´óÏó´«Ã½

This is a super idea - but before the inflation nutters jack these
rates up I think we need more info:
like 1) what is the proper measure
of inflation (assuming most folk
do not live in carboard boxes under Westminster bridge but in "houses");
2)how are exporters coping with the
high exchange rate against the dollar and does that really matter any more; and 3) what are rates like in Europe - and why are we not in the Euro like most economically savvy models, Stephanie?

P.S. Did Nigel Kennedy use zlotys to buy his new home in Poland - or is he squatting in a Bohemian commune?

The interview between ´óÏó´«Ã½ Newsnight
Scotland's Glenn Campbell and Jackie Baillie MSP (Wendy Alexander's team member)is now available on You Tube:
Music has been added towards the end ... 'Send in The Clowns'? Ms Alexander continues
to deny requests for interviews.

It is a pity that we must resort to Youtube for the best of Newsnight (thanks to Neil Robertson for that gem).

Paul Green, the man at the centre of the Wendy Alexander illegal donation row has also given an interview in Jersey to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland's Political Editor Brian Taylor - in which he
'tells of his anger at becoming embroiled in the controversy'. This link to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland also includes a recording of the interview given to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland's Westminster reporter David Porter by Sir Alistair Graham, former chair of the UK Committee on Standards in Public Life, in which he suggests Wendy Alexander should
seriously consider her position as
Scottish Labour leader.

I believe that interest rates should stay on hold at 5.75%. Why? Well, as well all know house prices are beginning to be brought under control and a decrease would simply allow the problem of 'runaway prices' to return.

Inflation is broadly under control and has been at around 1.8% and 2.1% over September and October so there is no threat there.

Also, usually when the interest rates are higher, the exchange rate is higher which makes our exports abroad more expensive. However, the Sterling-Dollar exchange rate has been falling in the past month from the highs reached in October which should help to reduce our trade deficit.

Finally, a raise in interest rates would lead to further repossessions as loans become more expensive and monthly repayments increase. They definitely should not be lowered as this would simply encourage more people to get into debt in the long term through taking out large mortgages and the possibilities of rates increasing in the future.

Speeding police - To be exempt police cars and other emergency vehicles do not have to be 'on a 999 call', as your report suggests. Section 87 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 provides the following exemption and applies to ANY police vehicle whether marked or not - Exemption of fire brigade, ambulance and police vehicles from speed limits.No statutory provision imposing a speed limit on motor vehicles shall apply to any vehicle on an occasion when it is being used for fire brigade, ambulance or police purposes, if the observance of that provision would be likely to hinder the use of the vehicle for the purpose for which it is being used on that occasion.
If not being used for the purposes described then emergency service drivers should and deserve to be dealt with in exactly the same way as any other driver, just as Mereddyd Hughes was.
Get your facts right for once and stop deceiving the public.

i think house prices are far too high and if they went down then they would naturally become affordable ..even to those who had the home repossesed..and please increase the stamp duty on buy to let homes only...why should a person buy a house or a piece of land to leave empty or undeveloped for entrepeunership.....or greediness.... .also i think the government have told the public that they are so effective that they are planning to ask the tax- payer to foot the bill for their election campagin for them to get on an earning ladder ....doing nothing more than imposing non-sensical regulation and at the same time as feeling comfortable at telling cancer patients that they cannot have the treatment because it is too costly...why are the managers in the health service not rolling up their sleeves and helping the people who are performing the work like the drs and nurses because this would save a lot of waste in the NHS which is cash starved... but wastefully regulated

sorry i forgot to add ...please increase the interest rates ....let the banks work harder for a change

I watched newsnight discuss the "credit crunch"never mentioned that young people are now being dissafected because a 1 bedroom flat should cost around 35,000 and a house 3 bedroom terrace should cost around 65-70,000.Its easy either put the wages up!!!! or bring house prices down!!!BUT its to late so instead of telling the public to stop racking up thier credit cards and buying into an over inflated housing market it seams its a wait and see policy.But with fuel prices rising ,food prices rising and the treasury proping up private banking institutions,they pulled that money out of a hat as they haggle over health,education.defence,some millions are to go here or there or we will have to put up tax,HERE NR TAKE THE SCHOOL BUDGET.The guy on newsnight was right there is anough money to go round but im afraid it is as they said in my day 7:93 !! SEVEN PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD OWN 93% OF THE WEALTH!!!

PRISON POPULATION - Crime has fallen; the prison population has increased by 20,000 in the last decade, yet Labour is planning to build more prisons: the idea is bizarre and flies in the face of common sense and logic.

And hugely expensive. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has announced a £1.2 bn prison building programme, on top of the current £1.5 bn. Lord Woolf has already warned that new prisons will simply fill up, and the "cancer" of overcrowding will return. What happens then?

Ministers are well aware that it is an overuse of prison, rather than an increase in crime, that has caused overcrowding. Inmates' self-inflicted deaths are around two a week - an increase on last year - and last week Liam McManus, aged 15, was found hanged in Lancaster Farms YOI. Prisons are failing to rehabilitate the majority of offenders. Prisons are failing to provide safe accommodation for vulnerable people. Mr Straw's argument for more prisons is unconvincing.

