CentreRight

It's safe to say that MPs Elliott Morley, Jim Devine and David Chaytor have never displayed the best judgement. Certainly their expenses claims could have done with a bit more attention (and honesty). However, their latest desperate attempt to escape justice over the expenses scandal may well be their most impressive blunder yet.

The Thoughtless Three are apparently trying to invoke the 1689 Bill of Rights to claim immunity to prosecution, on the rather dubious claim that filling out expenses forms is one of the "Proceedings in Parliament" that the Bill of Rights sought to protect.

In their straw-clutching, they don't seem to have considered the implications of arguing that the Bill of Rights is still an active and enforceable piece of legislation.

The granting of Parliamentary Privileges, such as free speech in the House, is only one of a number of protections that the Bill of Rights provides. One of the others, which applies to all citizens rather than just MPs, is:

That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void 

That means, arguably, that vast numbers of fines that are currently being dished out by police officers, council staff and others without conviction in a court of law are illegal. Most notably, as the redoubtable Neil Herron of Metric Martyrs fame has long argued, since the Road Traffic Act 1991 most parking fines have been "decriminalised", making them just such a "fine and forfeiture".

I'm not one of those people who attempts to dismiss things like the Bill of Rights as irrelevant or unlawful simply on the grounds of its antiquity. Far from it - indeed, it is this Bill that laid down many fundamental principles of our Consitution and that gave us crucial protections against the power of the State and the Crown.

However, I do dislike it when such laws are cherry-picked for the benefit of a privileged few, and ignored when it comes to the rights of the many. Why should Morley, Devine and Chaytor get the protection of the Bill of Rights, but the other 60 million of us be refused that very same protection?

It seems pretty unlikely to me that Morley, Devine and Chaytor's dodgy dealings will come under the protected heading of "Proceedings", but that will be because their activities were not protected by Parliamentary Privilege. The Bill of Rights itself still stands - for all of us.

Now that these Westminster triads have drawn attention once more to this lynchpin of our constitution, the Bill of Rights 1689 should be enforced properly and billions of pounds of on-the-spot fines and parking fines should be cancelled.

What's sauce for the goose is, as they say, sauce for the gander.

I wouldn't normally plug a book on CentreRight, but I'm going to make an exception for two reasons. First, the book in question is an unusually good one that I think Centre Righters will enjoy, and second, we are only a few days away from Christmas, so I thought it might come in handy as inspiration to those still hunting for gifts. For those organised souls who have got their Christmas shopping done already - please forgive me!

It's a difficult question: what to buy for the grumpy right winger who loves to gripe? Feel good film? Nope - soppy nonsense. Gadget? Not a patch on Meccano, why don't schools teach engineering properly like they used to... Sponsor an obscure species somewhere? Cue muttering about hippies. No, you need a gift that will go with the grain and channel the fury, rather than encouraging it to spill out over the Christmas dinner table.

The answer lies in a book all about how politicians, companies, advertisers, quangos, "experts" and broadcasters lie to us, every day and in a remarkable range of ways: Complete and Utter Zebu by Simon Rose and Steve Caplin.

The title derives from a classic example of the deceit that the book skewers so well. A Zebu is a bovine South American mammal, whose meat was found being widely sold as "British Beef" in pubs and supermarkets. Zebu, then, is shorthand for trickery, lies and BS.

As the book's blurb describes it:

We are subjected to a daily barrage of deception so pervasive that we barely notice it any more. Although the big lies still make the headlines, it's the small, everyday half-truths that really drive many of us to distraction.

'Ice cream' with no cream, 'chocolate flavour' with no chocolate, 'customer service' with no service. You have won a prize . . . Your call is important to us . . .

Lies, lies and more damned lies. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

And there is no area that escapes their ire - from EU food regulations to estate agents' dubious patter, from polimen's bluster to politicians' nimble language. As well as having successfuly researched a remarkable range of examples, some of which you will have heard of but others will certainly be new to you, the authors treat the topic with just the right mixture of humour and genuine, spitting outrage.

