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There’s something very alarming about Labour’s plan for compulsory community service for all school leavers.

Maybe it’s the vague similarity with conscription which the great Milton Friedman compared to a form of slavery “inconsistent with a free society”, inequitable and arbitrary, preventing young men from being able to shape their lives as they see fit. (The left always refers to Keynes as “the great” but never Friedman, so I will inverse).

Maybe it’s the awful language of New Labour’s vision of Citizenship with “young people being expected to contribute” (50 hours currently, probably rising) and the “do as we say” mindset behind it, the huge central authority directing the “young” so “the contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us.” (Whatever “better” is defined as.)

Both of these things leave me uncomfortable, and I expect everyone who opposes this will be spun as siding with the hoodies and lay-abouts etc. But this doesn’t change my point. In a free country we are not bound to perform work for anyone but ourselves; and because we are free, when people do act in the interests of others and not themselves - as people often do - that act is all the better because it was heartfelt, voluntary and real. Because it was human and voluntary, not robotic and compulsory.

From the EUObserver via Conservative MEP Dan Hannan;

One of the European Commission’s key departments has circulated a 15-page memo warning officials to be careful about what they write in emails and advising them on how to narrowly interpret requests for information.

The instructions “make it easier to get reports out” and “avoid having to go through blanking out” documents, says the commission.

It reminds DG trade employees that all documents, including emails, are “in principle subject to disclosure” and asks them to think of the regulation when they are producing documents.

“Each official must be aware that all his/her documents, including meeting reports and e-mails can potentially be disclosed. You should keep this in mind when writing such documents. This is particularly the case for meeting reports and emails with third parties (e.g. industry), which are favourite “targets” of requests for access to documents, especially by NGOs,” reads the memo.

It asks officials to draft documents “with the utmost care” while telling them to avoid making references to informal contacts, such as meals or drinks, with lobbyists.

“Don’t refer to the great lunch you have had with an industry representative privately or add a PS asking if he/she would like to meet for a drink.”

The document also tips off officials on how to narrow down the interpretation of a request for information. It points to a past example where a request referred to DG trade meetings with individual companies, meaning the department could avoid making public its contacts with business lobbyists.

“Recent cases concern requests for information about meetings with ‘individual companies’ on our FTAs [Free Trade Agreements] which have allowed us to exclude business federations on the same points, or about meetings with ‘DG Trade officials’ which have allowed us to exclude meetings on the same point with the Commissioner or the cabinet,” it notes.

As a way of avoiding officials having to blank out parts of documents they release to the public, the transparency guide suggests writing two accounts of meetings, a “factual” or neutral one that can be released to the public and a more “personal/subjective” one with assessments and recommendations for follow up that need not be disclosed.

It also explains that briefings should not be made public if still considered “newsworthy” – a derogation allowed under the regulation for documents concerning a decision still in progress – with DG Trade working on a series of key issues including making free trade agreements with poor countries (something NGOs are always keen to have an insight into) and sensitive WTO decisions.

DG Trade’s take on the transparency regulation which MEPs recently voted to expand to cover all documents, including electronic ones, has come in for criticism.

Corporate Europe Observatory, a transparency NGO, said the instructions appear to “directly contravene the spirit and content of the regulation.”

It is a “scandalous” attempt to “legitimise DG Trade’s recurrent attempts to shield evidence of its liaisons with corporate lobbyists from information requests,” said CEO campaigner Pia Eberhardt.

For its part, the European Commission defended the memo. A spokesperson told EUobserver: “Actually we think these are good instructions. It makes clear that no category of documents is excluded [from the regulation].”

The spokesperson also said that the instructions “make it easier to get reports out” and “avoid having to go through blanking out” documents.

The transparency regulation dates from 2001 but the commission recently proposed to overhaul it after complaints from the EU ombudsman and several court cases. Following MEPs’ vote last month the regulation has gone back to committee for discussion on sensitive issues such as the extent to which commercial data can be excused from disclosure.

The updated law is expected to be approved in the second half of this year, under the Swedish EU presidency.

Is Derek Draper secretly Timmy Mallet? No, but he may as well be.

So that explains the gaps in his C.V., Derek Draper is secretly Timmy Mallet?

