Ross Clark

Chris Huhne wants to know why we don’t shop around more for our utilities. I’ll give him one reason. The liberalisation of utility markets has created an impression of bewildering choice, but when things go wrong you realise that there is no choice at all, just the same old creaking infrastructure, owned and operated by the legacy company of an old nationalised monopoly. In fact, in one sense, liberalisation has made things worse: with a multiplicity of companies involved, you are never quite sure who is responsible for your pipes or your wires. You can find yourself caught between two companies, each blaming the other for your problem, via the inevitable call centres in Bangalore. I am writing this while squatting on other people’s computers.

 In Switzerland, declared Harry Lime in The Third Man, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. He would now surely have added the International Baccalaureate. There is no Swiss product which rates so highly with the British middle classes. Certainly not Nescafé, not in an age of filter machines. Not Emmental cheese and not Lindt chocolate. The accepted wisdom is that while our own A levels have become watered down to the point of meaninglessness, the bac is still there to stretch pupils, just like in the good old days when schoolboys all wore blazers and caps and their masters flapped around dusty classrooms with gowns, mortarboards and canes.

It is, as David Cameron says, a time to pause, listen and reflect: reflect that for every granny starving and dehydrating on an NHS ward there is quite possibly a patient in a private hospital being pulled screaming into a cold shower. If it wasn’t already obvious that private provision is no panacea for public services, it should be to anyone who watched last week’s Panorama film about Winterbourne View, a care home for people with learning disabilities run by Teesdale-based Castlebeck Care. For £3,500 a week, taxpayers have been funding a regime every bit as horrible as the state-run institutions which private care homes have largely replaced.

‘Localisation’ is an expensive path to greater political corruption The last time the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas played a part in national debate was in the 17th century, when — recent studies suggest — locals carved a rude chalk parody of Oliver Cromwell into a hillside. It failed to unsettle Cromwell, but the village may yet be the nemesis of another Oliver: Oliver Letwin, architect of the government’s pet policy of localism. Cerne Abbas is one of 17 communities selected by the Department for Communities and Local Government to prepare a ‘neighbourhood plan’.

In ten years’ time Oxford and Cambridge universities could be shining examples of social diversity, their student bodies reflecting the exact composition of the British population, a few sons of aristocrats educated alongside the children of benefit claimants from Teesside and a greater mass of suburban middle classes; all of them learning how to rub along with people of different cultures, attitudes and accents.

 The first time I heard of a crammer school I assumed it was a 16th-century foundation by Thomas Cranmer, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, where boys walked about the cloisters in long cloaks with copies of the Book of Common Prayer stuffed under their arms. I guess we didn’t take revision quite so seriously in my day. In fact I know we didn’t. Revision was something you did in the week before your exams, and if you had to do it in public you tended to hide your book of calculus inside a copy of Smash Hits. It was brought home to me just how much things have changed since the 1980s when I started discussing Easter holiday plans with the family, and noticed my son was shaking his head. There was no way he was going on holiday at Easter.

American healthcare makes our system look good, writes Ross Clark. But however revolutionary Barack Obama’s health reforms are, Americans will still pay through the nose Had I a more devotional attachment to free-market economics I suppose I would be joining all those Republicans condemning Barack Obama’s health reforms. I have written enough about the failings of the NHS over the years to fill an entire symposium at a Washington think-tank. How tempting, then, to echo the sentiments spewing out of Fox News, predicting US bankruptcy and state-sponsored euthanasia. ‘Say no to totalitarianism,’ appealed Republican congressman Devin Nunes, not content with the charge of mere ‘socialism’ made by many of his colleagues.