Angry presents for angry people are a difficult thing to get right. As an example of how not to do it, a not-very-political friend of mine once bought me a Michael Moore book because of a very mistaken idea of my views. The result? In the spirit of Christmas, I tried to read it, leaving me with soaring blood pressure, a new dent in my wall and an unfinished book. Complete and Utter Zebu, though, is bang on target. It confirmed my fury at the amount of Zebu sloshing around, informed it with new evidence and left me laughing out loud.

You can buy it here - or if you'd like to read more, they run an excellent blog here, highlighting more examples of Zebu.

Today's attack piece in the Guardian against Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, is many things. It is certainly a lazy attempt to smear a decent man as a racist. It is potentially a worrying bit of political campaigning by supposedly impartial public servants (of which more later). Most concerningly, it is an attack on the very idea of parliamentary scrutiny of quangos.

Mr Davies' crime was to write 19 letters over 21 months to Trevor Phillips of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, querying the EHRC's work and requesting clarification of what the MP saw as inconsistencies in the implementation of politically correct rules and laws.

The EHRC is one of Britain's most prominent and controversial quangos. It acts as an educator, a political campaign and a prosecutor in one of the most contentious areas of public policy - equalities and political correctness. It spends millions of pounds of taxpayers' money and is charged with regulating the behaviour of millions of people.

It is not just legitimate for an MP to be scrutinising such a body - it should be a requirement of anyone sitting in Parliament! Philip Davies was doing his duty and his job in querying the Commission's work, and the real scandal is that so few of his colleagues follow his lead.

We have 1,152 quangos in Britain, and barely any of them ever have to account to elected representatives of the people about the work they do in our name and with our money.

The true scale to which Britain sits at "the top table of Europe", as the Government love to claim, is finally becoming clear today. In Brussels our supposed friends are openly snubbing us, and in Westminster our own Government are discovering their own powerlessness.

After a few days of gloating from the Prime Minister that he managed to get notable nonentity Baroness Ashton appointed as EU Foreign Minister, Her Anonymousness has now made perfectly clear the reality of her role and her intentions, by telling a committee of MEPs that

"I won't be an extension of the British government. I have been appointed by the 27 member states."

Meanwhile, Alistair Darling is reduced to begging the new Single Market Commissioner Michel Barnier in the pages of The Times not to wreck the City with overly aggressive regulation.

This is the reality of our relationship with our "EU partners". We're not sitting at the top table at all, we are picking up the crumbs underneath it.

Last night, the TPA held a Euro Quiz night in Westminster both as a celebration of the success of our recent book (which is still available here) and as an opportunity to get together with some of our fellow campaigners for a bit of fun, as opposed to the policy and politics chat that is the normal staple of Westminster social events.

Fine performances were put in by a range of teams, including runners-up The Freedom Association (whose team included John Whittingdale MP)

 

and Conservative Future, whose Chairman Michael Rock can be seen here collecting the prize of Brussels Sprouts and red tape awarded for coming a triumphant last:

   

Other competitors included the Adam Smith Institute who secured second place, Open Europe, who put in a valiant effort particularly on the Eurovision round; Progressive Vision, which managed the impressive feat of fielding a team entirely from Mark Littlewood's family; and a team composed of a range of journalists.

The quiz was eventually won by (ahem) a TaxPayers' Alliance team but I'm pleased to say we stuck with that original decision, and resisted requests from the CF team to take the EU's approach by repeating the process again and again until they got the result they wanted.

It was a bit of fun, primarily, but there's also a serious purpose to this kind of thing. As Tim has pointed out many a time on ConservativeHome, it is still relatively rare that we all get together socially as a movement. Hopefully by getting together as groups who are united by what we agree on rather than divided by the areas where we differ, it can only strengthen the centre right coalition (and improve our general knowledge).

Some of you may recall that back in 2007, when the Iranian authorities kidnapped 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines to use as political pawns, a "Free the Navy 15" campaign was set up to hold peaceful protests outside the Iranian Embassy in London to demand their release.

