Gary Monro’s blog

Thomas Sowell (pictured) makes some telling observations on the moral breakdown in New Orleans:

During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves.

That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in — those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them.

Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans.

In a world where people flaunt their “independence,” their “right” to disregard moral authority, and sometimes legal authority as well, the tragedy of New Orleans reminds us how utterly dependent each one of us is for our very lives on millions of other people we don’t even see.

(Emphasis added).

It’s not a long article and is well worth reading…

From the BBC:

A woman is raffling her County Durham home after suffering a three-year campaign of vandalism by rowdy youths. Mercedes de Dunewic said she has reported 180 incidents in the past three years.

Tickets for the three-bedroom, detached house, complete with top security systems, are on sale for £1,000.

The 180 crimes logged against her house means she does not expect to get its proper value in the open market. The police say the same old things:

Insp Adrian Green of Durham Police said: “It is a very small minority of youths within West Cornforth who are using anti-social behaviour to intimidate people and obviously that makes people who may well be witnesses reticent to come forward.

“We have caught and prosecuted a number of people, we have used curfews, electronic tagging and custodial sentences to tackle the incidents.”

Yes, but that obviously doesn’t work, does it?

I wonder if Ms de Dunewic thinks it’s worth her time petitioning her local MP? I’m sure he could pull a few strings with the Prime Minister.

Hang on a sec - her house is in Sedgefield constituency. So her local MP… is the Prime Minister!

Doh!

From The Times:

The government’s own financial watchdog has revealed that three-quarters of hospitals and other NHS trusts are not following guidelines from the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for tackling ill health.

Patients are routinely being denied the most effective treatment for many common conditions including cancer, diabetes and heart disease because doctors and managers are ignoring “best practice” guidelines to save money, the Government’s financial watchdog says today.

The financial watchdog confirmed yesterday that patients across England were still facing a postcode lottery of care because NICE guidance was not being systematically introduced. The auditors said trusts that did not comply should have this reflected in their annual performance ratings.

Health charities and politicians condemned the treatment disparities as an appalling injustice to patients.

Hang on a minute… do I see CUTS in the New Labour NHS? Do I see INEQUALITY in health provision? In Cool Britannia? 2005? ‘Modern’ Britain? I thought these things only happened in fascist Tory states…

What is going on??

The Child Support Agency - designed to place the cost of raising children on the parents of those children - has a history of foul-ups. From high levels of incorrect payments to large-scale failure to actually collect payments from (mostly) fathers the agency has lurched from one disaster to another. It is now, according to Frank Field, leaving its comfort-zone of crisis to enter the heady heights of meltdown.

In an open letter to the prime minister, published yesterday, Mr Field said the government had failed to grasp the CSA’s flaws and merely tinkered with reform rather than radically restructuring the agency as he had proposed.

[the] former social security minister… accused the agency of a “deliberate policy [of] curtailing the amount of information made available” about its poor performance.

But Mr Blunkett said the government needed “positive ideas” about how to reform the troubled agency rather than being told about problems it was already well aware of.

“What we welcome even more than criticism is positive ideas we can incorporate in the current review available before Christmas.”

The agency was a Conservative government brainchild designed to recoup the costs of paying benefits to nearly 900,000 single parents. From its start in 1993 it has endured an annual disaster of one sort or another, with back-logged cases at one time numbering hundreds of thousands, incorrect assessments running at 70% and, now, the amount of uncollected maintenance exceeding £1bn for the first time.

One of the agency’s lows came this year when a report revealed that staff, under pressure to meet targets, knowingly entered false information, deleted files and avoided actually speaking to anxious callers:

Staff at the Child Support Agency have admitted a catalogue of deliberate administrative blunders that caused hundreds of thousands of families to lose income they were due from absent parents and the government.

The errors included knowingly entering false information on the CSA database, deleting files for no good reason and avoiding contact with anxious parents by transferring telephone calls to the answering machines of absent colleagues.

Staff at one business unit were “told to make up national insurance numbers on their stats sheet [by managers] more interested in hitting their target than actually getting the work done”.

One staff focus group said staff deleted files if they did not know where they should be sent. Other ploys included sending files to the in-trays of people on long-term sick leave.

The report, which was commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, was hidden while the government attempted to place the blame for the agency’s failures on its new computer system.