CentreRight

Today is an exciting one for the TaxPayers' Alliance - our UK Debt Clock starts its 1,300 mile tour of Britain, highlighting the vast scale of the national debt to taxpayers right across the country.

For many years now, there has been a clock counting up the USA's National Debt in New York, acting as a constant reminder to people how much the Government is borrowing for taxpayers to one day pay off. Inspired by that, we have built what we believe to be the biggest digital clock in the world to do the same for the UK national debt.

Seven metres long, and one metre tall, mounted on the back of a 14 metre lorry, the TPA Debt Clock drives home exactly how vast Britain's national debt now is. To get an impression of its size, have a look at the first photo of it here.

The national debt is run up by politicians in Westminster, but has a hugely damaging impact on taxpayers right around the country - as well as equating to a bill of over £30,000 per family, it is threatening to undermine our credit rating and destory investor confidence in Britain. Therefore we have made our clock mobile, so we can take the message to the people.

After its launch today in Westminster it will visit the Bank of England and then go on to the Millennium Dome before leaving London and travelling around the country. It will be stopping off at:

Oxford, Tuesday 13th April
Bristol, Wednesday 14th April
Cardiff, Thursday 15th April
Birmingham, Friday 16th April
Manchester, Monday 19th April
Edinburgh, Tuesday 20th April
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Wednesday 21st April
Hull, Thursday 22nd April
Peterborough, Friday 23rd April
Norwich, Monday 26th April

and you can get full details of each stop on the tour from www.debt-clock.org

Even if the clock isn’t passing through your neighbourhood, you can get your own debt clock to embed on your own website or blog. Our online debt clock counts up the national debt in real time at the same pace as its full size cousin:

To get your own debt clock widget, click here and copy the code to your own site.

The national debt can be a bafflingly large figure - particularly in an age when billions and trillions are bandied around so readily. To help put it in context, here are a few facts about the debt, which currently stands at over £781.5 billion:

- The Bank of England holds £21.669 billion in gold bullion and foreign currencies as the national reserve.  The Government borrows that much money every seven weeks.

- The Millennium Dome (now the O2) cost £789 million. That is equal to 1 day, 18 hours and 24 minutes of the national debt’s increase. 

- Using the existing debt you could buy some remarkably lavish things (if you so wished). For example, you could more than afford an exact replica of London's HMS Belfast, made of gold, at £673.3 billion. Similarly, building the whole Royal Navy fleet out of silver would cost £590 billion.

The message is clear - politicians must wake up to the scale of the national debt.

For more debt facts, information on the Debt Clock tour, media coverage of the clock and other information, visit www.debt-clock.org or follow the Clock's http://twitter.com/debt_clock.

Niche, sector-specific media is a strange world. In my time I've come across a weird and wonderful range of publications, many of which would not look out of place as Have I Got News For You guest publications.

This one really takes the biscuit, though. Doesn't it say everything about the bloated size of the state that there is now a whole magazine dedicated to "Public Sector Travel"?

Sometimes a story comes along that is literally jaw-dropping. One of those is in today's Daily Mail. As part of a programme teaching children about the Holocaust, teachers at St Hilary's Primary School in East Kilbride took an unbelievably irresponsible approach to impressing the horrors of the Final Solution on their pupils.

Instead of presenting the class of 11 year olds with the facts, which are shocking and disturbing enough in themselves to communicate the grim reality of the Holocaust, they decided to subject their pupils to a traumatic experience of their very own.

The Deputy Headmistress, it is reported, announced that by order of the Scottish Executive some of the children judged to have "low IQ" were to be separated from their classmates and sent away - perhaps to an orphanage. They would never be allowed to see their parents again. She then went on to tell them that their parents had been made aware of the decision, too, implying that they endorsed it.

Understandably, the children picked out were worried and upset. An authority figure in their school had told them that she, the Government and their parents had agreed that they were to be separated from their families.

As a lesson, it is unlikely to be forgotten, but it is of no perceivable value. These young children were put through a wholly unpleasant experience, and humiliated in front of their classmates. The teachers in charge seem to have a low opinion of their own ability to communicate history through normal teaching, twinned with a reckless disregard for the well-being of their pupils.

