Bruno Prior's blog

Pregnant Germans are trying to delay the birth of their babies until 1 January, the BBC report, because parents of babies born after that date will receive 25,200 euros (£16,911, $33,300 at current exchange rates) to "ease the financial burden of parenthood".

The handout is part of German plans to increase the national birthrate, which, at 1.37 children per woman, is well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain the population level (assuming that immigration is not an acceptable alternative way to maintain the population level).

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday on the progress of two projects - Sigma Scan and Delta Scan - commissioned by the Horizon Scanning Centre within the Foresight Programme of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). You may not have realised that the POST (if you knew it existed) had a Foresight Programme, nor that that programme included a Horizon Scanning Centre, and probably not that that centre had commissioned Strategic Horizon Scans from The Institute for the Future in California on the future of science and technology (Delta Scan) and from Outsights (a management consultancy, surprise, surprise) and Ipsos Mori (the pollsters) on future social, political, economic and environmental issues (Sigma Scan). But rest assured, those civil servants are busy beavering away, working out how we'll all be living our lives in 50 years' time. How else would we know what to plan for and what to throw our taxes at?

Renewable electricity in the UK is supported primarily by the Renewables Obligation (RO), an obligation on licenced electricity suppliers to purchase a proportion of their electricity from renewable sources. Most types of renewable electricity are eligible, and every unit from every eligible project is treated as having an equal value to the environment. Until now, that is....

According to their website, the CBI's mission is:

"to help create and sustain the conditions in which businesses in the United Kingdom can compete and prosper for the benefit of all"

and their policy is:

"decided by our members – senior professionals from all sectors and sizes of business are directly involved in the policy-making process"

In the experience of this author, the CBI are now complicit in the government's ever-expanding intervention in the economy, and listen only to their bigger members. A recent exchange of correspondence seemed to illustrate this attitude. It is repeated below - decide for yourselves.

Some of the easiest carbon savings that could be made are to be found in our houses. Britain's houses are famously inefficient, belching heat (and therefore carbon) into the sky. Though the government believes it can tax people into reducing their consumption of vehicle fuels, cigarettes and tobacco, it does not hold the same view of domestic energy.

Instead, it asks the major energy suppliers (companies like British Gas, Eon, RWE, EdF, Scottish & Southern etc.) to help it reduce domestic energy consumption, in a scheme called the Energy Efficiency Commitment (EEC). That is asking the wolves to guard the sheep. Does it really think the energy suppliers are going to do their best to get their customers to use less of their products?

While we are stuck with big government, an important check on the power of the executive is an independent second chamber. Although the undemocratic nature of the House of Lords is much derided, it is noticeable that their Lordships have provided much more substantial and well-reasoned opposition to the worst excesses of the current government than has been provided by the Commons. This is quite significantly related to the fact that many of their Lordships do not owe their positions to conformity with party policy.

Most examples of picking losers are normally quite subtle. Very often, the offending policy is well-meaning, and the harm unintentional. But the abuse by the Labour Party of their control of the levers of power to steer funding towards Labour constituencies and away from Conservative and LibDem constituencies is blatant, intentional and vicious.

For the past decade, the West has been relatively immune to price-/wage-inflation, despite significant expansions of the money supply and movement of various national balances from credit to debit, thanks to the deflationary effects of competition from emerging nations such as China and India. This has bred a complacent attitude that all it takes to control inflation is interest-rate policy designed to keep a cap on price-increases. The lessons of the twentieth century, which showed clearly that money supply was linked to inflation, that government interventions that caused an imbalance between the natural levels of saving and consumption were connected to the "boom-and-bust" trade cycles and that inflation, once started, could be very hard to stop, have largely been relegated in the concerns of policy-makers. Wage competition from immigrants, price competition from the East, and regular tweaking of inflation indices and interest rates are enough, so the theory goes, to make the old disciplines unnecessary.

It is probably this complacent consensus that explains why there has been so little comment on the inflationary aspects of the current dispute over NHS wages. There has been much sympathetic coverage of the below-inflation wage offer that has been made by the Government to NHS workers. They are deemed to be justified in their complaints, because a below-inflation wage offer is, so the analysis goes, a real-terms cut in wages. Nevermind that NHS wages have gone up, sometimes massively, above inflation in the last few years. And critically, nevermind that the corollary of that argument is that public servants should always receive pay offers that are no less than the current rate of inflation.

If employees feel that a pay offer in line with inflation is no increase at all, and therefore a minimum offer, then what happens as inflation creeps higher, as is happening? Wage offers track or exceed price-increases, which feeds the inflationary spiral. This is exactly back to the territory of the 1970s, and yet no one seems to have noticed.

The Telegraph nearly wrote this entry for us. They have listed the winners from the recommendations of Michael Forsyth's Tax Reform Commission:

Government intervention is always frustrating, but when it inflicts direct damage on people's lives, it is an altogether more serious and contemptible matter. Yet, this is happening on a regular basis to British families. We learn today of the Williams family of Newport, whose family was ripped apart by social services for no good reason.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As Danny Finkelstein has highlighted, Camilla Cavendish of The Times is fighting an honourable battle to expose the large number of occasions when travesties of justice such as this are inflicted on innocent people by representatives of government. But she admits it is an uphill battle, as she is so often prevented by the law from reporting on abuses of the law.

Gordon Brown has pledged to "cut red tape" for at least the third time this year, according to the Telegraph. This might seem a strange thing to criticise on pickinglosers, but we do so, not because it would be a bad idea, but because we don't believe he even knows what that means.