The proposed three "super-prisons", each warehousing 2,500 inmates, indicates a measure of desperation. But Ministers have only themselves to blame. Labour's get-tough sentencing policy is the culprit. The reason for the overcrowding crisis is that policy makers have not thought through the consequences of sentencing policy. The chickens are coming home to roost.

The prison population already stands at 81,455, and is expected to rise to 96,000 by 2014. Do Ministers actually realise it costs the same to build nine hospitals as one prison? Some moral leadership is badly needed.

Prediction for tomorrow: The BoE will cut rates by 0.25% - why? Not because it makes economic sense, but because the BoE MPC is not independent (all but two owe their jobs to the Treasury and its former head G. Brown). This is the same BoE, which cut rates to 3.5% and merely poured petrol on the debt flames.

Stephanie Flanders was right to draw attention to the secret covenanting scheme story involving Mr Abrahams and senior Labour officials in this morning's 'Guardian'. That does take the donorgate story forward I guess?

But having also just got round to reading yesterday's Guardian front
page story "Revealed: how UK banks exploit charity tax laws" I wonder
whether in fact the Sleaze Watchdog appointed after PMQ by Gordon Brown
is necessarily the man to get on top of things? He is apparently a former
chairperson of the NSPCC - which is one of the charities named in The Guardian story about how £234bn of mortgages was put in trusts supposedly for the benefit of good causes: "While most of the trusts do not name the charities which are the supposed beneficiaries of their trusts, one set up five years ago by the Halifax names the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) as a beneficiary, and has since raised funds on the back of almost £50bn of home loans. The Halifax admitted that this trust had not paid a penny to the NSPCC, however, and the charity said it knew nothing about the arrangement." (Guardian 5/12/07)

Starts to sound worringly familiar?

Sir, The reason for a cut in interest could be that it is an attempt to keep people with a roof over their head. The figures for repossessions next year is likely to double, at least this might stem the tide. A previous contributor mentioned 'merely fanning the flames'good point but we are so far down this crazy road of hedonism that it would be economic madness to raise or even put on hold interest rates. Brown has a lot to answer for, he looks more and more like John Major with each passing day. House prices have trebled in eleven years and the architect of all that, and he wears it like a badge of honour is one, G. Brown. History will condemn him.

The prison population has doubled since the early 90s. When rehabilitation was rehabilitated in the early 1990s it was done so within the Prison Service (initially) on the basis of a specious analysis of the literature of 'What Works' which had been rightly consigned to the dustbin by Martinson in the 70s. That was why the USA stopped funding it. That was why the 'rehabilitation' research in the 90s came from Canada not the USA. In the early 90s, a cabal of Canadian researchers in collusion with a few renegades in the Prison Service tried to convince Home Office administrators that Cognitive Skills based programmes would rehabilitate. Their research basically played footloose with statistics.

Work on what is widely termed 'End-To-End Sentence Management' on the other hand was originally developed with HQ and the long-term prison system by Home Office psychologists, and was originally designed as a
systematic effort to introduce evidence driven behaviour management making better use of regime activities for improved prison risk assessment and behaviour management (i.e. control) rather than waste staff time chatting pointlessly to offenders about their problems (which are inevitable if one is cooped up in cells most of the time rather than in activities). This, sadly, was highjacked by enthusiasts who did not understand 'behaviour' and by predatory entrepreneurs who had a penchant for selling cognitive skills snake-oil and, like many of the psychologists alas, had nothing but disdain for mundane conventional out of cell activities as the basis for effective, evidence driven, risk assessment and behaviour management. This malaise then spread to the Probation Service which thought it was learning about offender management (over the decades, Prison Psychologists have led and Probation followed as the Prison Service was the major employer of psychologists, there are only a few in Probation, compared to hundreds in the Prison Service).

I am sad to say that I suspect that the problem is because 80% of psychologists are female, and nearly 70% of the Probation Service is now also. Females' skills are largely verbal rather than spatial/quantitative. Alas, the offending population is largely male and the reverse, in fact the offender population is on average especially weak verbally. Some have conjectured that this is why they are so prone to offending behaviour in the first place, we live in a feminised, Service Sector driven economy and they (genetically) can't cope. As there is no evidence that education or any other rehabilitative programmes can correct this, for evidence driven reasons given elsewhere, the promises that cognitive skills (covert verbal behaviour) or even Speech and Language Therapy are panaceas is empty or worse, just cynical money making rackets for entrepreneurs disguised as researchers or therapists.

There is no reliable, replicable evidence that rehabilitation programmes either in prisons, in the community (or in schools where much of the offending behaviour first becomes obvious), work.

The Offender Management Bill became law in the summer after a sustained campaign of opposition from the Anti-Prison Lobby (cf. Penal Consortium who had surprising backers who should have known better) and the country will now see 'interventions' opened up to the Third and Private Sectors (who will fare no better for reasons already given) with likely job losses in probation as they struggled in vain to compete to deliver and are judged on empirical outcomes, i.e. evidence.

