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Happy St George’s Day to all my blog readers!

Be sure to read my latest article on ConservativeHome, celebrating today and all it means.

Also check out this article by Boris on his celebrations in London, this New Culture Forum article and an old blog post by Dan Hannan.

The system of “pay’n'perks” enjoyed by MP’s is a disgrace, that goes without saying, but I’m rather alarmed at the idea of Parliament employing MP’s secretaries and staff directly and centrally rather than MP’s doing so themselves.

Besides the fact that these staff will suddenly no longer have a “real boss” who they are accountable to - and all the usual poor quality we expect from public sector staff - they will also be employees of the State. Who is their master, and who will they seek to impress?

The whole idea is dangerous, What if a staffer was secretly linked to another party? MP’s will be in constant fear, trusting no one.

LabourHome asked: “Who has been the greatest Labour Leader over the last 30 years?”

Just 2 votes behind Tony Blair was Michael Foot, author of the longest suicide note in history. I know they don’t exactly have a good range of options but I mean, really, 26% favour Michael Foot?!

Gordon Brown got 5 votes…himself, Sarah Brown, his two sons, and his housekeeper.

UKPollingReport feature a prediction of the European Parliament election results.

The same team produced a similar prediction for the 2004 elections, which predicted that the UK result would be CON 32, LAB 27, LD 12, SNP 2 and PC 2, with the Greens and UKIP loosing all their seats. Hopelessly wrong. Real result: CON 27, LAB 19, UKIP 12, LD 12, GREEN 2, SNP 2, PC 1.

Now they are taking into account all sorts of things - the latest opinion polls, the last national election, who is in government, how close the last national election was to the last european election, whether the party is an “anti-European” party or not, whether they watch Neighbours or not… - though how you weight these things is anyone’s guess. Projection: CON 27(nc), LAB 22(+3), LDEM 13(+1), UKIP 4(-8), SNP 2(nc), PC 1(nc), GRN 0(-2).

Is this the most hopeless poll ever? The notion that the Conservatives make no progress on their 2004 result (their lowest vote share in a national election since 1832) despite a UKIP meltdown; that Labour make significant progress; the Lib Dems improve from their post-Iraq War highs; the SNP make no progress; and the Greens vanish despite the global warming fears…it’s bonkers. What are they on?

My prediction (excluding Northern Ireland) is that the UKIP meltdown largely aids the Conservatives who win 40 seats, with UKIP being reduced to a 3 by holding a single seat in each of the South East, East Anglia and South West constituencies; Labour gets reduced to around 11 MEPs again aiding the Conservatives but also seriously affected by low turnout and the BNP, who I expect will sadly gain a seat in each of the North West, Yorkshire & Humber and London regions; Liberal Democrats will do poorly and be reduced to maybe 10 seats; whilst the Greens will do well with 4 seats, two in London and two in the South East. The SNP will probably gain a seat to have 3, with Plaid Cymru holding their 1.

We will see which is more accurate…

One of the early posts on this blog was Overtime faces EU ban;

“The European Parliament has voted to force Britain to limit the working week of its citizens. Britain has no veto on this area, and unless the (quasi-devolved?) UK government can convince a suitable number of other EU members to back us up, the ban will be put in place. It will then be illegal to work more than 48 hours per week - regardless of whether you need or want to. In the land of the EU it is the [European] State that knows best, not the individual. Having to pay the mortgage, saving up for a holiday, new car or extension, working to pay school or childcare fees, have better quality time, start your own small business or retire early - or retire at all the way things are going - will all be NO EXCUSE. There are no exceptions. Even if it’s temporary while another family member is out of work! Now we see how powerless the British government has become. It cannot even defend our right to work how much we want. And even if we can convince enough to support our opt-out, what will we have to give them in return?”

Well the ban marches forwards ahead of June’s European elections, as reported on the BBC.

Now I personally believe it’s a matter of personal liberty how long you work. There are 168 hours in a week, what you do with yours - and what I do with mine - is entirely our own concern. (The exception being where long hours and tiredness puts others at risk of course). But I know some people are oar-poking busybodies who believe in technocratic state intervention based on statistics and flimsy socialist arguments, so I guess they need demolishing.

MYTH #1. The health hazards caused by excessive working time are well proven.
False. You are generalising. Driving a lorry when tired may be dangerous, stacking shelves or answering phones isn’t! There are already laws in place governing working hours in dangerous situations.

MYTH #2. Countries that work less have higher productivity.
Some statistics show this, others don’t - GDP per capita for example is higher in workaholic America. Surely individual businesses are best placed to maximise productivity in their own firm by adjusting their own employment hours - how many firms would get staff working overtime if productivity would be higher with less hours or by hiring part time staff?

MYTH #3. With people being made redundant or reducing their hours, there is a growing sense that the work that remains should be shared out fairly.
Rubbish. Having more staff on the books is more expensive, paperwork heavy and largely impossible. Hours needed fluctuates and recruiting staff to fill the gaps over the Working Time Limit just wouldn’t work. What’s more you’d be producing less goods with more staff, a waste of human resources that would otherwise be available for use elsewhere!

There have been over 100 complaints about Coronation Street.

Unfortunately they weren’t about the illogical story lines, poor acting, sheer improbability of so much gloom infesting one street or the fact that nothing and no one changes, progresses or does anything. I don’t watch - as you can probably tell - but recently I saw part of an episode and I’m sure the plot was the same as the last time I saw it about 5 years ago.

A murderer from “beyond the Street” - this time a sociopathic control freak Scotsman named Mr Gordon (I wonder where they got that idea?) - and some sort of love triangle, Ken Barlow about to have an affair with some weird woman he met through some weird local arts thing (and disguised by “research” for a local history book no one will read), a hat that controls people’s speech, and grumpy workers.

