PISA is a half measure of education

In this country parents don’t choose to live in poverty in order that every penny of the family finances can provide one child with the best possible education. We do not sacrifice all leisure and play in order to spend every waking hour and minute on extra homework. Nor do we threaten our children with our own suicide, when the child looks likely to fail an exam. Asian parents, on the other hand, apparently do.

In the UK, we want our children to grow up as rounded, happy individuals. The purpose of school is not simply about passing exams, but also for building character. It may be easier to get a child through an exam if we teach by rote, but we also want our children to have curiosity, creativity, and a sense of adventure. These qualities are not easy to measure, but are essential for a successful life.

Milibandism and the TV football market

Sky‘s dominance over televised football was recently shattered by the entry of British Telecom into the market. On the face of it, this competition should be exactly what our country needs, to bring down the outrageous expense of TV, as a small but significant strike against our cost of living crisis. However, the market for football rights is dysfunctional, and Sky may already be trying to undermine competitive pressures [link]. That’s why Milibandism needs to be applied.

If BT and Sky were competing for customers on equal terms and with equal products, then prices would naturally fall. The problem is that they can’t have an equal product. One or other will have the football rights and the customers will go straight to that provider. Therefore, the two companies will compete ferociously to buy this content, pushing the price up to astonishing levels, and wiping out the advantage the consumer would have gained through their competition.

Binging paedophiles out of the shadows

The happiest client I ever represented was a paedophile who had walked into Limehouse police station and handed over his hard disc which contained thousands of images of child pornography. He was laughing and joking and brightening up the whole of the custody suite with his good humour, even though he could be facing a jail sentence.

The disc contained images right across the spectrum of seriousness. At the soft end was an image of a six year old in stockings and suspenders, lying spread eagled on her back, with a caption over her crotch saying “Click here to Enter”, so there was no mistake about the nature of the material.

Because he’d handed himself in he was given a caution, meaning he’d have no criminal record but would be put on the sex offenders register. You’d expect him to be delighted, but the moment we got outside, he suddenly burst into tears and was inconsolable.

£23bn scandal of London’s housing bubble

According to the Bank of England, each year since 2010, £23 billion of foreign money has poured into the London property market. One would think that this is a good thing for the economy, but most of these foreign buyers have never been to London, or at least have no intention of spending any time here.

It’s all about the preservation of wealth. The residents of unstable oil-rich countries fear the Arab Spring. The residents of China and Russia fear their governments. All are looking for stability. It has become the fashion to “park” money in London. It’s what wealthy people do when they don’t trust the banks, they “park” their money through the purchase of an asset, as a store of value. In this regard, the London property market has become a gynormous piggy bank.

In 2011, Regent Street was valued by The Crown Estate at £2bn. Each year a multiple of over 11.5 times this in ordinary homes is being snapped up. That’s the equivalent, each single year, of Oxford Street, The Strand, Fleet Street, High Holborn, Trafalgar Square, High St Kensington, Old Bond Street, Berkeley Square, Park Lane and Knightsbridge, and more. That’s just one year.

The Phoenix-like rise of Red Ed

In July 2011, I wrote a article called “Ed Miliband’s Biggest Mistake” which argued that the “Red Ed” nick name was a blessing, not a curse. My main point was that only through gaining the attention of the media can you then get your message across. Miliband had rejected the image that the journalists tried to construct for him. As a result he made himself a boring subject to write about, so they didn’t write about him.

Although the article was prominent and caused some conversation, Miliband soon asserted that he wanted to occupy the middle ground and be seen to do so. “Red Ed” was the last thing he needed to win a general election. Or so he thought.

What would a jury make of Assad?

Sarin is invisible, odourless and deadly in tiny amounts. The best way to detect it in your surroundings is to note that you’ve have just shit and pissed yourself, and are now choking to death as your own throat muscles contract.

If a terrorist group decided to crop dust London, they might consider that in agriculture, a crop duster would cover an area of about 1.5 square miles per day. Since London is 700 square miles, that would require 467 crop dusters. This is not such a brilliant terrorist plot since the planes could easily be shot down.

However, since Sarin is heavier than air, it naturally falls to ground level, so the terrorists could fly far higher and rely on gravity to take the poison to the quarry. Therefore we could crop dust London using jumbo jets to deliver nerve agent in industrial quantities, and wipe out 8 million people. This may be possible with as few as a dozen aircraft covering the capital in a vector grid.

What’s the point of today’s Labour Party?

Way back in 1992, at the TUC conference, John Prescott stunned the socialist movement, by making a forceful speech in favour of John Smith’s proposed trade union reform. He attacked the unions for even questioning the motives of the Labour leader. He shamed them into submission. He showed that his loyalty is to the party over the unions and as a result, was rewarded with the deputy leadership when Tony Blair later rose to power.

He is the closest thing there is to Labour Party royalty, and he just accused the party leader of being ineffective. This is not unreasonable. Everywhere I look I see the government’s economic policy being attacked. The Economist magazine calls the Right to Buy policy “A daft new government-subsidy scheme”, but what did we hear from Labour? Nothing. Not a dickie bird.

The Tory Wealth Trap

The Tory wealth trap is making the rich richer, while the rest of the population either stands still or gets poorer. There is no drip down effect caused by the squeezing the real economy with ill-timed austerity, while flooding the financial markets with cheap money, QE. All this achieves is to boost asset wealth while eroding wages, through pay freezes and inflation.

C’mon Ed, fight!

In case the reader needs reassurance that Osborne is a failed Chancellor, you only have to look at what the financial services people are saying. A couple of weeks ago, Citywire ran with this headline, “Hooray for the (debt-fuelled) UK recovery!”

How about this funny analysis from the stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdowne: “Former US president Abraham Lincoln has been credited with saying the problem with politics is you can never please all of the people all of the time. In a more contemporary setting and with the UK yet to regain ground lost during the 2008-09 recession chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne has struggled to please anyone at any time since stepping into 11 Downing Street three years ago.”

However, the one thing that the Tories do massively better than Labour is this: When they are down, they come out fighting. Even when the world took note that Keynes had won and austerity lost, they carried on fighting. The question is, what does Labour do? Has Ed Miliband and Ed balls given up? Do we only have an opposition on a Wednesday lunchtime?

After the cuts agenda

You can tell what the Tory focus groups are saying by watching the way the Tories behave. Right now, they are trying to close down the perception that the government has no ideas or purpose, other than the cuts. They know they have no agenda, once the cuts agenda is done.

This explains the flurry of rather pointless ideas announced in the last couple of weeks. Each one of them is half-baked and each one is accompanied with same the line, “Labour did nothing about this in 13 years”.

An example is Theresa May’s call for a consultation of Stop and Search, arguing that the policy tends to target young black males. This got widely reported and became a talking point on the media, even though it was completely shallow. This is not serious policy, just a suggestion that people have a chat about something. Yet every Tory politician took to the air to attack Labour for doing nothing for 13 years.

On health they talk of a £200 deposit for foreigners entering the country. Again, MPs took to the airwaves to claim that Labour did nothing for 13 years of government. There has been little response from Labour to this proposal, but Andy Burnham tells me that he can’t respond as he still doesn’t know the details. He doesn’t object to stopping abuse, but he does object to the idea that Labour had done nothing about the issue previously.