Ross Clark

Ross Clark on the workers who milk the rest of us by retiring early as a result of ‘ill health’ The next few months may well see the political death of Tony Blair. But whether he will get buried is another matter. In an echo of the public-sector bolshieness 27 winters ago that eventually brought down the Callaghan government, public-sector unions have renewed their threat to stage a national strike over proposals to raise their normal retirement age from 60 to 65. A month ago Alan Johnson, the trade secretary, appeared to buy off a strike by agreeing with the unions to exempt all existing public-sector employees, even newly recruited 18-year-old postmen, from the need to work until 65.

There was a surreal touch to last Sunday’s newspapers. The inside sections, which tend to be prepared a little in advance, brimmed, as usual, with pieces about the delights of living in France. The news pages, by contrast, carried pictures of French youths lobbing Molotov cocktails and overturning cars in the great orgy of rage that has overtaken the country in recent days. Cars seem to have had the worst of it. In the truest French bureaucratic traditions, somebody has even been keeping a countrywide tally of those destroyed: by Monday night the toll had reached 1,408 vehicles.

Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty their lofts to send surplus possessions to Cancer Research shops, and many more will be stuffing ‘pinkie rings’ on to their fingers and toes in order to support work on breast cancer. In all, Britons last year raised £302 million for cancer charities, far more than any other country in Europe.

Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max Clifford could not have timed better her arrival in Britain. As Mrs Menezes and other members of her family surveyed the spot where her son was summarily executed on suspicion of being a terrorist, the Prime Minister was on a stage in Brighton saying this: ‘We are trying to fight 21st-century crime — antisocial behaviour, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime — with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

The local people who turned out to see Princess Helen Louise open the new wing of St Leonard’s Hospital in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1938 would not have recognised the term ‘stakeholder’, but they would seem to have fitted perfectly Tony Blair’s vision of a breed of socially responsible citizens helping to run the country’s public services. ‘They paid for the hospital through voluntary subscriptions of a few pence a week,’ says local historian Barry Wall. ‘The hospital had been built in 1867 using the proceeds of the sale of the site of an old leper home which had been in existence since the reign of Edward II. But it was local people who paid to keep it going.

Who believes that bird flu may cause as many as 50 million deaths? Ross Clark doesn’t, and here’s why I don’t personally know anyone suffering from malaria or tuberculosis, but I imagine that if they have been following the Western media they must have found the past week somewhat surreal. Half a billion people are now suffering from malaria, of whom about one million will be dead by this time next year. Nine million are suffering from tuberculosis, two million of whom will die in the next 12 months.

In these pages recently Elisabeth Anderson wrote about, but declined to give the name of, a website that gives the price of any property sold in England and Wales during the past five years. Actually, it’s called www.nethouseprices.com, and a quick nose around the site reveals that flats up Liz’s way, Marylebone, are selling for anything between £200,000 and £500,000. But the website isn’t good just for being nosy about your friends and colleagues; it gives property buyers the wonderful advantage of being able to catch out estate agents and developers.

I have some native sympathy with the lackeys struggling to handle the Inland Revenue’s computers which, like a berserk one-arm bandit, have just spewed out an excess £1.9 billion in tax credits. I am not sure I am the best-qualified person to expound on the inadequacy of government IT systems. My own computer bears the large indelible bootprint of the Clark school of systems technology. It was imprinted a fortnight ago when the machine crashed, erasing two years’ worth of work, or at least sending it somewhere deep into the bowels of the hard drive where it could only be recovered by the kind of forensic nerds who do kiddie-porn investigations.

Ross Clark says that the government’s PFI deals allow private companies to prosper at the public’s expense Imagine you are a left-leaning Guardian reader with a social conscience. You are not a communist, but your attitude towards private enterprise is less one of enthusiasm than grudging tolerance. If we are going to let private companies run things and make things, you believe, they must at least follow a Will Huttonesque paradigm of virtue, looking after their staff and the local community before distributing a few crumbs to their shareholders. And, of course, capitalists must be kept away from the things which really matter.

