A notable extract from today's report by Professor Gregg on welfare reform. The report was commissioned by the government.

...if lone parents had the same employment rate as the overall population some 300,000 children would be lifted out of poverty. Furthermore, the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among children aged 5-15 in families whose parents have never worked is almost double that of children whose parents are in low-skilled jobs.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Welfare benefits

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Here is one of the ways in which you would be better treated in an American (and doubtless also a Japanese, German, French or Swiss) hospital for heart disease than you would be in Britain. In America and, I suspect, the other countries mentioned, you might get a scan with a 64 slice CT scanner that will show quickly - and without ill effect on you - just how bad your arteries may be obstructed.

In Britain, you have a much lower chance of having access to this scanner.

The Daily Telegraph today carries a report that the 64-CT scanner has been shown as effective in revealing coronary disease as the traditional, much more invasive method. The chances of anyone surviving heart disease depends crucially on being assessed quickly and effectively and then getting an operation, if needed, quickly. But the process of assessing the disease is bound to be hindered in an medical system which does not have the use of 64-CT scanners.

I saw such a scanner at the Mercy Hospital in Miami about four years ago. It had been installed the day I arrived. That was the only hospital in America that I visited and it had the new scanner. There must have been many such machines even at that time. I looked up to find how many hospitals in Britain had it then. The answer appeared to be only one.

Now, according the Telegraph, still "only a handful" of these scanners are in British hospitals. I wonder how many that means? Is it five, perhaps? Clearly nothing like enough to scan more than a small fraction of those with heart disease.

I am afraid this is another example of the way in which the treatment you are likely to receive in Britain is years behind what you would expect in America and in other countries which have systems of medical care that use up-to-date equipment.

It is worrying that Americans still apparently think that the NHS may be a model worth following. It would be useful to see an estimate of how many people in Britain die prematurely of heart disease each year because of the inferior diagnosis and treatment here. We have such an estimate for cancer from Professor Sikora (10,000).

Incidentally, the 64-CT scanner has other important uses as well.

The Telegraph article is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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Several newspapers report on the assertion that science GCSEs are easier than the equivalent "O" levels were in the 1960s. Here is the Daily Mail version which includes a great question from the 1960s.

Even I could get all three questions from the recent paper right. They are questions that almost anyone who is literate with a little bit of general knowledge could answer. Increasingly the better schools in the private sector take International GCSEs in preference to the devalued ordinary ones.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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It is quite a shock to read the huge contrast what is happening in a better-managed economy. This is from the Spectator blog.

Meanwhile in Singapore, the government- which has announced a stimulus plan based on subsidies for increasing training by the labor force- which will be paid for by tapping into the surpluses run up during the fat years- announced today a reduction in the pay of top civil servants and politicians to reflect the economic downturn. Basically when the economy is hot, they get higher pay and bonuses, when it's not, they get lower pay.

Read it and weep.

http://www.straitstimes.com:80/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_306495.html

Why can't the UK do this?

A link is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Politics

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As the dust settles, things are becoming clearer. They seem to be getting a lot clearer at the Daily Mail, for example. Today the main opinion article is by the City editor, Alex Brummer who confesses that he was conned by Gordon Brown. He had, he says, thought since 1997 that Gordon Brown was a good chancellor - his embracing of the City was a good sign and a great improvement on previous Labour chancellors.

But now, Mr Brummer, admits, the pre-budget report has changed his view of Mr Brown. He thinks "prudence has been trown ruthlessly overboard" and "gone is the economic rectitude of which the Treasury boasted for so many years".