I was involved with that campaign at the time in a personal, rather than professional, capacity - happening to be friends with the people who decided to set it up. While we were under no illusions that President Ahmedinejad buckled under the pressure of our home made protests, it was important that, with the rhetoric flowing from Tehran and the embarassing silence coming out of Downing Street, there was a clear signal that people in Britain found Iran's thuggish behaviour unacceptable.

Sadly, with the detention of five innocent British leisure sailors a few days ago, it seems that Iran may be up to its old games. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the crew of the Kingdom of Bahrain were seized only a couple of days before the Iranian Government announced their intention to build 10 new uranium enrichment facilities, in direct contravention of a new IAEA resolution requiring an end to enrichment.

Whilst it may of course be possible that the Kingdom did accidentally stray into Iranian waters, if reports that malfunctions had left them drifting are true, even that assertion should be taken with a pinch of salt -  given that Iran lied about the location of HMS Cornwall in the previous crisis. Should the yacht have genuinely drifted into Iran's waters, the right response would be to give the sailors a ticking off, patch up their boat and send them back where they came from.

Worryingly, Iran's response has instead been to hang on to the sailors for almost a week already, and now to start making pronouncements about whether they had "evil intentions". Given the worry that Iran may well be using these British civilians as political pawns, the decision has been taken to restart what was Free the Navy 15 as "Free the Iran 5".

If Iran does not return these sailors swiftly, as is just, then it seems protests to call for their release may again be necessary. You can visit the Free the Iran 5 blog to find out more, and email freetheiran5@gmail.com to receive emails about possible protests.

(NB I also ought to say at this point that I'm posting this entirely in a personal capacity as something that I think will be of interest to many Centre Right readers - the TPA is in no way involved in the campaign or the issue in general).

Rebranding, and the commissioning of shiny logos, by public sector bodies always attracts controversy. At best, even when the logo that results is ok, it is really an exercise in indulgence and managerial egotism. At its worst, you end up spending thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money on something that is actively embarassing.

It's safe to say that your rebranding has gone pretty badly when you find yourself cooking up absurd explanations of why you always thought it would be a good idea for your civic logo to look like a sperm.

 

Ellen Vernon, economic regeneration officer at North Devon Council, which helped to develop the branding project with £5,000 funding, said: "To many, the 'swirl' represents Fore Street, the Harbour, a fish, an ice-cream and even waves. To others it may look like a sperm, which makes it vibrant and life-affirming."

Oh dear.

Ipsos-MORI have an interesting opinion poll out today that is partly focused on public spending.

The headline on the Today Programme was that the poll shows public support for higher taxes rather than cuts in public spending, which would be astonishing given the state of the economy, the high tax burden and the evidence from almost every opinion poll in recent years to the contrary.

The interpretation put on this by Ben Page of Ipsos-MORI was that while politicians are bravely facing up to the disastrous state of the public finances, the people are still lagging behind and refusing to face up to the truth.

In reality, we know that the public are actually consistently more realistic than Westminster - both because they have day to day experience of waste and inefficiency in public services and because they have been economising and cutting back in their household spending, and want to see the public sector do the same.

So why the odd poll findings?

Well, for a start there is the framing of the questions. Anyone who has ever commissioned a poll will tell you that the language and phrasing of the questions asked is crucial. Indeed, normally polling companies themselves are very firm with clients when a poll is drawn up to avoid biased questions. In this case, though, there are clearly weighted questions.

Every time the issue of public spending is discussed, Ipsos-MORI have used the phrase "spending on public services" and even in one instance "spending on key public services", which provides a clear bias towards the idea that the spending they are asking about is schools, hospitals and other frontline activities rather than back office operations, quangos, senior staff, the civil service etc etc.

Take, for example, the question that is used as a basis for the headline finding that people want higher taxes:

The Optimum Population Trust, for those of you who haven't yet come across them, are an odd bunch. Bluntly, they believe the best way to save the planet is to get rid of as many human beings as possible.

On the plus side, at least they are being more honest than most greens in their open contempt for human beings. The reality of many in the environmentalist movement is at core a deep anti-humanism, an arrogant dislike for people who are somehow too stupid to see the problem with their pursuit of a happy life and a healthy family.