Like many of my countrymen, I find the cantankerous figure of Charles Clarke somewhat alarming. In fact, I think on balance I would rather live next door to David Boag. It would certainly be more entertaining. Boag, a 28-year-old warehouseman from Dechmont, West Lothian, is a man of unusual habits. He likes to watch the film An American Werewolf in London, after which he spends some time howling. Not only that; neighbours who have taken to watching him through his curtainless windows have spotted him climb up a step ladder, leap on to his sofa and then dance around the room with a Christmas tree. Whether Mr Boag is a little mad or just eccentric I don’t feel qualified to say. Perhaps he needs to meet some girls, or at least broaden his taste in films a little.

Thirteen local authorities have been chosen by the government to be Cultural Pathfinders, showing how culture and sport can help to deliver government priorities across public life. The government’s social, environmental and economic agenda is to be promoted through cultural initiatives at local level.

Natural environment and rural communities draft Bill published A Bill designed to address better the real needs of rural communities and the natural environment through modernised and simplified arrangements for implementing policy was today presented in draft to Parliament by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Mrs Beckett said: ‘The Bill we are publishing today will be key in delivering our commitment to a better quality of life for all with sustainable development at its heart. The new integrated agency will lead the way in delivering an accessible and high quality natural environment contributing to the enjoyment and well-being of current and future generations.

Government continues drive for better, more efficiently organised public servicesIn a guidance pack sent out today to Leaders and Chief Executives of all local authorities in England, the government outlines how local authorities will measure and report efficiency gains they have achieved by means of a three-stage self-assessment process. This method has been determined following consultation with a group of local authorities and organisations including the Audit Commission, Local Government Association and INLOGOV of the University of Birmingham. The pack offers guidance on how change agents such as the Regional Centres of Excellence will support local authorities in delivering efficiency gains.

From this week, we will be picking out some gems from the Panglossian world of government press releases, a world in which our hard-working ministers and civil servants make valiant efforts to better the lives of a grateful public. The title of this column, Everyone Benefits, is a frequent phrase which crops up in New Labour press releases to describe how nobody, least of all you the taxpayer, ever loses out from its initiatives. Lakeside Darts Action Promotes Adult Numeracy The Minister for Skills and Vocational Education, Ivan Lewis, today visited the World Professional Darts Championships at Lakeside to promote adult numeracy learning with the British Darts Organisation.

The national ‘giveathon’ provoked by Boxing Day’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean is an admirable response to an emergency. Rather less can be said of the thousands who fell for this year’s fashionable Christmas present: sending a goat to the Third World. Oxfam, one of several charities to run a ‘give a goat’ scheme, says it has sent 30,000 animals at £25 a time, many of them to East Africa. ‘How many times have you bought your uncle a tie, a plant or a book that he doesn’t need?’ reads the bumf on the Oxfam website. ‘The Oxfam catalogue can solve your problems by allowing you to buy him a really useful present this year — a goat.

Gordon Brown does not usually receive support from this column but he deserves some congratulation on one initiative. He has written to the European Commission to request that it lifts the threshold above which duty becomes payable on goods brought into the EU for personal use. For the past 10 years it has been frozen at 170 euros (about £145). While the EU has been keen to encourage cross-border shopping within the EU, it does everything it can to discourage us from shopping outside the EU. Should you buy a £200 fur coat in New York, you are liable to pay, on your arrival at Heathrow, VAT of 17.5 per cent plus additional duty of 12 per cent — in addition to any sales taxes you have paid in America.

A loftily named environmental pressure group called the Food Commission has been upset by the sale of bottled water from Fiji in Waitrose supermarkets. The water, it complains, has clocked up 10,000 ‘food miles’ before it reaches Western consumers. ‘Transporting water halfway across the world is surely the most ludicrous use of fossil fuels when water is plentiful in the UK,’ it complains. It is also concerned that we are wasting fossil fuels by importing prawns from Indonesia (7,000 food miles) and carrots from South Africa (5,900 food miles). Counting the number of miles travelled by a product is a bizarre and crude way of trying to assess the environmental damage done by an industry.

When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you.