced.

When we eventually reached the concourse, there was a further delay whilst we all queued through the ticket barriers – you would think that they would waive that requirement when they have already held us up.

One of the staff lounging about by the barriers had Revenue Protection Officer on a badge on his tit. I gestured towards it and said I thought that we could do with some Customer Protection Officers. He stared back silently with stupid, expressionless, piggy eyes, presumably believing, like his masters, that the protection of revenue is more important that the provision of a proper service. His dull incomprehension may have been just that – for some reason, it is not a qualification for this job that applicants can speak English.

A notice informed me that there had been a Meet the Managers opportunity earlier in the evening. One of my recurring and most pleasurable dreams involves me kicking just such a person repeatedly in the head, one kick for every hour of my life wasted because of the useless incompetence of railway managers, an entire football league’s worth of kicks. It was probably as well that the managers had pushed off home by the time my train eventually arrived.

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