I wonder what this teaches children - beware outsiders, hats can take over your brain and if you want an affair hide it behind something boring? But no complains about this.

Instead they were about busybody left-leaning oar-poking Ken Barlow being, well, busybody left-leaning oar-poking Ken Barlow.

The BBC reports “while the Barlow family were preparing to go to church, Ken - played by William Roache - questioned his son Peter on why he was allowing his grandson, Simon, to be “indoctrinated” by the church. He then went on to criticise Simon’s school for teaching creationism. After the family returned from church, Ken began to tell his grandson that Jesus rising from the dead “may not necessarily be true” and that scientists think the Big Bang created the universe.”

I am however with ITV on this one. As they say the soap was set in modern society and “represents views from all sides of the religious spectrum”. In a free country religion can be questioned, criticised and even joked about in any non-violent way; and the religious can reply likewise..in this case by calling Ken a busybody left-leaning oar-poking trouble maker. The most important part of a tolerant society is tolerating those who disagree. I do however wonder whether they would treat all religions this way…

I’m not a fan of Obama but he has at least kept a promise…

…he got his kids a dog named “Bo”.

It was a gift from Edward Kennedy. Does this count as a political donation I wonder…

So ’smear-gate’ enters another day and - although the public are slowly getting tired of the story - it shows little sign of slowing down. Round two has begun, the attack - with the mainstream media - on bloggers (see here, here and here for starters). Tim Montgomerie writes a reply here. This follows the green with envy attacks on Dan Hannan, by Michael White in particular.

Labour, caught out smearing the Conservatives, has moved on to bloggers in an attempt to shoot the messenger (how ironic they are smearing blogs when it is their blogging smear plans that got them in trouble - they know all about lying on blogs). They are of course joined by their regular newspaper cheerleaders such as Kevin McGuire (who used his blog to state most people wanted to know what Cameron’s illness was - backing up my fears some believe the smears), and the newly allied media fearful of bloggers.

In The Times Stephen Pollard writes “the difference between quality newspapers and even serious blogs is that your default reaction to a newspaper piece should be that it is true, whereas your default reaction to a blog post should be that it might be true, but it might equally well be a pack of lies.” He must be delusional, whoever trusted what they read in the papers? And who is he to tell us what our default reaction to anything should be?

Dan Hannan believes he was one of McBride and Draper’s targets. I don’t think he was, as we’d have heard about it from the emails, but I do think he was a target for Labour smears and spin. The sheer amount of dirt digging, word twisting and “dark arts” by Labour and their journalistic lackys (see here, here, here, here and here) as well as the “Lima suit lie” were all grossly disproportionate given Hannan is an MEP! Labour seems determined to shoot down every rising star because they don’t have any.

It seems smears are all Labour has left.

Today is the 4th birthday of ConservativeHome, which by a nice coincidence is also the first day NewsJunction is featured in the “Latest news & blogs” sidebar - although we were “tweeted” once before. Thanks to Tim for both mentions.

I first found ConservativeHome during the Leadership Contest of 2005, when Tim provided the best coverage available anywhere, and from that CH developed ToryDiary and more recently CentreRight.

ConservativeHome has also kindly allowed me to write on several occassions including my calls for a planning rethink, my brief history of how governments ruined our railways, my claims that the 2007 Scottish Elections weren’t a disaster but actually not too bad, why Conservatives and libertarians should oppose airport expansion and defend property rights, and how Henry VIII was a chronic currency debaser and “printed” too much money.

So as ConservativeHome celebrates, we wish it a very Happy Birthday and thank those involved over the years - Tim Montgomerie, Sam Coates, Jonathan Isaby, all the CentreRight and Platform authors et al - for all they have done.

The BBC reported last night that the government is likely to introduce an incentive scheme at the budget (22 April) for car owners to scrap old vehicles in exchange for new ones. The move would probably involve a payment of £2,000 to trade in cars that are a certain number of years old.

A rather telling line is “car scrappage schemes are seen as targeting the root cause of the industry’s woes - a lack of demand for its products”. Of course the real root cause is not a lack of demand but an excess of supply; even in the boom Ford calculated that worldwide car over-production was around 24 million per year.

Instead of encouraging firms to adapt to the new “post-boom” world by producing less cars and making them cheaper by reducing costs (thus boosting real demand), they are subsidising people with taxpayers’ money to scrap perfectly good cars to buy new cars they didn’t want (or can’t really afford).

Not only is this just taking money from one taxpayer to subsidise another (robbing Peter to pay Paul the car salesman), it is just delaying the fact car firms need reform to survive at our expense (and the expense of whoever we’d have spent that money with had it not been taken as tax, as well as whoever the car buyer would have spent their money with instead - say a small shop - had they not been bribed to buy a car).

What’s more, most cars we buy are foreign made - so we are paying our taxes to boost sales of foreign cars. Even the motor industry accepts this, claiming that 25% of the purchase price is in the UK based sales industry as an argument - as if paying our taxes to boost sales of foreign cars and subsidise car salesmen is so much better!

The policy is of course being spun as “green”. Old cars pollute more than new ones - true - but the amount of pollution in the manufacture of the new car, to replace a perfectly good old car, isn’t counted but is vast. Some of the “greenest” cars ever made are the 1950s Land Rovers still being used now.

So with taxpayers losing out, local businesses losing out as people buy cars instead of other goods, and even the motor industry gaining little (not that it should be an excuse for subsidy even if it gained a lot) - why is the government still planning this rubbish? Oh wait, there’s an election coming and the swing seats in the Midlands are auto industry heavy…

At least Arthur Daley will be happy.