City bankers are to reap nearly £7bn in bonuses this spring. Source: The Guardian.

Taxpayers have spent billions of pounds propping up the banking system and now City bankers are to taking £7bn of our money for themselves – 50% tax rate let’s make it 110% and get our money back with interest.

The BBC reports that Professor Chris Griffiths of Manchester University has clinically proved that Boots No 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum reduces wrinkles. Now I’m a sceptic about such claims and a trial size of just 60 people seems a rather small sample – but I’m no scientist, and I can’t afford the £190 needed to subscribe to the British Journal of Dermatology, where the report is published, so I can read it for myself – so we are left with an assertion that a miracle cream works and trusting that journalists have done their work – I’m not that trusting. I’m even more sceptical when:

Professor Griffiths stressed that they were independent, although the work received funding from Boots.

And another thing what happens when people stop using the serum?

Government plans to make personal, social and health education (PSHE) compulsory from the age of five , published yesterday, include a clause allowing schools to apply their “values” to the lessons and another allowing parents to opt their children out on religious grounds.

It means that all state secondary’s in England – including faith schools – will for the first time have to teach a core curriculum about sex and contraception in the context of teenagers’ relationships, but teachers in religious schools will also be free to tell them that sex outside marriage, homosexuality or using contraception are wrong. Sexual health campaigners warned that such an approach could confuse teenagers, but Catholic schools welcomed the move. Polly Curtis, The Guardian.

Now what on earth’s happening here? Religious sensitivity gone mad – religion has no place in PSHE – do we want our children growing up believing for instance that condoms increase their risk of HIV/AIDS? Of course not, but Pope Benedict XVI preached just that in his first papal visit to Africa just last month – and don’t get me started on homosexuality or sex outside marriage or …there’s hundreds of reasons why religion should be kept out of schools let alone PSHE lessons.

Signs of a New Labour revolt over the 50p top tax rate emerged yesterday when Stephen Byers described the proposal as “cynical” and warned that reneging on Labour’s manifesto commitment not to raise taxes was something the party would live to regret for years to come.

The former cabinet minister said he feared the budget “will make the UK less attractive, wealth creation will slow down, and that will have negative consequences for public spending”. Patrick Wintour, The Guardian.

If there was a Labour bone in Byers’ body then he could find plenty of evidence to contradict his views – another Labour MP who should have joined the Tories.

A Boeing 747 used by the president was escorted over lower Manhattan by a US air force fighter jet today as part of a government photo opportunity and training mission, causing a brief panic among office workers near the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Guardian.

As no-one had thought to inform New Yorkers workers unsurprisingly they poured onto the streets in panic.

What PR executive came up with that idea?

A sixth of Gloucestershire’s street lights are to be dimmed overnight to cut carbon emissions and save money.

About 10,000 of the county’s 59,000 lights will be turned down between 2200 BST and 0500 BST at night from last Wednesday.
The move is expected to save £210,000 per year and cut emissions by 28%.

Although the lights will be significantly dimmed, the noticeable difference to people passing by will be minimal, the county council said. BBC.

Perhaps we’d better remember our torches when out late at night.

A new recycling scheme for Gloucester will mean residents’ bins will be emptied fortnightly rather than weekly.

Under the plans, due to start next January, residents will be able to recycle food waste, plastic and batteries in a separate collection. BBC.

Our bin is generally half full each week so really this makes sense and plans for additional recycling are to be welcomed.

I recently published a post on the Child Poverty Action Group’s report which ranked the UK 24th out of 29 European countries. My wife took me to task over this and Ryan Conor provides the evidence I published in haste.

A few years ago, a report appeared from UNICEF which claimed that Britain was the worst possible place for children to live: the whole thing was lapped up gleefully by everyone from the Daily Mail (as a stick to beat Labour) to Polly Toynbee (in her crusade for more cash for early years). Now a ‘new’ report for the Child Poverty Action Group – surprise, surprise – says pretty much the same thing and is being given top billing on Today and in the Mail. Today’s Mail said that the CPAG research ‘echoed’ the UNICEF report. Well, it would do, wouldn’t it, since the principal author of both reports is Professor Jonathan Bradshaw of the Social Policy Research Unit at York University who decides which criteria to use in drawing up the league tables.

Now, having read some of his work, I think Professor Bradshaw is pretty good at his job. He can write reasonably well aside from occasional lapses into jargon – which can’t always be said for academics – and has developed a perfectly reasonable theory about how to measure relative childhood happiness and quality of life across countries. But it is just that: a theory. Yet it is being treated as irrefutable fact despite his league tables (as with the UNICEF report) giving equal weight to different things that few would regard as of equal importance or reliability. The CPAG report doesn’t tell you anything about Professor Bradshaw’s weighting of different aspects; in order to understand why the UK does so badly, one has to understand his weighting. To do that you need to fork out $34 for an article he wrote with Dominic Richardson of the OECD (in an independent capacity) in a journal called Child Indicators Research, published earlier this month.

The research splits 43 indicators into 19 components across 7 domains, giving each domain equal weight. There, you find, for example, that the reason the UK does poorly on child health is because of its relatively low childhood immunisation rates. These are given equal weight to infant mortality and to something called ‘health behaviour’ based on questions to children about whether they brush their teeth, are too fat or eat apples. The UK is apparently doing fairly well on these latter scores, but has been downgraded by its low immunisation rates. I wonder which newspaper and which morning current affairs programme has most to answer for on that score?

