SMALL IS BEST

The Free Market as described by PJ O'Rourke

The case for economic freedom in 147 seconds

When are the government starting the stimulus measures then?

Tomorrow VAT in Ireland will be slashed to 9% on discretionary spending and the tourist industry. When they did this for restaurants and hotels in France at the beginning of 2009, it’s reckoned that around 29,500 jobs were created in the entertainment industry. The British Beer & Pub Association are putting the pressure on for a similar move to take place in the UK:

“Cutting VAT could create thousands of jobs in British pubs, bars and restaurants, boosting tax revenues, and helping out consumers. It’s time for the UK to catch up. With this sensible, job-creating move, Ireland is just the latest in a long line of EU countries to cut VAT on food in the hospitality sector, with the UK looking increasingly like the ‘odd one out’”

Read full article at Order-Order

Archbishops and taxation

Some things never change, in the week that saw the Archbishop of Canterbury still demanding that taxpayers fork out more money . It's  630 years ago this month since  thousands of rebel peasants descended on Canterbury Cathedral demanding the Archbishop be deposed.

It followed the introduction of a crippling poll tax which had been brought in under Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury, who was also the Lord Chancellor.

The Great Rising – also known as the Peasants' Revolt – saw Maidstone man Wat Tyler lead thousands of peasants from across Kent and the South East to attack Rochester Cathedral and then later break into Canterbury Cathedral during the celebration of high mass to demand that monks depose the Archbishop.

But it ended with bloodshed and the murder of Tyler and Archbishop Sudbury.

Half a millennium later still the old establishment expect the workers, poor, old and small business owners to pay vast amounts of money so that they, politicians,  Churches and NGO's can waste our money by spending it better than we can on their pet pork barrel projects.

Climate models go cold

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.

But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.

They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.

One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.

This is an article written by Dr David  Evans  who consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural product

Full article here

SOCIALNOMICS

Eric Pickles defied by Conservative Kent council

"Kent County Council pays Katherine Kerswell, its group managing director, £197,000, while five directors below her earn more than than £150,000. One interim director is said to be earning £1,100 a day. This is despite calls by Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, for any chief executive on that level to take a 10 per cent pay cut, and for other staff to maintain salaries below the £142,500 earned by the Prime Minister."

Tax Freedom Day

Today is Tax Freedom Day – the first day of the calendar year that Britons stop working for the state and start working for themselves. This year, we've worked for a full 5 months this year to pay their taxes, with every penny earned in the UK between January 1 and May 29 taken by the taxman to support government expenditure.

· Britons have worked 149 days to pay their taxes in 2011 – three days longer than in 2010.

· Regional figures reveal that Londoners have to work the longest to pay off their income tax burden (51days) whilst the Welsh spend the least time paying their income tax (35days)

· UK income taxpayers would have to work for almost a year and a half with all their money going to the government to pay off our national debt.

This means that Tax Freedom Day, the day when people stop working for the government and start making cash for themselves, will come on May 30 in 2011 – 3 days later than in 2010. The main reason for this is that the government has raised VAT, in order to help reduce the UK’s record budget deficit.

New calculations by the ASI also reveal the worrying extent of the UK’s debt. Our burden of debt is so great that UK income taxpayers would need to work for nearly a year and a half (525 days) - with their entire wage packet going to the government, and not a penny being spent on public services – to pay off the national debt.

KCC being economical with the actualité rather than tax payers money

A £200,000 windfall payment to Kent County Council’s former chief executive actually cost the taxpayer twice as much as originally stated.

Peter Gilroy was given the six-figure sum after agreeing to extend his contract for a year.

It was designed to ensure that his pension was not affected by his decision to stay on.

Now KCC’s auditors have disclosed that agreeing to pay Mr Gilroy actually cost £408,000, taking into account relevant National Insurance and income tax contributions.

The revelation comes in a formal report by the Audit Commission that makes a number of criticisms of the authority over a series of six-figure severance payouts to top officers.

The Auditors have been  critical of how the county council negotiated the settlements, saying it failed to properly set out why they were considered value for money.

In the case of Mr Gilroy, who was paid £214,000 last year, the report says councillors were given too little information to allow them to make an informed decision about the proposed payout.

It criticises the council over its failure to assess whether the agreement with the chief executive was value for money, saying no alternatives were explored.

It also says the finance director was not told.

Reasons to vote Green

Disgraceful KCC Child Protection Failure

Kent County Council leader Paul Carter has admitted being unaware of how poorly run the authority’s child protection service is.

Last week County Hall’s most senior politician was forced to issue an apology after a damning Ofsted report rated the safeguarding and looked-after children services at KCC as "inadequate".

Areas of concern raised after a two-week inspection last month include the management and supervision of services, low educational attainment of looked-after children, high number of cases not receiving quality assessments, and social workers with high case loads.

 Cllr Carter admitted he only now appreciated the full scale of the problem."We’ve got some poor management, which the report highlights," he said. So it will be interesting to see what action will be taken over this "poor management" bonuses all round?

