Family Tax Credits: The Farce Continues

So, we learn today, that in the year today, the government managed to overpay £1.8 billion in Family Tax Credits. Apparently, however, we should be reassured that it won't be so bad in the next year: the government expects to overpay a third less. Great, so the government is only overpaying £1.2 billion.

What?

What?

What?

1. Why is the government so monumentally incompetent at calculating what is and what isn't due?

2. More pressingly, why is the government taxing these low income households in the first place?

Call me outrageous, but I have always believed that the poorest families should not be paying tax. And, that includes National Insurance. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the cost of collecting and then reimbursing taxes is a ludicrous waste of public money. Why not up the tax-free allowance to £10,000?

It's not rocket science now Gordon, is it?

Violent feelings

Yet another tragic story in the news has failed to surprise me: that of Tom Grant's being stabbed when he made the mistake of trying to intervene in an altercation on a train.

Whenever I read about yet another grizzly story of GBH, murder, rape, etc, I often ask myself whether there really is more violence around these days, or whether I have just become more sensitised to these reports and therefore think there are more of them than there used to be, when in fact there are not. Given the frequency with which these stories appear, however, and the official statistics (already pointed out on this blog), I am forced to conclude that society is indeed becoming more violent.

As well as the increasing violence in this country, the stabbings of Tom Grant and Kiyan Prince highlight a disturbing trend. According to reports, both of these young men intervened in a fight in which they were not involved in order to protect the vulnerable underdog. Both of them were promising, popular students and both of them are now dead. The message which is being sent loud and clear is that if you see someone doing something obviously wrong and obviously harmful to another, you should turn a blind eye or be prepared to accept that you may join in the original victim's fate. These thugs are so emboldened by the incompetence, impotence and apathy of the criminal justice system, that they feel entitled to carry on as they please with impunity, and woe betide anyone who tries to stop them.

I have experienced a few minor, but nasty incidents myself. For example, when I looked at a brutish looking man casually throwing his fast food wrappings in the street, he rushed at me screaming abuse. Another time, I saw three kappa-beshelled youths brazenly attacking the locks on a mountain bike with an enormous pair of boltcutters in broad daylight and was told to keep walking or to risk discovering to what other purposes their boltcutters could be put. These, as I said, are minor incidents, but they have left me cowed. Now, whenever I see an argument, or a kid with their feet on the seats of the train, or a man urinating in the street, or any number of unpleasant manifestations of human behaviour, I look down, and walk on. I am too afraid to intervene, for fear of bringing the attention of these yobs upon myself.

I know I am not alone. Most people who see someone being beaten up, or even someone collapsed on the street, will not intervene, for fear of endangering their lives. It is a damning indictment on the state of our communities, not to mention a tragedy for our society, that we have reached the point where the majority of the population is held to ransom by an unchecked and violent minority.

Brief hiatus...

As outrageous as it is to do this so early on in a blog's life, I'm going to be away for a few days... lil' sis is getting hitched (hence the enforced field trip to Moss Bros)

normal rants, etc will resume early next week.

Marriage and Divorce: the true cost

It's always been said that the only people who really profit by divorce are the lawyers, but now the House of Lords has issued its landmark ruling on how the marital pot should be divvied up on divorce, and confirming that the role of the wife as home maker and mother is of equal financial value to the partnership as that of the breadwinner. Divorcees of millionaires can expect handsome divorce settlements, million pound houses and even a seriously generous income for life. It's one up for the feminists and one in the eye for evil (male) investment bankers/pop singers/idle rich, etc out there who thought a short and childless marriage would not seriously damage their pockets.

Am I the only one who sees this as yet another nail in the coffin for marriage as an institution? We've abolished the married couple's tax allowance, created a gravy train for single mothers, belittled the importance of the actual ceremony with our civil partnerships and all the while, ensured that prenups are pretty much unenforceable in this country. So, if you are a millionaire, or even if you are not, I suggest you think very carefully about the financial consequences of marriage before tying the knot.

Brian Haw: Cut down to size?

It gave me a warm fuzzy glow to read how 20 brave officers of the Met (who clearly have nothing more pressing to do) dismantled most of Brian Haw's protest materials during the small hours of this morning, in order to enforce a notice they had issued to him under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 that he must limit the size of his placards to 10 feet in length.

