Fraser Nelson

The Guardian has published a piece on school reform which perfectly expresses the attitude which has condemned children of lower-income parents to dismal education for years. The introduction of the story goes as follows:   There are around 10,600 empty school places in Suffolk. Or, to put it another way, if 10 average-sized secondary schools were closed down, there would still be a place for every child living in the county who needs one. Which made it somewhat surprising, therefore, when the Department for Education approved four free schools in the county, with a further two in the offing. 'The Suffolk free school scandal', as local campaigners are calling it…   Behold the bureaucratic mindset: why open a new school if there are places to fill in bad ones?

School and welfare reform are the signature missions of David Cameron’s government – but is welfare going wrong? Labour is crowing that today’s figures from the Work and Pensions department on welfare-to-work show it’s a failure. I’ve just come back from a DWP briefing with Chris Grayling, the minister responsible, and thought Coffee Housers would be interested in his take. It was Labour who first involved private companies into welfare-to-work, and the coalition has continued it – but pressed the reset button. Their scheme is called the Work Programme, the largest welfare-to-work programme on the planet with 750,000 clients. It means the government pays a £4,000 fee to a company that can place someone with a job for 18 months.

Is parliament good for anything? This is, in effect, the question behind the coming Libor investigation. Ed Miliband’s assumption that to get any questions answered you need a judge-led inquiry fits a trend, and one that Rod Liddle examines in this week’s magazine. For my part, I’m uneasy about the deification of the judiciary and quite liked Rod’s idea of having an inquiry into the judges, led by a butcher. If parliament doesn’t work, I think the answer is to fix it rather than give up on it. So a lot is now resting on Andrew Tyrie, who is about to chair the parliamentary investigation into Libor, who must next week start to select the Libor committee’s members and define its remit.

Bob Diamond had thought it safe to take a bonus this year. His record, he thought, spoke for itself: Barclays had steered its way through the financial crisis without taking a penny of government subsidy. In 2012, it was making profit, paying tax, providing mortgages and being a model corporate citizen. His zombie rivals, RBS and the other state-owned banks, he thought, now had to dance to the politicians’ tune — but not Barclays. The whole point of taking a £7 billion bailout from Qatar and Abu Dhabi was to stay politician-free, believing that even a smidgeon of government direction would harm the bank.

The Glasgow-based writer Gerry Hassan took part in our Scottish independence debate on Tuesday, and then made the mistake of getting the train back to Glasgow. It took 15 hours. No one could help a landslip in Cumbria, but then one of the engines caught fire. His story, below (recorded by the BBC), is perhaps a reminder of the need for investment in our existing rail network rather than spending billions on HS2. (For more on this, do read Ross Clark's recent HS2 magazine cover story.)  "It was both a bizarre and strangely OK experience – in that the weather wasn't massively hot or cold. Otherwise it had the potential to be like a road to hell movie. When we passed Oxenholme, at about 14:00, there was a flash flood beginning and lots and lots of water on the platform.

It suits a great many people to blame the banks. The ministers (like Ed Balls) who oversaw the debt-fuelled credit bubble; the Tories (like George Osborne) who signed up to Labour’s debt-fuelled spending binge; the regulators who failed so appallingly (a global crisis but how many collapsed banks in Australia and Canada?); and Mervyn King, who oversaw this hideous asset bubble and didn’t sound the alarm. When George Osborne told the Commons that banks ‘brought our economy to its knees’ he suggested that, even now, he has not worked out what caused the crisis. The theory that wicked, greedy bonus-seeking bankers caused the crisis has been repeatedly debunked, but it’s easy to blame bankers anyway.

I’m presenting Radio Four’s Week in Westminster tomorrow at 11am and discuss George Osborne’s U-turn with former chancellors Alistair Darling and Nigel Lawson (the latter pictured above when editor of The Spectator). I put to them that it is unwise for a chancellor to perform a U-turn because it undermines his credibility – a very precious commodity in such turbulent times. Darling said that the great risk is that Osborne doesn’t look like he’s in control. Lawson replied:   ‘That is my concern; that it might be thought that the main thrust of policy is no longer secure. And once the financial markets – let alone anyone else – think the government is on the run, then the task of maintaining the policy is very much harder.

David Cameron’s 10 Downing Street has an unusual setup — it has a pollster, Andrew Cooper, as its chief strategist. This helps explain why the government is (to put it politely) more able than its predecessors to modify its policy positions to align with the nation’s priorities. Cooper’s polls are showing that pretty much the most popular thing this government has done so far is impose a £26,000 cap on benefits. Indeed, if there were more welfare cuts, his polls show, they would also be popular. So the government can save money and win votes! Quite some trick.  Today the PM is proposing to cut housing benefit from the under-25s, saving an estimated £2bn.

13 years of Labour rule taught us two vital lessons about school reform. The first is that there is no direct link between money and results. Funding per pupil more than doubled under the last government: But for all that extra cash, Britain's schools have slipped down the international league tables over the past decade. Every three years, the OECD rates countries according to student performance. Of the 31 with scores for both 2000 and 2009, here is the top twenty in mathematics for 2009, along with changes since 2000: So if money doesn't work, what does? The Blair/Adonis City Academy reforms — which themselves stem from the Major/Baker reforms — show that stunning results are achievable if the tuition changes.