"The service is under pressure, but  the report highlights issues that are more severe than I  have been aware of."We’ve got to make sure members of staff are appropriately managed and tasked because there’s an element of people being overwhelmed here."

This from a council that wants to spend our money funding and running commercial businesses, that has bid and won the rights to the new Local Enterprise Partnership scheme.  Yet they can't successfully organise and manage their core services. When will KCC let go of their vanity empire building and focus their time and resources and our money on core services.

Oh by the way it's also snowing again, please let's see if we can avoid a similar fiasco as we had when it snowed last time.

SOCIALNOMICS 1

Kent.gov.uk – local government incompetence in PPC

‘Austerity’ is a much more familiar word nowadays and the public sector is embarking on a series of cutbacks to help towards saving the £Billions needed.  A few months back I had reason to type ‘things to do in Kent’ and saw a PPC advert that enticed me in …. to a dead page on the www.kent.gov.uk website.     At the time I was annoyed that public money was being used to fund a PPC advert that led to a dead page.

And then I forgot all about it.  Until now, having seen something in the news about cutbacks being too severe and people losing their jobs in council departments.

So I used the tools at my disposal to research what PPC adverts have been used by Kent County Council in the past 12 months.  

The good news is that they’ve stopped using PPC advertising (at least for now).   But what about how they were handling it beforehand?  Has there been wastage on PPC that was unnecessary?   Yes, there certainly has been.

For example, there was a whole campaign focusing on attracting in people who had typed certain phrases into Google.  As an example, if someone typed the phrase ‘management jobs in Dubai’ they would have seen an advert that displayed as:

Environment Graduate Jobs
At Kent County Council
Environment Stream – £23,054

If you’d typed ‘financial services authority jobs’ or numerous other types of phrases (I have them all for anyone interested) then you would have seen the same advert appear.

OK, someone thought they’d be clever by picking up on phrases that people type and then trying to tempt them into clicking on an advert, hoping that they’d be swayed into considering a type of job that was nothing to do with what they’d searched for.   What they demonstrated was a clear lack of knowledge about how PPC actually works, and they would have been penalised for that (by Google).

So what about when someone typed ‘Los Angeles things to do’, ‘where to go Paris’, ‘what do do Miami’ and ‘things to do Hong Kong’?   What do you think appeared in Google?   Try this:

What To Do Fun Day
Free Family Fun Day
Next Saturday In Canterbury

Why on earth would someone interested in Los Angeles or other places be interested in a family fun day in Canterbury?  What possessed the monkey that created that PPC campaign?!

There are numerous such examples I could come up with.  For example, Google searches on ‘Bouncy Castle’ and ‘facepaint’ brought up the Canterbury fun day advert and a search on ‘pyrenees walking holidays’ brought up an advert promoting a walking festival. 

I think that underneath the incompetence there was someone who had the best intentions – attract people to get involved at a local level, having searched for something very vaguely related, or to encourage graduates looking for numerous types of work to instead consider an Environment Graduate job.   But I wonder how well it was all measured?   What did the cost of clicks actually achieve?    And how many people clicked on adverts after the landing pages had disappeared?

The point of all this is to demonstrate that it’s easily possible to identify the PPC and SEO keywords that any organisation is visible under and while such research is generally used by those in business to identify what competitors are doing (ask me how, if wanting to know more), it can also highlight significant weaknesses.

The big question in my mind is this:

“Out of thousands of staff, plus the presence of numerous PPC experts within Kent, how was it possible to make such a mess of something that could have achieved much better results at minimal cost to the public purse?”

So yes, I do feel sorry for some of those who will lose their jobs in the public sector as time goes on but I do have to wonder whether incompetences like the one shown here are replicated in numerous other ways that lead to wastage and ultimately, to job losses when the belts have to be tightened because there’s no money left.   Finally, for an added laugh, look at the strapline on the council website … ‘A council that performs excellently’.

Article by Andy Harris at Custwin   http://tinyurl.com/2vh5572

The Real Scale of the Debt

It's a start

By January 2011 every council will have to publish details of invoices over £500.

Kent County Council have started by publishing details of invoices over £500 that have been paid by their Environment, Highways and Waste services.  In the months ahead they plan to publish all expenditure over £500.

They  will be publishing the data each month in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF to make the data as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Making sense of the invoice information

This is what the data looks like:

The files contain details of all invoices paid in the reporting month that have a value of £500 or more (excluding VAT). We will not be publishing details of payments that are of a personal nature, such as those to foster carers.

The data is split into six columns containing:

• the reference number for the payment being made
• the name of the supplier/organisation receiving the payment
• the date the payment was processed by our payments system
• the value of the payment on the invoice in pounds excluding VAT
• the part of the council (we call them directorates) that made the payment
• the cost type which shows how we categorise the payment (we use more than 700 different cost types to help us identify and manage our spending).