There has been a lot of discussion today about this, ranging from the implications for free speech in the U.K., police priorities, the shift towards an ever increasing authoritarianism that this represents, the dangers of retrospective law-making, etc, etc. I do not wish to further rehearse these debates here. I merely wish to raise this question: given the intense attention which Parliament and the police have devoted to this protest, am I to assume that it is only a matter of time before he is shut down or locked up? Indeed, is the 10ft length limit merely to accustom Mr Haw to such a confined space for his persistent protesting?

Fighting cancer: a good idea

The United Devices Cancer Research Project is a scheme run primarily by the National Foundation for Cancer Research, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, United Devices, Inc, and various other organisations and individuals, which aims to use idle PCs around the world to assist in finding new cancer drugs, by modelling the interaction of potential anti-carcinogenic compounds with proteins. The idea is that you download a simple, non-intrusive screensaver programme, which uses your PC to process data, which is then returned to the server. There is a useful Oxford FAQ page with more information.

Grid.org are also running the Human Proteome Folding Project, which builds upon the work carried out by the Human Genome Project, and is aiming to discover the functions and structures of all of the proteins encoded in the Human Genome. The project works along the same lines as the Cancer Research Project by getting people to install a programme called Rosetta onto their PCs.

These are both fascinating projects, with millions of people having signed up to help.

I want doesn't get

Once of the most ugly things about living in the UK today is the very effective way in which Labour has manipulated the national psyche for its own purposes, and sought to legitimise the politics of class hatred and envy and to engender an attitude of entitlement without responsibility or merit.

This rot is setting in at all levels of our society: no teacher can discipline an unruly pupil without running the risk of infringing his rights, dangerous prisoners are released by a litigation-phobic probation service and law-abiding citizens are warned to hide their MP3 players and mobile telephones so as not to encourage muggers and pickpockets.

Labour has even allowed this nasty culture to permeate one of its most noble goals: that of eradicating child poverty. There are a number of ways of defining child poverty, but the one used by the Government is to define child as living in poverty if the family's income is less than 60% of the "contemporary median equivalised household income". By using this subjective test and measuring child poverty relative to national average wages, Labour is further reinforcing the attitude that if you have less than someone else, this is somehow unfair and something should be done about it.

I do not wish to denigrate from the very difficult conditions in which some of our poorest families live, and nor do I wish to detract from the very laudable work of the ECPC. I wholeheartedly agree with the Government's aims to provide assistance and opportunity to help lift families out of the cycles of unemployment and poverty which can be so destructive. However, I would point out that on an international scale, British families can hardly be said to be living in poverty (i.e. living on less than a dollar a day). We do have a welfare state which provides housing, healthcare and income support for the poor.

The thing with which I violently disagree is the culture of entitlement which seems to eminate from the New Labour machine. Part of growing up is realising that you cannot always have what you want, although you can work to try and obtain it. Too many people in this country are not learning that "I want doesn't get" and are instead adopting an I-want-therefore-I-deserve attitude to life. If we are to succeed at restoring respect in our communities, a good start would be teach children (and adults) the satisfaction of achieving things for which they have worked.

More stick and less carrot: deterrence is the only way

It was with weary resignation rather than any great surprise that I read the disclosure on the front page of the Telegraph today that an average of almost 2 prisoners a week have been escaping from Leyhill Open Prison, Gloucester over the past 3 years.

The local police have been left with the double burden of rounding up these criminals, and of having to deal with the "mini-crime wave" for which the escapees are responsible.

The Home Office has not provided absconding rates for the other 12 open prisons, however, I share The Telegraph's pessimistic view that they would be much lower than Leyhill.

In a statement given to the BBC, The Prison Service stated that although prisoners were "rigorously risk assessed" prior to transferring them to Leyhill, the number of prisoners escaping was because "less trustworthy" prisoners were being placed in open conditions.

Leyhill and other minimum security prisons are used as a rehabilitative half-way house for prisoners who are due for release. According to the HM Prison Service's website, Leyhill has a special function of "assessing and preparing life sentence prisoners for release, providing an environment in which prisoners can assume more responsibility and benefit from opportunities to make decisions for themselves before returning to the outside community".

This all sounds very laudable: after all, rehabilitation of prisoners is an essential function of the Criminal Justice System (the "CJS"). However, the fact that 393 prisoners have escaped since 1999 (most of them in the past 3 years) strikes me as indicative that Leyhill is viewed by some prisoners as a easy exit route than as a useful step on the road to rehabilitation.