This is not a case for crying "something must be done", or demanding central government produces a new set of rules banning teachers from scaring schoolchildren. In the best case scenario, such a move would produce irrelevant rules at large expense. In the worst case, the clause against scaring children would undoubtedly be used to clamp down on genuinely worthwhile activities such as outward bound events.

What we really need to stop teachers like these from pursuing such abject nonsense is for parents to be given real power over schools. At the moment, you have to pack your child off to school where the teachers can be as irresponsible, incompetent or downright harmful as they want and as a parent you have very little power to change things.

The parents of children subjected to this deeply unpleasant experience should have the power to gather the support of other parents and change the school's policy, get the person responsible dismissed or punish the school as an institution by moving their children elsewhere.

Whenever you think the Parliamentary authorities couldn't become more ridiculous, they exceed themselves.

As if it wasn't absurd enough to have the restrictions on protests and so on, they seem to have started cracking down on political literature being allowed into the Houses.

Today I was scheduled to speak at the Young Britons' Foundation event in Committee Room 10, hosted by Greg Hands MP. I took with me a sheaf of TPA leaflets, as you do when speaking to an audience who may want to know more or even join up, and at the request of the event organisers.

But when I eventually got to the security scanners, I was told "You're not allowed those."

"Why not?"

"You're just not. You could throw them everywhere."

And they were confiscated from me.

What a topsy-turvy world we now live in, where someone is forbidden from bringing political materials to a meeting of political activists and MPs in the building at the heart of our politics. Small wonder the public think that Westminster has gone mad - it increasingly seems that it has.

Politics is important. The size, cost and power of the State mean that no-one can afford to ignore or take lightly the question of who runs the country. However, politicians must also do their best to limit the collateral damage that occurs when they battle for supremacy.

There is a danger that the titanic battle of a General Election could come to resemble a fight between King Kong and Godzilla - that both sides become so engrossed in defeating each other that they fail to notice that they are laying waste to the city around them.

I fear that the latest furore around allegations of bullying in No 10 is just such a disaster. Something really important has been wrecked as a result of the political tussle.

Don't get me wrong - it is certainly important and deeply concerning if the Prime Minister has been bullying his staff. However, the decision of the National Bullying Helpline's Chief Executive to reveal that Downing Street staff have called the Helpline is a serious error that will do lasting harm to many people.

It is a fundamental principle of these helplines - from the Samaritans to University Night Lines - that they are utterly confidential. Only if people know that no-one will ever stand any chance of finding out about their call will they feel able to phone in. That confidentiality even extends in many cases to the phone operators themselves concealing the truth about their work or volunteer activities - lest a friend or family member be put off phoning for support for fear that they will be put through to someone they know.

The actions of the NBH's Christine Pratt have shattered this confidentiality with regard to her own organisation. She did not name the people involved, but she did just about everything else. Even if the callers can't be personally identified from her comments, it is safe to say that the boss-worker relationship is probably even more unpleasant in No 10 this morning than it was when the calls were originally made.

Worse, if anyone out there - in Downing Street or any other workplace - is feeling bullied themselves, they will now think twice before picking up the phone. The concern will now be live in people's minds that if one helpline can behave in this way, then others can do.

It may have made some good headlines, but Ms Pratt's intervention has shattered something crucial to large numbers of vulnerable people. I can't help but feel she has burned something incredibly valuable just to warm up politics for a day.

Gobsmacking. Jawdropping. Farcical. Obscene. The idea that British taxpayers should be made to bail out Greece and the Euro are all these and more.

Greece currently faces a fiscal crisis brought by decades of bad spending decisions, and the failure of its political class to stand up to the country's militant union movement.

The resulting issues for the Eurozone are similarly self-inflicted. By binding such a disparate range of economies into one currency and interest rate, the scale of a Greece-style crisis was deepened and its impact was extended far across the Continent.

Given that the last people to blame for either of these problems are British taxpayers, it is staggering that the British Government is still refusing to rule out handing our money over to bail out the Greeks.

If, like me, you believe we have more than enough economic and fiscal problems at home without dishing out yet more taxpayers' money to Athens, please sign the petition against the bail out here.