On the down side, the OPT's aims are actually pretty worrying - verging on sinister, even. Buried in their website is a detailed spreadsheet [Excel link] laying out their ideal "sustainable" populations for each country. And those "ideal" populations are a little worrying, if you try to imagine the reality of them.

For example, the UK should shrink to 29 million people, from the 60 million we currently have. We are of course a small island, but ask yourself which half of your friends you would rather did not exist?

And we get things comparatively easy in the OPT's dystopian vision of the future.

Only one in six of the current Algerian population should really be allowed. Bosnians are unlikely to be overjoyed that 3 million of their 4 million people are, in the OPT's eyes, an inconvenience. Rwanda should apparently go from 7 million people to only 2 million.

The big worry for radicals - like myself - who would like to see a serious restructuring of the state is that if and when there is a change of Government, that change will be cosmetic rather than fundamental.

The big bear trap awaiting opposition politicians is the idea that there is nothing wrong with the way Government works, just with the people who are running it - that as long as you have a blue rosette pinned to the Cabinet Ministers rather than a red one, everything will work fine.

This is, of course, a fallacy. As Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell have laid out so brilliantly in The Plan, it is the ship that is at fault - changing who wears the captain's hat will make little difference.

That is why it was worrying to read in yesterday's Sunday Times that Chris Grayling wants official forms to ask people with regularity whether they are married or not.

He seemse to be concerned that whilst official forms request endless information about sexuality, ethnic origin, religious beliefs, family arrangements and so on, they rarely ask about marriage. His argument seems to follow that therefore state paperwork is failing to promote marriage, and considers it unimportant.

There are certainly many things wrong with official forms - not least the kind of lifestyle and personal data that they demand. I personally refuse to answer most of these questions, and I know a lot of people who take pleasure in providing absurd answers to them. The public are fighting back against nosey officialdom in the same way, hence the recent trend of writing "Jedi" when asked one's religion.

Voters would welcome an end to invasive, irrelevant questioning every time they go to the GP or apply for planning permission.

However, Mr Grayling has got it all wrong. The right response to nosey, politically correct questions on official forms is to cut them out, not add in more that satisfy one's own interests. There is no benefit to having even more invasive paperwork, just because you want to snoop from a traditionalist, rightist perspective rather than a trendy lefty perspective.

Shadow Ministers should look at each policy before they propose it, and ask themselves this question: Underneath the bonnet, is this any different to what the Government are doing?

In this case, the answer is no.

The problem with the current policy of information gathering is not that they are gathering the wrong kind of information but that they are demanding so much information at all. A state that holds databases on traditional right wing things, like marriage, or respect for the police, or free market credentials would be just as bad as a state that holds databases on ethno-religious identity, sexuality or household energy usage.

The last thing people need is for this cloying, bullying, prying, database-building Government to be replaced by one that is eactly the same, but painted a different colour. We need a Government that talks sense, rather than the same old rubbish but in a different accent. Mr Grayling should start burning databases, not commissioning his own.

It has recently become an obsession of the Government to put what would have previously been policy targets into law. We already have a "legally binding" target of cutting carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050, and today's Queen's speech lays out further plans to put legal guarantees on education, public finance and child poverty.

This is both pointless and meaningless. The Government have long been accused - accurately - of Governing by press release, but this is taking it to the ultimate absurdity. They used to announce long term policies of the top of their heads in order to grab the next day's headlines. Now they are actually introducing full legislation to achieve that same aim.

As well as a waste of time and money in Whitehall and Westminster, this is damaging to democracy itself. For a start, there is the clear intent to attempt to bind future Parliaments. Happily, the constitution does not allow that to happen in strictly legal terms but the rhetoric of "setting this in stone permanently" is clearly pushing in that direction.

At best, they are effectively boobytrapping the statute book for future Governments - delaying them implementing their own policy and legislative agenda by requiring them to defuse a series of obstructive laws before they can even start doing what they want.