This goes back to my point in my last posting on this subject, that the whole mechanism of the CJS is failing in one of its key purposes, deterrence. Too many criminals are discovering that despite the posturings of various home secretaries, crime under New Labour does pay and moreover, will go unpunished. Until the various arms of the Criminal Justice System are sufficiently banded together and adequately resourced to ensure convicted criminals are properly punished and so that a clear message of deterrence is given to would-be criminals, crime rates will continue to rise, criminals will continue to run rings around the CJS and we, as taxpayers and the general public will continue to bear the consequences. It is time criminals learnt that if they commit a crime, they must accept the consequences of that crime, and that those consequences are severe.

RIP Gladys Hammond

I was much relieved to hear last week that Gladys Hammond's remains were finally found and returned to her family, albeit as part of a pathetic, last-ditch attempt by John Smith to reduce his sentence for his part in the campaign of terror and hate he had waged against the Halls of Darley Oaks Farm.

I am sick and tired of militant anti-vivisectionists using illegal methods to impose their views upon the law-abiding majority and was relieved that the judge in the Darley Oaks case took as dim a view of the quartet's behaviour as I did and sentenced them accordingly.

I hope that these sentences will send a clear message to these terrorists that their tactics are not acceptable and will be punished by the full force of the law. Unfortunately, there are still a whole range of nuts out there willing to use bully-boy tactics to cower the rest of us into submission and I do not think Andrew Baker or Brian Cass will be sleeping any sounder in their beds.

Gladys Hammond, on the other hand, I hope you will now be left to Rest In Peace.

People's Petition

Young Tories: Party Poopers?

I was particularly taken by Floreat Aula's description of some of the more obnoxious Tory youths to be found haunting the dreaming spires and similar places. Having met several similar specimens as an undergraduate, by whom I was alternately patronised and pawed, there was nothing I would have been less likely to do than to join my university's Conservative Association. I cannot but feel that this is a shame, as I was probably not the only young female to be totally turned off by such idiots. Surely, if we are truly to engage more women in Tory politics, grass-roots conservatism must include all new shoots (and be less obsessed by roots)?

Retribution, Rehabilition and Reform

One thing that bothers me a lot is my inability to come up with the be all and end all solution to our well-documented problems in the Criminal Justice System (the "CJS"). Successive governments have sought to address the issues of how to bring down crime, run the prisons and rehabilitate offenders, and whilst I have looked upon their tinkerings with interest, I have yet to be convinced that any one of them has come up with a definitive solution.

In particular, I am torn between my soft-liberal-fluffy wish to rehabilitate reformed offenders back into the bosom of society and my damn-'em-all-to-hell-they-deserve-it impulse to lock 'em up and throw away the key.

Given that unofficial figures to soar), our prisons are almost at full capacity and convicted criminals persistently re-offend (in 2003, 61% of prisoners were re-convicted within two years of release), I am forced to conclude that the CJS's purpose of deterrence is failing to cut ice with criminals.

So how do we get the Criminal Justice System's snarl to be sufficiently scary to deter criminals?

In my view, the first priority should be that convicted criminals are properly punished. If this requires a prison sentence, then send them to prison. If our prisons are full, we should build more. A prison term should be as long as the original sentence and there should be no automatic right to parole, (HRA or no HRA).

The Government should stop meddling with the criminal law and allow judges greater flexibility in sentencing. In particular, the life sentence should mean life, and should be retained as an option for judges when sentencing offenders who have committed the most serious crimes. Instead of continuously passing new laws which criminalise ever more specific acts, the police and CPS should be compelled to use effectively our existing criminal laws to charge and prosecute.

Once we have tried and punished criminals, how do we prevent them from re-offending? The continuous stream of embarrassing stories highlighting the incompetence of various parts of our CJS should serve as a wake-up call to all of us. It is not enough to punish an offender and then to release him and forget about him. We must ensure that an adequate programme of education is offered in prison and that the prison, probation and (in light of recent disclosures) immigration services are made to communicate with and assist each other. With this compulsion for co-operation must come increased transparency and accountability. The probation service must do more than cast a distracted eye over its charges, and instead must actively assist ex-offenders in securing housing and employment (although what sort of landlords and employers could be found for them, I cannot say).

Sadly, as I am only too aware, the sheer volume of offenders, the staggering cost and the megalithic unwieldiness of its institutions have and will continue to make any reform of the CJS virtually impossible until politicians and civil servants are willing to rebuild the whole piece for the long term.

Australian angst : From Reaction to Action?