For that matter please send the link on to friends, family and colleagues. We must not let taxpayers be ripped off yet again.

There has already been some discussion here, both by Tim and Melanchthon, of the findings of the annual British Social Attitudes Survey, but I think there is a broader trend than those they identify. Yes, Britain can be said to be moving "to the right" to a certain extent, but in this Survey we see yet another sign that the simplistic terms "right" and "left" are actually becoming defunct. In fact, it shows Britain is becoming broadly libertarian.

In the traditional, stereotypical view of what "right" means, a right winger would be for the free market and low taxes in the economic sphere, and strict and moralistic policies in the social sphere. This is the assumption that the BBC, for example, tends to make.

In recent years the word libertarian has been adopted to identify a distinct ideology that is separate from this. As a libertarian, I believe in free market, low tax economics but on the social side I believe in individual liberty, and freedom of choice in terms of lifestyle, sexuality and religion. (It should be noted that there are some self-declared "Left Libertarians", who are more economically controlling but supportive of social liberty. They are however very rare.)

The turbulent extremist underbelly of Waziristan, Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, may be a long way from Westminster, but it seems set to bring the UK's fiscal crisis into sharp relief.

According to Lady Kinnock, the Foreign Office has a shortfall of around £110m this year - a problem exacerbated by the weakness of the Pound (and the failure of the FCO to effectively hedge against the possibilities of devaluation). As a result, the anti-terror effort in Pakistan has simply been left without the money it expected.

This is crunch time. The situation in Pakistan is far too serious to simply scrap our work there, given that the country's militants are explicitly linked with attacks directly targeted against Britain. There isn't any more money in the pot, nor can taxes be raised without doing huge harm to the prospect of economic recovery.  Therefore, if we want to maintain these crucial efforts then we need to cut somewhere else. This is the new politics, and the sooner our politicians get used to it, the better.

So, where to cut? Interestingly, the Lib Dems' Lord Wallace (no relation) made the case on the Today Programme this morning for the International Development budget to be cut. He made the very good point that economic and social development are rather difficult to do if your country is overrun with trigger-happy extremists. Of course, at the moment this option has been forbidden to Conservative Shadow Ministers by the current policy of ringfencing DfID's spending.

Alternatively, the British Council spent an impressive £209m last year. With such a pressing public finance crisis, their work looks more and more like a luxury that we can ill afford. Whilst well-intentioned, their programmes are often extremely costly and are really an indulgence. Foreign Office Ministers need to ask themselves: which is best for Britain and for Pakistan - defeating violent, organised terror plots targeted at Pakistani and British civilians, or organising sports exchanges between Rugby and Kabbadi teams?

Thus far, the spending cuts promised by the main parties have been either very small or very general. We all know that the need to get into the nitty gritty is inevitable, but the inhabitants of Westminster are still clearly nervous of being up front about that with the public. This is a mistake - and as the developing controversy over these anti-terror cuts shows, either they can choose to come clean soon, and on their own terms, or they will be forced to face up to it by circumstances beyond their control.

Softball questions from the back benches at Prime Ministers Questions are one of those grim facts of life - like chewing gum on the pavement. They're a slightly sad waste of time, and don't even perform a useful PR function, as they simply annoy viewers.

Today, however, one Government backbencher managed to excel herself in producing a remarkably ridiculous example. I didn't catch the MP's name, and wanted to blog this without having to wait for Hansard to come out with the precise wording, but it went something like this:

"Does the Honorable Gentleman agree with me that the Child Trust Fund has been a great success?"

Gordon Brown, of course, did, and took the opportunity to wax lyrical about how much the Government cares about children - quel surprise. But how on earth can anyone know whether the Funds have been a success or not?

The Funds, which are given to every child when they are born, contain £250 of taxpayers' money. Parents are allowed to top them up with their own money as they wish. However, the scheme applies to every child born after 1st September 2002, and the money cannot be accessed until their 18th birthday.

So no-one knows how the Funds will turn out yet - and nor will we know until the early 2020s when the first tranche of Funds mature with the 2002 generation of children. It might be prove successful, or it might turn out purely to be a way of tying up vast amounts of taxpayers' money for decades.