Even worse is the disillusionment that this foolish PR tactic will undoubtedly spread amongst the public. Most people already do not believe the pledges that politicians make - their repeated betrayal of such promises has cheapened their word until it has become in most cases utterly devalued. Instead of working hard to regain popular trust in their pledges, the Government have instead tried to wrap themselves in the authority of legislation in a desperate attempt to persuade people to believe them.

That approach will simply cheapen people's belief in legislation and Parliament, too. Just as with MPs' expenses, our politicians would rather tarnish the standing of our democratic institutions than admit and correct their own failings.

The really infuriating thing is that the Government itself doesn't even believe that these targets will be hit, as legally required. They don't even care - as long as it has the desired effect on the content of next week's fish and chip wrappers, then job done. If the target is hit or not when the arbitrary date comes  round, it will matter not a jot to them - particularly as they will be comfortable on their pensions, or even long dead by the time.

As part of the TPA's Great EU Debate, we're filming a series of interviews with prominent figures and groups representing the full range of views on the EU issue. The first two have gone on line today, and are from Lorraine Mullally from Open Europe:

And Richard Laming, of the pro-EU European Movement:

You can watch these and other interviews which will be posted over the next few days at www.greatEUdebate.com  

Further to Harry's report about Hammersmith & Fulham's fourth annual council tax cut, I think it's important we consider the full importance of what H&F are achieving.

For people in the Borough, of course, they have a council which is helping them to survive the recession. There are millions of people around the country who would give an eye for a council which does that, rather than slapping increasing bills, rising charges and draconian rules on them.

In a national setting, though, Hammersmith & Fulham are exposing the Emperor's New Clothes of local government. Without a sizeable council showing that it is possible to cut taxes and improve public satisfaction year on year, wasteful and inefficient councils would be able to claim it was impossible.

H&F's success removes that lazy excuse once and for all.

It's always interesting to see the attempts to dismiss the success of Stephen Greenhalgh's administration every year. Originally it was "Well, it's easy to do that if you take over from a wasteful administration." Four years later, with the 3% cut being delivered yet again, that one seems to have been dropped.

Then it was allegations that Hammersmith and Fulham is an unusually wealthy or untroubled area, which can be swiftly rebutted by the bare facts.

The latest excuse is that H&F get an unusually generous deal from central Government, which again does not seem to be the case compared to the funding of many other councils. Indeed, given the Government's record of jealously holding down funding to politically inconvenient councils, it is hard to see why Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown or John Denham should be giving a leg up to the H&F revolution.

Eventually, those excuses will run out. Just as with Wandsworth, which continues to embarass neighbouring boroughs with consistently low taxes and good services, other councils may eventually have to accept that there's nothing magical or unworldly about Cllr Greenhalgh et al - they're just good at running a council. If only other councillors would follow their example rather than attempt to rubbish it.

Crikey - it feels like the height of the MPs' expenses scandal all over again. Back when the Telegraph was publishing new revelations every day, the working week became a bit distorted at the TPA - work would finish at the normal time and then kick off again after the 10 o'clock news, responding to the latest shockers.

So it has been tonight, with the leaking of parts of Sir Christopher Kelly's forthcoming proposals on reforming MPs' expenses. The difference is that instead of being faced with a new bit of bad news, as we so often were in those giddy duck house days, this is mostly good news for taxpayers.

At this point, I should note that this is only a partial leak of Kelly's report so far as I can see. It only covers some of the expenses issues he was investigating, and there is as yet no mention of the administrative and procedural matters such as transparency which are so crucial.

That said, what we have heard is pretty good, and mostly in line with what we at the TaxPayers' Alliance were recommending.

Family Members: Kelly rightly proposes that MPs should not be allowed to employ family members. Even if an MPs' spouse or child is an untrammeled genius, this practice is so drenched in suspicion that it is unacceptable.

Second homes: Kelly is apparently banning mortgages outright, and thus banning the prospect of MPs making a capital gain on their second home. This is welcome and long overdue, though his suggestion of renting houses is a more open ended and thus expensive option than our preferred plan of housing Members in the Olympic Village.