When you look at the detail of the story, what he has actually done is to ask the FSA to cut red tape by 25%:

1. How does one quantify "red tape cuts"? In what units is this measured? It's a popular concept, borrowed from Australia I believe, but utterly meaningless. "88.2% of statistics...."
2. Why only the financial services sector? Does the rest of business (or life in general) not count? The Telegraph reports that "the Chancellor will also say he wants the Department of Trade and Industry to focus on the global promotion of the financial services sector, and in particular the City of London." Can you get a much clearer case of government preferential treatment? And do we believe foreigners are going to use the City because the DTI goes around promoting them, or because they gain a competitive advantage from doing so? How many foreign businessmen in whom the City would be interested do we think are not aware of the City and its services already? Enough to justify regular trips abroad for DTI ministers and civil servants, apparently.

Apparently Ed Balls likes to be called the "City Minister". I didn't know they were allowed to make up their own titles and roles. And how disturbing is it that the man responsible for the detail of economic policy that affects all of us, designs it with particular consideration of how it affects the City. Is it inconceivable that there may be circumstances where the interests of the City and of the broader economy (or industry) are not aligned? If so, who is going to be the winner when hard choices have to be made? Still, Ed should be alright with a nice juicy City job or multiple non-execs once his political career is over. As both Ed and the country will be better off when that day arrives, perhaps we could agree that it is brought forward. Next election, perhaps?

David Cameron and the Daily Telegraph think we should subsidise rural Post Offices to keep them open, even though 800 of them get fewer than 16 customers per week. It's funny how people who preach about competitiveness forget about their principles when it is their voters or their readers that would benefit from ignoring economics.

Yet another effort by the Government to "go commercial" is failing. £10m was spent on an internet accommodation service which produced just over 400 hotel bookings this summer, reports the Telegraph. What a surprise. When I book a holiday, the first place I think of looking is the website of the national government.

Government should provide for its citizens only those things that they need (not want) and that are not provided by the market. I hadn't noticed a shortage of travel websites, had you?

Back in the 70s, government picked a real winner: nuclear power. It was going to produce, they promised, power "too cheap to meter".

We know how that turned out. Rather than being too cheap to meter, nuclear turned out to be first too risky to privatise, and subsequently too expensive to run. Post-liberalisation, British Energy had to be baled out when it was revealed that they couldn't even cover their running costs, let alone their vast capital, risk, waste disposal and decommissioning costs at the prices delivered in a competitive market.

As reported by the Telegraph, but strangely not available on their website, the charity Inter Care has been forced to shut down its operations by the Environment Agency (EA). Inter Care sends unused drugs from the UK to African hospitals. The EA has ordered them to suspend shipment because they may be breaching European Union regulations on waste disposal. Clinics in Africa are now running short of drugs as a result.

You can pick your enemy in this story. Maybe the fault is the European Union, for legislating in such a way that it would prevent something as beneficial as this. Or maybe it is the fault of the EA for excessive pedantry in the application of regulations. Experience of the EA would strongly suggest the latter, but experience of the EU would suggest the former. Is this the perfect confluence of two of the most sclerotic government bodies in the world? The perfect bureaucratic storm?

David Cameron has vowed to find jobs for the disabled, on the basis that "We have a social responsibility to help disabled people into the workforce". What could be more sympathetic and just than the government giving people a leg-up who face great obstacles in life? This is the Tories' new passion for "social justice" in action.

Following on from the item on birth centres, we now learn that upto eighty cottage hospitals may be facing cuts. As per birthcare, it's not the cuts themselves that are necessarily the problem, but the fact that this is no economic choice, in the sense of matching demand to supply, but a bureaucratic choice. NHS managers have calculated that these facilities are the ones that will be least missed. How do they know? There is no market in healthcare, so there is no way for people to reveal their preferences.

I don't know if this is exactly a case of picking losers, but it certainly falls into the category of stupid policy assessments, and they usually end up with more losers than winners. Anyway, it is so stupid that I had to post about it.

I have just watched a recorded episode of Newsnight (from Tuesday, 3 Oct, I think) in which Susan Watts, their Science Editor, made the following pronouncement:

"David Cameron's new green Tories could use a small carbon tax both to pay for new technologies and to raise revenue to let them lower taxes elsewhere."

Age discrimination is self-defeating. Companies that employ less suitable people simply on the basis of their age will do worse than companies that employ the most suitable candidates regardless of age.

But that is not the same thing as saying that age and experience are not often relevant to someone's suitability for the job. Legislation trying to prevent companies from discovering the age of job applicants is not only bound to fail, but also ought to fail (Daily Telegraph, 26 Sept 2006, p. B7).

Someone in Whitehall decided that the most efficient way of dealing with out-of-hours medical enquiries was to have a centralised phone enquiry system (NHS Direct), rather than doctors on call. This would save money and make doctors' working hours more civilised. Unfortunately, remote diagnosis is not easy, or else the doctors on call would have been handling most of their calls in this way. Not surprisingly, this change has not reduced the number of patients who cannot be diagnosed over the phone. They therefore have to go somewhere. We now discover that where they are going is to the Accident & Emergency (A&E) services of their local hospital (Sunday Telegraph, 1 Oct 2006, News. p.8). There were an extra million visits to A&E in 2005/6 than the previous year. An A&E consultant has estimated that over half of those visiting A&E could have been dealt with by a GP.