Ross Clark

The council estates of King's Lynn, Harriet Sergeant recently revealed, are groaning with Chinese migrant workers, 50 to a house. The Daily Mail, naturally enough, is outraged by this threat to society and house prices, playing on rumours that workers are controlled by Triad gangs. Equally upset is the Guardian, which complains that many workers are illegal, they are being paid less than the national minimum wage and their gang masters won't even let them join the Transport and General Workers' Union. Why is it that migrant workers have to be received so negatively? The Daily Mail has made an art of attacking 'welfare scroungers' over the years; now it seems the paper is no fonder of people who work hard for little reward – at least not if they are foreign.

Anyone who believes that the anti-competitive ethos in state schools originates with a handful of ideologues in our local authorities should take time to study the United Nations output on education. The UN Commission on Human Rights's 'special rapporteur on education' recently attacked British schools for being too competitive. Katarina Tomasevski, a Swede, complained that the Department for Education's regime of tests for seven-, 11-, 14- and 16-year-olds breaches Article 29 of the Human Rights convention. Forcing children to sit down and take exams, she says, perverts the aims of education, which should be 'directed to the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential'.

What would it take for the Guardian to argue that mineworkers are a baleful influence on otherwise peaceful rural peoples, and that trees and flowers are more important than well-paid jobs down the pit? The answer is when the mining jobs in question are in Madagascar. The paper has joined the environmental groups campaigning against a plan by Rio Tinto Zinc to mine for ilmenite, a mineral used to produce titanium oxide, used extensively in the paint and plastics industry. 'In an age where ethical investment has become common, the proposal seems to be a throwback to Africa's plunder by grasping Europeans and greedy multinationals,' thundered the Guardian. 'Life will change utterly in the town most affected, the coastal community of Fort Dauphin.

The opportunity to applaud French farmers comes along once a century at most, so an overpriced, oversubsidised champagne must be in order. As I write, France is on the point of scuppering talks on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), thanks to lobbying from its dairy and cereal farmers. This is entirely predictable and might not be seen as much of a cause for celebration – until one examines the proposed reforms. It isn't easy to conceive of a more absurd system than CAP, which consumes half the EU's annual budget subsidising the production of food which European consumers do not want and which ends up being sold cheaply to the Third World, thus undermining their own agriculture. But the European agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler has managed it nonetheless.

Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to 'give it a rest' and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there. It is entirely logical that Sir Edmund should be happier at the idea of Everest being put out of bounds. Was his ascent of Everest really such a big deal, he perhaps fears people will ask, when pot-bellied American tourists and beer-swilling students are doing it every day? But why Nepal should be expected to decline to make use of its principal asset and deprive sherpas of valuable income is another matter.

Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation's conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been 'meeting farmers and communities at the sharp end', he has concluded that free trade isn't such a good idea after all. 'The way forward,' he writes in the Guardian, 'is through a regime of managed trade in which markets are slowly opened up and trade policy levers like subsidies and tariffs are used to help achieve development goals.' It isn't just his days as secretary of state for trade on which Mr Byers is turning his back.

Investors stung by the endowment-policy and pension-plan mis-selling scandals, and in possession of poorly managed unit trusts that have failed miserably to outperform the FT-SE index, can hardly be blamed for coming to the conclusion that they might just as well make their own investment decisions rather than rely on the men in grey suits. Sadly, however, the European Commission believes that we cannot be trusted to make such decisions by ourselves. Its new Investment Services Directive contains a stinging clause that would oblige execution-only stockbrokers to assess their customers' competence before allowing them to use the service. Such obligations, the stockbrokers warn, will mean a sharp increase in the cost of trading for millions of small investors.

Unesco's recent Education for All week was outwardly a campaign to boost the educational opportunities for children in the Third World. On closer inspection, however, the campaigning materials betray a political motive involving one issue alone: 'gender parity'. 'Educating girls yields the highest return in economic terms,' asserts Unesco. 'Countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have not sent enough girls to school over the past 30 years now have GNPs 25 per cent lower than if they had given them a better chance.' This dubious statistic fails to acknowledge that in several African countries – notably Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia – more girls attend school than boys; and they are hardly economic hothouses either.

Although much overshadowed by the war in Iraq, environmentalists, businessmen and charity workers met at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last week to discuss why 1.2 billion people still have no access to clean water. The United Nations has set a target of reducing this by half by 2015. But Michel Camdessus, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warns that the target will not be met because only $80 billion a year is being invested annually in the global water supply against the required $180 billion. Returns are too low thanks to corruption and mismanagement in the Third World. Part of the problem is that Western anti-globalisation lobbyists, who themselves enjoy clean water, have been preaching a message that water and profit do not mix.

In a speech in Ontario a fortnight ago, Leo W. Gerard made an eloquent appeal for the formation of a new 'worldwide movement for social justice to cure the ills of globalisation'.

The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all bad news in the property world, however. Real-estate agents in Finland and New Zealand could not be happier. American ex-pats, more used to life in the cosmopolitan districts of London and Paris, have discovered a taste for living in the world's backwaters. Pick up a copy of the Offshore Real Estate Quarterly, the bible of the chronically worried American, and you are transported to a world where survivalist freakery meets the swish language of property marketing.

James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term - which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools in Ghana are left waiting on the doorstep while their teachers play truant, and how pupils of government schools in Hyderabad are forbidden to learn English and are forced instead to do the domestic chores of the teachers. Having made a convincing case for private education, Mr Tooley ended his piece with the question, 'What on earth is government doing in education at all?