Many ConHome readers may have seen me and my colleagues from the TPA gathering signatures at the Conservative Party Conference for our giant postcard (picutred, right) to President Vaclav Klaus urging him to stand firm on the Lisbon Treaty. Now you can join those who have already sent President Klaus their messages of support by signing our online petition here.

The messages coming from Prague Castle have been mixed in recent weeks, from outright refusal to sign Lisbon to more pessimistic comments, but the game is not over yet. There are undoubtedly many threats being flung at President Klaus by EU leaders, and many incentives being dangled in front of him so it is still crucial that we lend him our support in his brave campaign.

Do sign the petition, and send it on to your friends and family.

I was amused to see in this morning's papers that Manchester City Council has apparently spent £8,000 producing a book of sex tips for the over-50s.

Looking at the timing, is there a possibility that the Council has embarked on this project on the basis of twin stereotypes:

1) the assumed average age of delegates to the Conservative Party Conference next week, and

2) the running joke about what delegates get up to after a few too many free fringe meeting glasses of wine?

Of course, whatever the Council's motives this is an absurd use of taxpayers' money. For that matter, it will undoubtedly go to waste. As Anne Widdecombe says in The Sun today,

"If someone hasn't learnt how to have sex by the time they have reached 50 then a booklet is certainly not going to help."

Quite.

We all know that a fundamental principle of British law is that ignorance of the law is no defence. Or rather, we should all know - Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, seems to be trying to hang on to her job as one of the most senior lawyers in the land explicitly on the basis that her offence of employing an illegal immigrant was "inadvertent".

Sometimes, of course, people are punished due to breaching overly complex laws that they couldn't reasonably be expected to understand - particularly given the huge increase in legal complexity Baroness Scotland has overseen. They are normally ordinary invdividuals unversed in the law, though, rather than one of the most senior lawyers in the land who actually helped to enact the very law they have broken.

But as well as being aware of this particular law, shouldn't the Attorney General should be aware of a such a fundamental principle as ignorance being no defence?

She certainly should be - thanks to a quick search of the ever useful www.theyworkforyou.com I can confirm that she herself has said it to justify the Government's proposals at least twice in Parliamentary debates:

1. On 27th October 2003, in a debate on the Extradition Bill she rejected civil liberties concerns by telling Lord Clinton-Davis that "as he is well aware, is that ignorance of the law has never been a defence, and to recognise it as a reason for not extraditing people to another EU country is a dangerous precedent."

2. On the 21st of October 2004, in a debate on the higly dubious Civil Contingencies Bill, she told Lord Archer of Sandwell that "The noble and learned Lord knows far better than me that ignorance of the law has never been a defence in our country."

Surely the Attorney General cannot have forgotten that principle in the last five years? And if she has, surely she should be sacked from such an important legal position anyway?

...as long as they are like this one:

The government has saved £7m in the last year by making its departments greener, the Cabinet Office says.

Changes made include using double-sided printing, turning off computers at night and extending the life of PCs.

Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith said reforms had "saved enough carbon dioxide to fill almost 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools".  

£7 million is a handy saving, that taxpayers will rightly be pleased about. Of course, people are also justified in asking why it was acceptable before the Government took up its green policy crusade for computers to be left on over night to run up energy bills and for single-sided printing to be the norm. These basic measures for saving money should have been standard practice in all public bodies, never mind just in Whitehall departments.

There is another aspect to this story which is quite revealing, too. Green policies have been failing to get popular support because they normally involve large expense, and with a recession and a huge deficit that is unacceptable to most people. Indeed, the ardent anti-capitalism and anti-growth views of the core of the Green movement have actually tainted the whole issue for millions of people, leading them to assume that all environmentally friendly measures are going to cost them a fortune (for the very good reason that most proposals being put forward are indeed going to do just that).

This story takes a different tack, and has been spun to promote green policies against that background - the message is "See, being green can save money!"

