The Bewilderness

The NHS' Heads are Spinning

Twelve well drilled NHS leaders wrote a letter to the Times yesterday.  It suggests that Patricia Hewitt's "best year ever" claim was part of a plan of campaign.

we would like to take the opportunity to state our belief that the United Kingdom is fortunate to have one of the fairest health systems in the world where no one need fear becoming bankrupt because of their need to fund their healthcare. It has dedicated staff who are driven by a passion for patient care and has been transforming itself into a 21st-century healthcare system of which we can all be proud.

It is remarkable that they ignore the fact that people die on waiting lists, that people are remortgaging houses to buy Herceptin, and that the NHS management/political leadership has bankrupted itself by poor budgeting and worse negotiating skills.

Happily, a letter to the Times from twelve foolish, over-promoted bureaucrats has little influence today.  ;NHS Blog Doctor is telling it like it is, and the twelve spinning apostles merely look foolish.

Bungle At The Home Office

Charles Clarke appears before an Eminent Jurists Panel, spruced up and professional, to defend the undermining of due process and roll his eyes backward, because they just do not get it. Terrorists, they kill people, we need security.

`I defend it categorically,'' Clarke told the Eminent Jurists Panel at a hearing in central London. The orders give ``some capacity for the state against people we don't feel able to pursue through the courts in a normal prosecution.''

Clarke today rejected those arguments in his testimony, suggesting the panel may have failed to grasp the gravity of the terror threat.         

      

``I don't think you understand,'' Clarke said. ``Do we just somehow pretend it's not there?''

That was the response of the Home Office to foreign prisoners who were  designated for deportation after completing their sentences. They just slipped away...into the community.

Matters were made worse by Clarke's admission late Tuesday that he did not know where most of the offenders, who include three murderers and nine rapists, were.

Among the offenders, five had been convicted of committing sex offences on children, seven had served time for other sex offences, 57 for violent offences and two for manslaughter.

There were also 41 burglars and 20 drug importers among those released back into the community without considering their removal from Britain.

Our Home Secretary has taken personal responsibility for this slight hiccup.

Clarke, who has accepted personal responsibility for the 'shocking and systematic failure' of his ministry and the immigration agencies in dealing with the cases, said Tuesday evening: 'I certainly don't think I have a duty to the public to go - I have a duty to sort this out.'

All the foreign prisoners released will be served with a 'super-ASBO' trademarked TB, and supervised by the Probation Service.

Loans? What Loans?

It is unclear why Blair is continuing to highlight the role of the honours system: perhaps to demonstrate a  system of rewards as an outcome of public service. It could be an attempt to delink honours from the sleaze surrounding the loans for peerages; or a signal to the wealthy that the backers of city academies will continue to attract gongs. If so, the timing is arrogant and peculiar.

"If someone gives 2 million pounds of their own money -- time, effort, energy, years of hard work -- isn't that something that we should be saying: 'That's a great thing that they've done'," Blair told a news conference.

"Insofar as the honours system rewards people who contribute to society, contributing to the education of disadvantaged kids in the inner cities is about as big a contribution to society as I can think of," he said

Nano Flips A Biological Switch

Picking up important developments in Nanotech that may hover below the radar for a while is always a bonus. Here seems to be a likely candidate wending its way towards commercial heaven:

Here's how it works. The team uses a microfluidics chip that includes a number of channels measured in nano-metres. The novelty of microfluidics is that it can channel liquids in laminar, or predictable, flow.

The floor of this channel is peppered with Hall-Effect sensors. The Hall Effect describes how a magnetic field influences an electric current. That influence can be measured to a high degree of accuracy. These measurements link the biological motor with the electronic signals of the silicon world.

There is more detail at Linuxelectronics. This is an important model for linking biological motors to in silico applications.

The number of potential applications is staggering. They can be used for flow-control valves, pumps, positioning drives, motors, switches, relays and biosensors.

The system could be used to develop molecular circuits, or even molecular scale mechanical devices. The potential applications are difficult to predict, but are only limited by the imagination of researchers, such is the versatility of an actuator on this scale.

"It could be used as a communicator between the biological and silicon worlds. I could see it providing an interface between muscle and external devices, through its use of ATP, in human implants. Such an application is still 20 or 30 years away," says Firman "It's very exciting and right now we're applying for a patent for the basic concepts."

For once, and much as it makes me choke, something good has come out of EU funding.

Family Ties

A number of individuals have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000. All appear to be of Pakistani origin and the original arrest focussed on a visitor from that country.

Asif Siddique, 25, and Mohammed Rafiq, 40, were held under the Terrorism Act 2000 at a house in Alva, Clackmannanshire.

They are the older brother and uncle of Mohammed Atif Siddique, 20, who was arrested at the same address 11 days ago, also in connection with terror laws.

This followed an investigation by MI5 and Special Branch, probably on suspicion of jihadist connections.

The NHS is under-managed

If you extend the 'audit economy' to the relationship between doctors and patients, replacing professional concern with quantifiable outcomes, then statements about the undermanagement of the National Health Service are clearly not bonkers.

Gill Morgan, chief executive of the NHS Confederation and the managers' leader, yesterday defended the latest figures: 'The NHS is, if anything, under-managed. The NHS deals with over one million patients a day. That level of complexity takes a lot of managing so that doctors and nurses can get on with their job.'

Whilst healthcare professionals are sacked, the NHS has employed 1,000 more managers, leading to a new total of 40,000. Now, there may be a need for more managers within  individual hospitals and other healthcare institutions. But, it is hard to view such needs dispassionately in the command and control NHS.