The views of Mr Brummer are not, in the great scheme of things, of huge importance. But the printing of this article, I suspect, tells us that the view of Mr Paul Dacre may be changing and that is very important indeed. Mr Dacre, for those who do not know, is the editor of the Daily Mail. For all the time since Gordon Brown has been chancellor and continuing while he has been prime minister, Mr Dacre has been an admirer of Mr Brown. The Daily Mail is thought of by many as a right-wing newspaper and in many respects Mr Dacre has right-wing views. But his view on economics are not doctrinaire or passionately in favour of low taxes and small government. He probably prefers these things, but not with religious fervour - or not enough of it to stop him admiring Mr Brown. I used to know Paul Dacre pretty well since I was a leader-writer for the Daily Mail for two years. He is not perfect of course but I admired him a great deal and admired his courage in pursuing ideas about damaging changes in the British way of life. He got a lot of insults from the "liberal" media over these things. However it was a great frustration to me that he would not countenance a hostile approach to the policies of Gordon Brown (except in recent years by Richard Littlejohn who was obviously given licence to express his robust views in his column without restraint).

But the fact that Paul Dacre commissioned Alex Brummer to write this piece today saying that his (Brummer's) view of Gordon Brown has changed indicates that, more significantly, Mr Dacre's view has changed. Mr Brummer, probably understanding his employer's wishes, is not directly critical of Mr Brown himself. But there is no escaping the fact that all he describes has taken place under Mr Brown's stewardship.

Another article in today's paper that also suggests that finally Mr Dacre is seeing through the New Labour story. It is by Edward Heathcoat Amory and he describes how most of the jobs created in all the regions of Britain since 1997 have been in the public sector: "More than 1.3 million of the 2.2 million jobs created between 1998 and 2006 were in public sector areas".

So we now have a view emerging in the Daily Mail that Labour is being reckless with its borrowing and that most of the growth in jobs in the years of Labour power consisted only of public sector jobs. It is heading towards the view (or am I being too hopeful?)that much of the apparent growth that took place after the first three or four years of Labour government was a con trick, being created by rising debt and government spending, not real increases in production or productivity.

Why does the view of the Daily Mail matter? Because it is perhaps the most politically important newspaper in Britain. It has a far bigger circulation than the "quality" newspapers and is read by people who vote (whereas some readers of the low-end newspapers probably do not vote). Many of its readers are floating voters.

For over a decade, the Daily Mail has been sympathetic to Gordon Brown and his works. If that is truly changing, I suspect he really is finished.

p.s. For a truly hostile approach to Mr Brown, try this.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Media, including BBC bias • Politics

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Mr Durkin appears to have read The Welfare State We're In.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Welfare benefits

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I took part in a lunch-time discussion about the pre-budget report on Radio 5 Live this afternoon. We did not know for sure what would be in the report although the leaks from the government have been like a flood.

It seemed at times as though it was me (arguing that extra increases in borrowing would be reckless) versus the man from the Sunday Mirror and the two specialist correspondents of the BBC. The BBC political and economics correspondents generally took a view that was sympathetic to the government but it was the political correspondent, John Pienaar, who showed outright pro-Labour bias. I jotted down a couple of his remarks.

He said that a fiscal stimulus "desperately needs to be done". This is the Labour Party's view. It is not the Conservative Party's view. His job, at the BBC, is to be impartial and not to express a personal view either way.

He then referred to the proposal to raise the top rate of tax to 45 per cent as "a bit of fairness". This was clearly a remark intended to leave the impression that an increase in taxation of the richest was a) fair and b) a good thing. I wonder whether Mr Pienaar has really thought through what "fair" means and how it differs from "re-distributive" or "equalising". He probably uses the word to mean "makes people's income closer to equal". I will leave aside the fact that history shows that this is not necessarily a good idea and merely remark that a 45% tax rate is not, at this moment, the policy of all the major parties and so, again, it is not for Mr Pienaar to say or imply that it is a good thing. He was taking the line of the Labour Party. It was bias, plain and simple.

He repeated this line about "fairness" a second time, later in the discussion. The implication, of course, is that anyone who opposes this rise must be against "fairness". That is absurd and indeed, unfair.