For accounting purposes, the council is organised into five areas:

• Adult Social Services
• Chief Executive's Department
• Children, Families and Education
• Communities
• Environment, Highways and Waste

Invoice details

Details of the invoices they  pay are available  in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF.

Full details here http://kent.gov.uk/your_council/council_spending/invoices_over_500_pounds.aspx

KCC Wasting Taxpayers money again

Council officials have spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on staff away days to teach them the secrets behind becoming a successful team.

Activities ranging from two days at a hotel at Brands Hatch to outdoor pursuits at Paddock Wood have been laid on, with a total of £30,086 being spent in two-and-a-half years.

The figures cover events organised by the corporate personnel team for County Hall staff. 

Kent County Council admitted it was not a complete list of events, and said it would take too long and be too expensive to provide a comprehensive breakdown for the Freedom of Information request submitted by KOS Media.

This means the true cost of days out could be substantially higher. 

Of the details available through FoI, it was revealed that in one case £4,613 was spent on two days at a hotel at Brands Hatch for 25 County Hall workers to show them what made a successful team.

A spokeswoman from KCC, however, said one of the days was a Saturday and no excursions were taken anywhere else, for example, to the racing circuit nearby.

On another day, 54 staff were treated to a day of outdoor pursuits at Treejumpers in Paddock Wood at a cost of £6,404 to the taxpayer. 

The reason stated for the Treejumpers away day – which was repeated just nine days later for a smaller number of workers at a cost of £2,891 – was that it was a ‘team event’. 

Training days also racked up high bills, with £6,189 being spent to equip 23 staff from the Information Services Group at KCC with a ‘toolkit’ of skills for high performance.

The event, held at the four-star Eastwell Manor in Ashford, aimed to increase levels of self-awareness to allow the team to understand the motivation behind their own and others’ behaviour.

And on another team development day, this time for Kent Extended Services, which works on activities for school children, families and communities, £1,080 was spent on learning to understand each other better.

Six members of staff were also treated to a day at Buckmore Park, a karting circuit in Chatham, at a cost of £1,149.

Reasons stated for the trip were to enable them to improve communication, forge positive links with each other, adopt a ‘joined-up’ approach and work together positively. 

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said Kent residents would be outraged their council tax is funding tree-jumping under the guise of training.

He said: “It is worrying that this is not even the full picture of how much departments are spending on these jollies, as there are cases that are not documented.”

Details obtained from KCC outlined the number of delegates involved for each away day, with numbers as high as 184 for one event. Of the 27 set out, some 671 staff took part. 

Although in many cases this would have been the same workers involved on different away days, Mr Elliott questioned the amount of working time lost.

“These spending totals do not reflect the cost of the lost time of those staff members attending days out,” he said.

“Taxpayers will wonder why senior staff at KCC are being paid such huge sums if they aren’t up to the job and need all this extra training. 

It is perfectly possible to hold team building events in-house at no extra cost to taxpayers, which is really important, especially in a time of fiscal crisis.”

Of the details obtained from KCC, the most recent team days, in June and July, were held in-house for free.

Amanda Beer, director of personnel and development at County Hall, said the council was committed to delivering the highest standard of services to residents.

“We see successful team-working as equally important as individual skills and it is entirely appropriate that team-building events form part of our staff development,” she said.

“All such events must have clearly stated purposes and outcomes and we encourage teams to organise volunteering days that help local communities at the same time.”

Yeh Right !

Kent  County Council leader Paul Carter has  apologised to staff upset that senior officers pocketed £53,000 in bonuses last year.

The cash was paid despite a promise made by former chief executive Peter Gilroy in January, 2009, that members of the chief officers group would not accept any bonuses for 2009-10 in recognition of the current financial situation.

His statement followed an announcement in last year’s budget that staff would only receive a one per cent pay rise.

However, Cllr Carter pointed out at Thursday’s full council meeting that the money relates to performance in 2008-09.

“I do admit the Peter Gilroy statement could have been better worded,” he said.

 “There was certainly no intention to mislead staff but because it was not explicit it was open to misinterpretation.”

Cllr Carter went on to explain that bonuses for chief officers can only be paid in the financial year that follows that in which they are awarded.

Therefore there will be none paid for 2010-11, nor for 2011-12.

He added: “I hope this finally ends the matter and I apologise to staff who may have felt misled.”


Er  no  Mr Carter  it  doesn't..  Whether  the  staff  accept  your  weasel  words  or  not  I  don't  know.   As  a  taxpayer  that  is actually  footing  the  bill  though  I  can  tell  you  I'm  far  from  happy.  Please  explain  what  these  bonuses  were  for.  Was it the  amount  of  taxpayer  money  saved,  or  maybe  the  vast  improvement  in  core  services.  There  again  maybe  the senior  management  opted  to  reduce  their  enormous  salary  and  pension  pots  in  lieu of  performance  related  pay? 


No  thought  not,  just  lining  your  pockets  at  taxpayers  expense  as  usual

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