Another piece of the puzzle

The Observer provides more details on the lobbying firm, Weber Shandwick:

Weber Shandwick, whose chief executive, Colin Byrne, used to run Labour's press office, has been touting the controversial academy programme to hundreds of companies with a view to securing desperately needed sponsorship. The company, which acts as a lobbyist for Coca- Cola, Nestlé, Microsoft and the US defence giant Lockheed Martin, is being paid £2.5m over two years by the Department for Education to attract business investment into schools.

The Observer has established that prospective supporters of Tony Blair's flagship academies are sometimes introduced by the firm to the education minister Lord Adonis, the architect of the city academy programme, the funding of which forms part of the police investigation into the cash-for-honours scandal. Police are probing allegations that Labour donors who supported city academies financially were recommended for peerages.

The ecology of networks, think-tanks, lobbying firms and info-brokers that grow out of all governments has proved an unproductive tool for ensuring the success of policies. This is what when you provide perverse incentives for your political policies, ineffectively disguised as public service.

Liberty is the New Battleground

Blair wishes to shift political conflict from the economy towards that which pundits in the United States have termed "culture wars". He has chosen civil liberties as the battleground, arguing that freedom is not preferable to security.

He outlines controversial new steps, ranging from seizing assets from suspected drug dealers - which could see anyone stopped with more than £1,000 having the money confiscated - to draconian new restrictions on the movements of those suspected of involv-ement in organised crime.

Even if they are not convicted of a crime and there is insufficient evidence to try them, suspects could be banned from associating with certain individuals or travelling to certain places, in order to disrupt trades such as human trafficking.

Blair argues that crafting new laws to disrupt designated groups, even if they abrogate due process, are appropriate for ensuring that the majority of voters no longer live in fear of a criminal minority. In his email exchange with an Observer columnist, Blair justified authoritarian measures by results:

In the exchange with Porter, Blair admits measures such as the antisocial behaviour laws have 'disturbed the normal legal process' but argues that previously police were not prosecuting over such crimes: 'Where these powers are being used, the law-abiding no longer live in fear of the lawless.'

He defended controversial action on asylum and immigration as necessary to prevent racists exploiting the issues.

And he said [Lord] Steyn's criticism, in a lecture earlier this year, showed 'how out of touch much of the political and legal establishment is today', adding that he remains determined to go further down the same road: 'I would widen the police powers to seize the cash of suspected drug dealers, the cars they drive round in... I would impose restrictions on those suspected of being involved in organised crime. In fact I would generally harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country.'

The Guardian article sets out some of the concerns on civil liberties in the three major parties. Yet, it is unclear why such an issue will acquire greater importance than the ever-important 'schoolzandhospitalz'.

Blair needs to maintain other fronts in order to draw attention away from his policy failures and undermine the reputation of his electoral opponents. The latest gimmick is civil liberties, a sector vulnerable to state action with little chance of a popular defence. Yet, the criminalisation of many middle-class drivers, the triumph of gimmicks over an effective criminal justice system and the increased coarsening of the streets with yobbery, leads to a reality break between what people hear from Blair and what they actually experience.

This 'reality break' can never be bridged by the 'ratchet effect' of the Labour authoritarians, trapped in their vicious circle of centralisation as they are unble to effect real policies of individual empowerment that reduce the power of the state.

Reshaping the face of the Islands

Despite the increases in the regulatory and tax burden, the British economy is expected to maintain its growth rate. Ernst and Young argue that this is partially due to the influx of immigration from Eastern Europe.

The Item Club, the only forecaster to use the Treasury's economic model, believes interest rates would be 0.5 percentage points higher and gross domestic product 0.2 per cent lower were it not for an estimated 300,000 new workers from Eastern Europe alone.

Professor Peter Spencer, the chief economic advisor to the Item Club, said: "The steady flow from the most recent accession countries to the UK has proved remarkably positive for the economy… we are looking at a very positive cost-benefit ratio."

The positive benefits of immigration from Eastern Europe is not limited to the South-East. they have settled in all regions of the Kingdom.

The government cannot rely upon liberal immigration policies to offset the problems associated with the growth of the state. This is a short-term measure that postpones inevitable reforms. With the rise of the BNP, one also notes that the 'decay of the state' is finding the scapegoats of change in the immigrant communities.

A Union Jack on the Moon

Should there be a British space programme with British rockets and British astronauts? Piers Sellers, an American astronaut of British extraction has called for the government to fund manned spaceflight. He argues that a British astronaut will provide an example to encourage greater interest in space amongst schoolchildren and  that this will  prevent a threatened  research deficit in British contributions to space science.

The UK does not support a manned space programme, even through the European Space Agency (Esa), of which it is a member, does.

Asked whether he would like to see Britain fund its own astronauts, he replied: "Yes I would.

"Most of the European member states participate in a manned programme and have astronauts in the programme. They are either working in Russia, Europe or the United States."

It is unclear whether the existence of astronauts in other European countries has proved of great cultural benefit. It is doubtful that they have inspired thousands of schoolchildren to consider becoming astronauts.

One could argue that scarce resources often force scientists to focus their research programmes more productively and often provide better results. The 'string and sealing wax' approach of the Cavendish laboratory during the interwar  period is a fine example. Therefore, British efforts in space science are small-scale, useful and productive.

If manned spaceflight proves economic and profitable in the next two decades, British entrepreneurs or philanthropists will commence the necessary accumulation of capital and knowledge to send astronauts into orbit. Is there any point in wasting taxpayers money on space boondoggles which could retard the inevitable 'catch-up' phase, as we are not first movers in this sphere of endeavour? The answer, of course, is No!