Continuing on from my last post, the debate Downunder following the revelations of serious domestic and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities continues apace.

The national mood has turned to anger, with many voices clamouring that the abuses have been happening for years and that the Australian government's policy of non-intervention and the reluctance of politically-correct do-gooders to condemn what has been a long-standing and little publicised culture of abuse has served to reinforce and legitimise this abhorrent behaviour.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has called for immediate action to bring the perpetrators of these abuses to book. "We're doing a great disservice to indigenous communities by … holding back from the proper enforcement of the laws against people who transgress those laws". The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, has announced an emergency summit, however, there has been widespread cynicism as to how effective this "Talkfest" will prove, given that several federal and state leaders have chosen to boycott the event.

For some commentators, this furore is strangely reminiscent of the media attention surrounding John Howard's 2003 summit. Let's just hope that Australia manages to harness the national mood and to act now, instead of sidelining the problem for another 3 years.

Australian angst

I have noted with interest the recent national display of shock and sadness following the publication of Nanette Rogers's dossier of domestic and sexual violence which is endemic in the remote Aboriginal camps of central Australia.

Australians have come a long way since the country was first declared "terra nulla" by its early settlers and over the past few decades, the national conscience has become increasingly exercised by the plight of Australia's indigenous people. There have been numerous initiatives which have been aimed at protecting and restoring Aboriginal communities, whilst at the same time seeking to preserve their culture. In 2000, the organisation Reconciliation Australia was founded to "promote and build reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians".

Sadly, one of the unintended consequences of Australia's policy of non-interference with Aboriginal culture has been to lock the remote Aboriginal communities deeper into desperate cycles of poverty, ignorance, poor health and substance abuse.

So what can be done to address these problems? In my view, it is wrong to allow a veneer of "culturalism" to cover systematic abuse within any community: an Australian is an Australian is an Australian, whether indigenous or not. Aboriginal women and children are therefore entitled to the same protections as any other citizen. Moreover, it is a fiction to pretend that these communities have not already been greatly influenced by non-indigenous culture (please don't tell me Aborigines have been addicted to petrol-sniffing for 40,000 years). To allow these communities to implode under the weight of their own depravity because it is not for the Australian government to interfere with their "culture" is both patronising and wrong. I sincerely hope that the mass outrage felt by most Australians translates into an effective campaign to address these abuses and help pull the Aboriginal communities away from their path of self-destruction.

Faith Hope and Charity

There has been much debate recently over Ruth Kelly's recent appointment as Minister for Equality and the compatibility of such office with her widely publicised Catholicism. The question that has arisen is that, given that the Catholic Church is very clear in her condemnation of homosexuality, and given that Ruth Kelly is a devout Catholic and supernumerary of Opus Dei, how can she perform her governmental function as champion of gay rights and equality?

To those commentators who are calling for her to be disbarred from holding this office, I would say this: is this truly the path we wish to go down? Surely, the state is secular and must remain blind to an individual's personal beliefs and religion when selecting her representatives. For so long as a minister is competent to perform their role, it is not up to the government to consider how they might feel about doing so. To discriminate against public servants on the grounds of their privately held views sets a dangerous precedent, as demonstrated by the European Parliament's decision to oust Rocco Buttiglione for having the moral courage to publicly declare his disapproval of homosexuality based upon his faith. If we continued along this route, then surely no Catholic could work in any hospital in which abortions were carried out, no Muslim could work in the Treasury (which derives significant income from sources prohibited under Shari'ah law, such as the sale of alcohol), no animal rights sympathiser could work for the NHS (which routinely procures and prescribes drugs which have been tested on animals), and ... you get the point.

To Ruth Kelly, on the other hand, I would say that if you really believe in the truth and integrity of the Catholic faith and in its teachings, (including the doctrine that practising homosexuality is a sin), how can you, in all conscience, defy your God and your Church in order to further your political career?

Sadly, the conclusion I am forced to draw is that Ruth Kelly has at this crucial moral moment chosen to ignore her faith in the hope that her electorate and her God will have the charity to ignore such blatant hypocrisy.

Token Bird

This is Token Bird.

I am starting this blog because I was invited to appear as a guest contributor on the Reptile's blog. Having had many a debate with the Reptile about various issues, he has suggested I might enjoy my own blog (although I suspect there is a hint of Reptilian self-interestedness, as the more I write, the less we "discuss"!).

New blog

Token Bird is under construction...