Fraser Nelson

Was that it? Gordon Brown’s speech was no launch-pad for an election or anything else. It was competent and workmanlike but its shopping list of initiatives recalled his duller budgets. The NHS saved his sight, he says. Maybe so, but biographies of Brown tell how frustrated he was with years of duff advice from the NHS while he feared he would go blind - before an (Asian immigrant) consultant managed to help him. The rather muted ovation reminded us that the audience had grown used to Blair style oratory, which they won't hear for a while now. Anyway, I can now understand why cabinet members were told to keep their speeches unsparky, and limited to seven minutes. It would be very, very easy to outshine that.

As David Cameron prepares to speak, I would like to helpfully outline five components behind the mess we see today. 1. Bungling central bankers: As I blogged earlier, the Bank of England refused to support banks with the zero-penalty lending rates offered in every other major world economy. There’s a strong case for such discipline, but I believe a stronger one for keeping liquidity moving if there’s a risk of a run on the banks.  2. Dozy regulators: The FSA hasn’t kept pace with the UK’s fast-evolving banking sector. Northern Rock had stood out a mile as the most highly leveraged bank in Europe, yet the FSA didn’t see any problems. The City did.  3. Monetary loosening: Swapping a 2.5% RPI target for 2.

The Zac-Gummer boomerang, thrown in December 2005, has hit Cameron in the face today. The Quality of Life group policy report is overflowing with guff. Take their headline plan to add VAT on short-haul flights. Has it occurred to either of them that VAT is reclaimed by anyone on business trips, so this would only hit the small people on their holidays? I have to admit sharing Stephen Glover’s revulsion to the sight of a millionaire eco-warrior proposing to tax the poor out of the sky, off the roads and away from the supermarket car park. The finger-wagging piety is the precise reverse of the empowering message of Conservatism. I suspect Cameron has by now grasped how politically dangerous all this is to him.

William Hague has just given a non-committal response to the “mixed results” of the American troop surge. I’d rather have liked him to say something like this (adapted from the Giuliani article I mentioned earlier) In Vietnam, just as in Iraq today, America fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, they corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 the South Vietnamese had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency… But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South.

I have a bit of good news for James (and Iain Dale).  Zac won’t be listened to. I understand that of the six policy review groups, the favourites of the Cameroon leadership are the social justice and competitiveness report (by IDS and John Redwood respectively). The others are not considered to have much meat in them – and lots of gunk which will be discreetly spat out. The education group, for example, has apparently failed to give a proper examination to the school choice agenda , perhaps the biggest public service revolution in the world right now. And the Tory NHS agenda has preceded the health review (which didn’t have much original to say anyway).

Greetings from Sweden, where the newspapers today report that huge demand for Chinese has now made it one of the top three languages taught in schools here. Sweden has the voucher system, so the curriculum responds to parental demand rather than ministerial diktat. Imagine that. In Britain, just 4,000 of our 3.3 million state pupils study Chinese, and nearly all of them are Chinese. But don’t worry. A government adviser has instructed the country’s 250 specialist language schools to put Chinese on the curriculum as “the language of tomorrow”. Yes, it seems these language schools needed to be told. Moral: you can’t rely on mandarins to learn mandarin.

I was struck by the fact James plucked out of that Newsweek article – that “every second child in London is born to an immigrant mother.” Could it really be true? Silly question –Newsweek is known for its accuracy, and originality. The data is in Table 9.2 of this Office of National Statistics Excel file - 53% of London births are to immigrant mothers. In Newham, it’s 74%. In Kensington & Chelsea, it’s 68%. The least is in Staffordshire, 7%. For some reason, the ONS also calculates fertility rates: a UK-born women has on average 1.6 kids – it’s 3.9 for a woman born in Bangladesh but living here. And 98% of UK births to Bangladeshi women are within wedlock, against 51% for the UK.