Then, there’s something called “subjective wellbeing” – which is ranked as importantly as health or education. This has three components – each one three times as important to a country’s score as whether kids can read properly. These are “personal wellbeing – the percentage of children reporting high life satisfaction” – whatever that means; wellbeing at school – whether children “feel pressure at school” (bad, apparently) or “like school a lot” (good); and ’self-defined health” – whether children think they are healthy. Each of these three subjective components is ranked more importantly than whether a country’s babies die in infancy. Anyway, needless to say, British kids score below average on this lot. But it is comforting to learn that in league table-free Finland, regarded as the best education system by many, children feel just as much pressure and are just as likely not to like school as their British counterparts. The authors tell us this is because “educational attainment may be a well-becoming indicator rather than a well-being indicator.” I did warn you Prof Bradshaw was guilty of occasional lapses into jargon.

Next up is relationships. There are just two components here, each worth considerably more to a country’s ranking than good literacy or low infant mortality. And as Britain is slightly above average here, we probably shouldn’t complain. But it is again subjective and is based on the percentage of children who “find it easy to talk to” their parents and who find their classmates “kind and helpful.” In case you were wondering, France is not a good place for this sort of thing. I trust President Sarkozy has a taskforce on the case already.

Then we turn to material wellbeing, which is based on relative poverty indices, measures of deprivation and children in workless households. This seems, like health, to be a reasonably objective indicator. Children in the UK are, apparently, among the most likely to be living in workless households, but the authors tell us this does not mean they are lacking in consumer durables (colour TVs, computers or cars) or under severe economic strain. The next ‘domain’ is risk and safety. The three components here are ‘violence and violent behaviour’ (fighting or experiencing bullying), child deaths and risky behaviour (early intercourse, smoking, drugs, drunkenness). Surprisingly, perhaps, the UK does a bit better on this list, being brought down by youthful drunkenness, but having a relatively low number of child deaths.

Then we turn to education. The UK gained slightly above average PISA scores (among the countries in this report) in literacy, numeracy and science (though the combination of these is only worth the same as each of the subjective questions above). The other two components are educational participation of 15-19 year-olds and in pre-school and NEET rates (those not in work, education or training). Since there is an obvious correlation between post-16 participation and NEETs, the authors have chosen to give half of the education score to this aspect of education. There is no mention of university participation, where the UK does well. And the relatively high pre-school participation rates, where the UK is also doing much better than many – and which most researchers would regard as the most crucial element – are apparently worth just a third as much as 16-19 participation/NEETs. That is the authors’ choice but this is not an accurate representation of any education system. There is a final domain for housing issues, which is a second poverty grouping.

In their academic article, the authors themselves show how easy it is to manipulate the data – and, to be fair, are happy to offer it to anyone else wanting to do so. They pick just seven indicators – child immunisation, ‘high life satisfaction’, talking to dads, lack of educational possessions, recent bullying, maths scores and houses with housing problems and the UK finds itself up in 18th position instead of 24th, ahead now of France and Italy.

I have no quibble with researchers reporting these indicators and highlighting where Britain ranks according to each one of them. I also think it is important that young people’s voices are heard – as is increasingly the case in schools. But I worry about arbitrary weightings which give far more weight to subjective – and perhaps culturally sensitive – questions than to matters of life and death or pretty basic educational outcomes. The CPAG should publish all this information on its website, but if the media weren’t so keen on talking our country down, they might actually explain the arbitrary nature of these rankings – and own up where our low rankings reflected their own efforts rather than the policies of the government. Ryan Conor.

We all make mistakes.

Ministers needed to “roll up their sleeves” and get to grips with the task of reducing the growth in public spending now.

“The success or failure of a Conservative government, if one is elected, is going to be whether we deal with this enormous problem that we have,” Conservative leader David Cameron said.

“It means the whole way the government operates is going to have to change. It means ministers actually being rewarded on the basis of how they can save money rather than spend it.”

Mr Cameron said the Conservatives had identified three areas in which savings should be made.

Projects such as the ID cards scheme and the Contact Point child protection database should be scrapped, the tax credit system should be scaled back and public sector pay needed to be tackled. BBC.

And it won’t benefit us one jot – especially if you’re low paid or work in local government – it’ll go straight into maintaining the life-style the rich have become accustom too.

Cameron’s right about one thing Britain must be prepared for a “major culture change”.

And that culture change must be in the attitudes to wealth and how it’s created – many of us have wrongly used rising house prices to make us wealthy and used that wealth to borrow vast sums of money: it can’t go on. Furthermore we can’t allow the few to exploit the rest of us – for instance it makes no sense to allow Private finance companies to make vast sums by doing little more than buying and selling assets and in the processes saddling companies with vast debts which can drive them to bankruptcy. If we don’t change the majority of us will face a life of poverty.

Iain Dale a Conservative priority candidate for the next election writes in The Guardian.

Remember Peter Mandelson proclaiming that he didn’t mind if people got filthy rich under Labour? Well, those days have well and truly gone. The 50% tax rate announcement was purely designed to give a signal to the Labour left that he’s happy to make the “pips squeak” (copyright Denis Healey, 1977). What other explanation can there be? It will raise very little extra money and help reduce incentives. A 50% tax rate will encourage entrepreneurs to invest money anywhere other than this country.

I’d hardly describe 50% as “pips squeak”, many people who never benefited from the vast wealth that the city made have now paid with their jobs – not that the many short contract and agency workers ever felt secure. Still Ian Dale feels the need to invoke Denis Healey – you know it seems reasonable to ask those earning vastly more than the rest of us to pay a little more and anyway these people pay accountants so they can avoid paying all tax I doubt that the government will recieve anything like the revenue it expects from this measure, but they’ll pay more.

As for Dale’s claim that 50% will be a disincentive to his so called entrepreneurs it really is a fantasy, people make money first, no-one in business thinks hang on I can’t make anymore money because I’ll pay more tax – do they – wake up Dale: live in the real world.