Prime Ministers' Questions is there to allow the representatives of the people to scrutinise the Government and hold the PM to account. As the Speaker mentioned again today, there is never enough time to fit in all the MPs who want to ask questions. Isn't it time for the Speaker to insist that MPs place probing questions rather than adulatory puff pieces?

A small forest has already been cut down to print the column acres of analysis of the abortive Hewitt-Hoon plot last week. Nonetheless, I'm going to indulge in a little bit more.

This isn't really a bit of Kremlinology or speculation on who was behind it all, but rather an insight into the way the Left thinks.

Hewitt and Hoon's letter was not, as it is generally characterised, the announcement of a specific leadership challenge, but a call for a vote of no confidence. In its own way, that was quite a clever attempt at avoiding the pitfalls that wrecked previous challenges to Brown's authorit.

The anti-Brown rebels on Labour's benches have typically hit two major obstacles in the past. The first is that the potential challengers, such as David Miliband, have proved too cowardly to put their heads above the parapet. The second is that even if you have a willing challenger, the Labour Party's constitution requires them to get the fairly high number of 70 Labour MPs to publicly support the challenge for it to become official.

The idea for a vote of no confidence sidesteps both of those issues - no need for a challenger as a figurehead, and no constitutional requirement for a set number of MPs to back you. Of course, the plot fell down on its own in-built walking pitfall, Geoff Hoon, but their tactic did have some logic to it.

It was the reaction of Brown's allies and the Party authorities that was particularly revealing, though. They simply declared that the vote of the Parliamentary Labour Party proposed by the plotters was "unconstitutional" as there were no provisions for it in the Party Constitution.

This illustrates the fundamental philosophical difference between Right and Left. Whereas the Right generally take the view that you are allowed to do anything unless it is explicitly forbidden, the Left assume that you can only have rights that are explicitly granted by the rules. For the Right, your freedom was born with you and can only be taken away by rules and regulations, and for the Left, what freedom you have is given to you by the powers that be.

Whatever you do today, please, please, please respond to the final consultation on MPs' expenses.

When, on 4th November, Sir Christopher Kelly delivered a popular, coherent and firm manifesto on how to clean up Parliament, it was widely assumed that his decisive action meant that the expenses problem was going to be sorted out.

After all, they were a solid set of practical reforms built on a foundation of massive public demand and issued by an authoritative source. Kelly's proposals also had the unequivocal backing of all three main political parties.

They had, however, forgotten something. Back in the summer, when MPs lived in fear of being phoned by a Telegraph journalist, the Commons rushed through a new Act that they hoped might deflect some of the criticism by demonstrating a willingness to reform the system. In doing so, they created IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority - the quango which is now charged with designing and then running the new system of MPs' expenses.

By virtue of the Act that created it, IPSA is now legally bound to hold one last consultation which will produce the eventual system of MPs' expenses.

This is undoubtedly frustrating. After all, the Kelly inquiry was popular, attracted plenty of evidence submissions and produced a set of recommendations that would have done the job very well. Now, with IPSAs consultation there is a danger that the public will begin to feel that, EU-style, the establishment intends to keep asking the question until they get the answer MPs rather than the public prefer.

That may or may not be IPSA's intention. Many IPSA staff whom I have met seem to just want to get on with implementing Kelly's proposals. Sir Ian Kennedy, the IPSA Chairman (whom I haven't met), has been widely reported in the media over recent days to have sympathies that fall far short of the public's views, particularly on the employment of family members and the number of MPs who should be able to get free London accommodation.

What is certain that a determined and hard-bitten bunch of MPs are engaged in a coordinated campaign to use this final consultation to so drastically water down and fudge Kelly's proposals that they will be allowed to carry on with business as usual.

This is why it is crucial that the largest number of people possible respond to IPSA's consultation to insist that the reforms must be firm and clear. Kelly has demonstrated that a transparent, modern, and honest system is perfectly possible - and it is now down to all of us to insist that his proposals are adopted.

At the TPA blog we've published a question by question guide to the consultation, which may well be of use and interest to you all when making your own responses. You can find our guide to the consultation here.

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.