He also suggested that the government had got the Conservatives in a trap. This was an extraordinary line to take in the circumstances where a Labour government which claimed to have abolished boom and bust is today bursting through its own fiscal rules, facing a deep 'bust' and the prospect of an extra million unemployed. It takes a truly prejudiced correspondent at such a time to suggest that it is the opposition which is in trouble.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Media, including BBC bias

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There is nothing new in this letter to the Guardian, quoted in the Samizdata blog. The arguments and the data are treated very fully in The Welfare State We're In. But it is good to hear the argument so pithily put and from someone who has known what it is to be financially poor, rather than culturally impoverished.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Welfare benefits

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The redoubtable Norman Dennis has a letter in the Daily Telegraph today that is worth many long but less well-informed articles. The most fascinating part of it is that he cites Charles Booth as his source. Booth is usually used by those who defend mass government welfare. But Dennis is one of the rare people who have actually read his work and finds that it is not all quite what we had been led to expect:

Sir - We seem to want to take comfort in the belief that child abuse was just as common in the past.

Child abuse to the death is many times more common where the mother was not married to the father and the present boyfriend is not the child's father. Those household arrangements are many times more common than in the past.

We need not depend on theory. The great empirical study of slum life in Victorian England was Charles Booth's survey of the East End of London. Of child abuse he wrote: "I can only speak as I have found: wholesome, pleasant family life … affectionate relationships of husbands and wives, mothers and sons, elders and children."

From 13 volumes of observations, he concluded that this "agreeable picture" applied to 98.75 per cent of the population of East End slums - chosen by him as the worst in England. The "dangerous class" accounted for 1.25 per cent, and these few "fouled the reputation of the poor".

Would that it were 1.25 per cent today. Yet Booth is often quoted as the authority on the social disorder and moral squalor that the welfare state removed.

Norman Dennis, Director of Community Studies, Civitas, London SW1

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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David Cameron's speech this morning was the most encouraging thing I have heard from the Conservative Party in a long time. He said that a public spending splurge now would result in higher taxes later. He noted that Japan had tried increases in public spending to get them out of a long economic malaise during the 1990s. It certainly did not work. The economy grew at less than one per cent a year.

He noted that already Britain could only borrow at a premium rate compared to other countries. If the government tried to borrow even more than it has already, we would find it even more difficult to borrow and at higher interest rates. We could damage confidence and thus damage investment. In such ways, extra spending could actually reduce economic growth rather than increasing it.

He emphasised his long-established policy of keeping the growth in government spending over the cycle below the growth of the economy, thus gradually reducing the debt and the tax rates of Britain and creating a more prosperous society.

It was a speech so sound that it could have come from the days of Margaret Thatcher. Rejoice!

...and here is an article by George Osborne which was similarly welcome.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Politics • Tax and growth

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I went to an Intelligence Squared debate on the motion "It is wrong to pay for sex" last night. One of the excellent speakers was Germaine Greer who made plenty of clever points. But one part of her argument was an attack on capitalism and, in almost an aside, she referred to the "grotesque profit margins" of the supermarkets.

I wondered, though, if she actually knew what the profit margins of our supermarkets are. Had she looked them up? And what would she - or I or you - consider to be "grotesque"? At a guess, a profit margin of 20% would be the minimum. Perhaps 30% or even 50%.

So this morning I decided to check exactly what is the profit margin of our biggest supermarket chain, Tesco's. For those who are not financially minded, the profit margin is the net pre-tax profit as a a percentage of the turnover (sales). In Tesco's latest accounts, the company had turnover of £47.3 billion. Its pre-tax profits were £2.8 billion. Its profit margin, therefore, was 5.9%.

Grotesque? I think not. The margin is certainly less than that of most corner shops. Supermarkets tend to have lower profit margins than most other retailers. They have high turnover of stock, they buy in bulk and so they are able to sell cheaply. They prices can be kept down because of the economies of scale. That is why customers go to them. They are one of the reasons that the price of food in Britain and in other advanced countries has fallen dramatically over the past century, thus ending the days when poor people went hungry.

I wouldn't call Germaine Greer's ignorance of capitalism and how it works "grotesque". It is commonplace. But I do think it regrettable that someone of her fame and influence does not bother to do any research before she makes assertions about company profits.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Off the subject

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