The message could equally be that actually reducing public spending through simple savings can have green benefits - a message along the lines of "See, saving money can be green!" But that would never do - promoting lower spending as having good knock-on effects and, God forbid, undermining the idea that it is essential to spend more in order to save the planet, would stick in the craw of any Government Minister, and raise howls from the Big State enthusiasts among the Green movement.

That said, while yes, it should have been done years ago and yes, it is a cleverly phrased bit of propaganda, this is £7 million less for taxpayers to shell out for. That is the kind of Green I can get behind.

After the early rumblings of debate last week, the TPA/Institute of Directors report on how to save £50 billion on Friday, the TUC's dire warnings of the weekend and the crucial Sunday Times poll yesterday, it is now accepted that the battle over public spending cuts is well and truly on.

We have been working ten to the dozen over the last few days discussing, explaining and debating the 34 specific proposals we put forward for savings (you can see the rebuttal of people's criticisms here). Even Peter Mandelson has started to concede ground on the subject today, saying that the Government was willing to review any item of spending even including the beloved ID cards.

George Osborne's piece in today's Evening Standard, therefore, could and should have gone further than it did. Having rightly called on the Prime Minister to "tell the truth about cuts", his full page article then went on to only use two numbers - 2007, in reference to the year, and G20, the organisation, which hardly counts.

The Sunday Times' polling showed that 60% of the public want spending cuts. The international markets and the credit rating agencies want reassurance that a future Government will take control of the public finances with a firm hand. Even the people who disagree with one or another of the 34 proposed cuts we and the IoD laid out last week have been emailing and calling in all day to say they appreciate us bringing some honesty to the debate, and wish that politicians would stop dodging the details.

The principle that cuts are necessary has now been largely accepted - Mr Osborne and the Shadow Treasury Team must now start to tell the public exactly which difficult decisions need to be made.

Law and order has always been at or close to the top of the public's concerns. Given the continuing problems with organised gangs reaping the profits of the drug trade and the recent boom in knife and gun crime, proactive policing has rarely been more in demand.

Irrespective of the views of Home Office civil servants, quangocrats or unelected Police Authorities, the public who live at the sharp end of the crime problem know full well that what is needed is a tough focus by real police officers on catching criminals.

It beggars belief, therefore, to see some of the absurd schemes targeted at the innocent rather than the guilty that police forces are pursuing.

A couple of months ago, Northamptonshire Police introduced a tactic of shouting "Lock your doors" through a megaphone at innocent householders.

In July, PCSOs in Hove started climbing through windows into people's houses with no invitation or warning in order to lecture them about home security.

And now we learn that Police Officers in Richmond are breaking into cars that have unlocked doors or ajar windows, taking the owner's valuables and leaving them a note saying they have to come to the police station to reclaim them (and be given another lecture, naturally).

This kind of nonsense is not just a waste of taxpayers' money and police officers' time, it is genuinely hazardous to the standing and enforcement of the law. The law rests on the consent of the law-abiding majority, and even more crucially their co-operation.

The image to the right, which is used to promote the EU's African aid policies, was brought to my attention this week by a colleague who had stumbled across it whilst doing research into aid spending.

As well as being immensely patronising, and betraying the EU's love of exactly the kind of imperialism that its supporters so love to claim it counterbalances, the image is one of staggering hypocrisy. Whilst the European Union does distribute aid money, its far more notable impact on Africa is one of huge economic damage.

The Common Agricultural Policy, and the trade barriers that make it possible, do untold harm to millions of farmers who would dearly love to sell their produce to European consumers. It is sickening that while British and other European people are hit by spiralling food prices, a continent of farmers who could provide cheaper goods are effectively barred by massive tariffs from doing so.

This is one area where eurosceptics must take the EU on, and could do so to great effect. Morally, fighting against the protectionism and dumping of subidised produce into African markets that kills large numbers of people and impoverishes millions more is clearly the right thing to do. Strategically it has benefits, too.

There is a lot of manufactured tension between euroscepticism as a supposedly old-fashioned view and the new ideas of a rebranded Conservative Party. When David Cameron urged people not to “bang on about Europe”, he did so on the basis that rejecting eurosceptic politics would cast him as a moderniser.