Since there is no evidence that such interventions/programmes ever worked, more prison places are a necessity. The alternative is either intensive supervision in the community to the extent that nobody ever takes their eyes off their managed offender (which is going to be even more expensive than prison), or more crime/containment in the community. This will include schools alas.

Hopefully, Jack Straw has grasped how Prison Works. This was all said over a decade ago to his advisors. It was also said internally in the late 80s and early 90s. It's just unfortunate that so few ever fully 'understood' what Offender Management was originally designed to be.

Barrie (#19) - Thanks, but isn't what is said more important than who says it?

As to feminisation, there is brain-gender overlap, but look at the tails of the KS English SAT distribution at any age, but especially post puberty. It isn't as dramatic for Maths because so much of the test is now feminised. Then look at the selection of subjects at AS, A level and higher education. Given our economy is Service Sector dominated (80%), it is 'feminine' skills which are selected, and high verbal is one of those, regardless of biological sex. It's shaped our politics. Incidentally, which ethnic groups are advantaged here and which disadvantaged....?

Here are some other (independent) sensible voices falling, it would seem alas, upon predictably deaf ears over a decade ago:

If only they'd listened then...?

Much of this had been said internally in the early 90s, long before 'evidence-based practice' was spun by New Labour. The basic model for 'effective' Behaviour Management was high-jacked commercially, and has had negative, Lysenkoist, consequences in corrections for years, culminating in NOMS. Even more insidious has been its negative impact upon education, where it was purloined and misapplied (now as the FFT/DfES CVA model). This happened, largely because of the proximity of the two government departments in Westminster in the 90s, and their shared outsourced data management agencies who were ignorant/neglectful of the *behavioural* science behind the original work in the 80s/90s. What the government got as a consequence were very expensive IT systems which, as we have seen, have not delivered, have cost the taxpayer a small fortune, and which Jack Straw himself recently said in committee, were largely sold by snake-oil salespersons.

The fact is, they were warned long ago. The root problem is a subtle matter of staffing and failure (or unwillingness) to listen.

However one looks at this, the consequences have been destructive. The question is, to what end? I suspect it's privatisation, de-regulation/anti-statism in pursuit of the balkanisation/regionalisation of the UK into the EU.

Post 21

Barrie the system doesn't work ..
there is too much going against it.

Why don't u write a book instead?
I've just ordered one from the British Library - Looking through Volcanoes?

I've never fancied South America because of the corruption & politics
My uncle was there on the Dido

legs (#22) It seems to work for some. Is this how UK democracy works now?:

Barrie (#21) I suspect I have no choice but to stick to the bucket for now. Your analysis and advice seems sound for a fair & just world, but in the one we currently have, it seems that one needs to be able to make friends in high/distant places AND be adept at denying the obvious if one wishes to get on. Not qualities I find at all appealing.

Greetings -- Legs, Barrie and Adrienne .
We have never had democracy in this country. At the moment there is a Parliamentary system controlled by the largest of the minority vote , the majority of the electorate - for one reason or another - do not vote. We have instead a modern version of patronage. This has been superimposed on the old version of patronage ( which still exists in one form or another today ) exercised by Royalty . The new version is Parliamentary patronage and functions in much the same way - without the erstwhile 'Your Majesty' fawning .The 'You scratch my back etc.' self serving attitude. The yes men/accolytes are groomed for future office as long as they don't rock the boat and tread the correct path . For their part they chant the mantra required. Favoured companies have all the contracts going - for IT schemes , auditing , consultancy , transport etc. The list goes on and on . But when there is an outbreak of the people wishing to have their views known - such as the protest against the Iraq war or demonstrating peacefully outside Parliament they are ignored or criminalised . So - why do not the majority vote ? because Parliament itself as it stands is endemically corrupt and the man in the street knows it.

Greetings -- Legs, Barrie and Adrienne .
We have never had democracy in this country. At the moment there is a Parliamentary system controlled by the largest of the minority vote , the majority of the electorate - for one reason or another - do not vote. We have instead a modern version of patronage. This has been superimposed on the old version of patronage ( which still exists in one form or another today ) exercised by Royalty . The new version is Parliamentary patronage and functions in much the same way - without the erstwhile 'Your Majesty' fawning .The 'You scratch my back etc.' self serving attitude. The yes men/accolytes are groomed for future office as long as they don't rock the boat and tread the correct path . For their part they chant the mantra required. Favoured companies have all the contracts going - for IT schemes , auditing , consultancy , transport etc. The list goes on and on . But when there is an outbreak of the people wishing to have their views known - such as the protest against the Iraq war or demonstrating peacefully outside Parliament they are ignored or criminalised . So - why do not the majority vote ? because Parliament itself as it stands is endemically corrupt and the man in the street knows it.

John Braddock

You're right (Adrienne, Barrie and Legs are right), unless we play their game there is nothing to be done. And the whole point is that we are not the sort to play that game well enough to beat them – because then we would BE them.

Shucks. :-(