Well maybe not, but he may as well be. Maybe we’ll see him eating bugs in the Jungle, not that would be worth watching.

Today we see the extent of the unfounded and disgusting smears propagated by McBride and emailed to Draper and Tom Watson MP (along with Brown’s previous spin chief Charlie Whelan and Unite union press officer Andrew Dodgshon), as The Sunday Times and its ugly step-sister News Of The World publishes extracts. They really are the work of juvenile schoolboys passing notes around class behind the teacher’s back, and not very bright schoolboys at that!

All of the smears are of course unfounded - some are downright sick, others simply ludicrous, all hurtful and untrue - but I am concerned that some people actually believe them, in part at least. Today’s top search term for people arriving at this blog is “david cameron’s embarrassing illness” followed by the rather telling search of “what is david cameron’s embarrassing illness?” All typed it seems as a matter of fact!

With the public opinion of politicians so low, is there a risk people take the view - as one person I know has despite my attempts to change their view - that it’s “six to one, a half dozen to the other” and “an elaboration but there’s no smoke without fire”? In Harriet Harman’s Court of Public Opinion, everyone is guilty until proven innocent it seems. An apology from Downing Street is vital.

Further to the McBride/Draper smear plot, Iain Dale is carrying a News Of The World “teaser”.

Tomorrow the News of the World will reveal the sensational details in the shocking email smears sent by Gordon Brown’s top aide. The PM’s spin-doctor, Damian McBride, and Derek Draper, who heads Labour’s internet campaigning, outlined a dirty tricks war of highly personal stories about top Tories. (These’s that phrase again, why is everyone called a “top Tory”?).

The plan was far more sophisticated than McBride or Draper have claimed and was close to completion.

Emails seen by the News of the World show McBride and Draper schemed to spread false malicious stories that:

o Opposition leader David Cameron had an embarrassing illness
o Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s wife was “emotionally fragile” just because she appeared upset at parties
o A Tory MP used his position to get publicity for lover’s business
o Involved allegations about female Tory MP Nadine Dorries and another named MP.

In the emails, McBride says: “We’ve got to keep up the momentum.”

But in the theme of spin, had they not been thankfully caught out, maybe they could have been spun back?

Opposition leader David Cameron had an embarrassing illness - get the sympathy vote, the votes of fellow sufferers, lots of press; remember the fictional illness in Absolute Power? Electoral goldmine.
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s wife was “emotionally fragile” just because she appeared upset at parties - she’s upset about climate change, poverty and the economy because she cares passionately, lots of votes there.
A Tory MP used his position to get publicity for lover’s business - as part of a commitment to helping small business during the recession?
Involved allegations about female Tory MP Nadine Dorries and another named MP - just deny that one, no publicity is bad publicity?

Just a thought.

Where there's muck there's Mandelson?

So for one morning I don’t look at the newspapers - “hey, it’s an Easter Saturday,” I thought, “what can possibly happen on an Easter Saturday” - and it seems the Guido-Draper blog war goes nuclear.

Guido and Derek Draper - with his “independent” LabourList website - have been trading blows for some time, but suddenly it seems there’s far more to it.

The Telegraph reports that emails sent to Draper from an “unnamed” senior advisor to Gordon Brown, “which made a number of unfounded, innuendo-laden suggestions about the private lives of David Cameron, George Osborne and other Conservative MPs, came into the possession of Paul Staines, who writes the Guido Fawkes political blog.”

The paper attempts to make more of an issue of the security breach and Guido-Draper spat but in reality the unnamed advisor was Damien McBride - Brown’s chief political advisor, a “close friend” of Peter Mandelson and a taxpayer paid civil servant! The emails were to appear on Draper’s LabourList site to smear a wide range of Tory MPs and bloggers, including Iain Dale, Guido and Nadine Dorries. Also involved somewhere is Tom Watson MP, who was copied into all the emails from McBride (who has now resigned) and lists Mudslinging: The 25 Dirtiest Campaigns of All Time among the top books to have influenced him!

But with all of these three spinning the dark arts where is the Slime Minister himself, Peter Mandelson? It all just seems to have his DNA all over it. Was he involved? We know he is good friends with McBride. He somehow feels conspicuous by his absence to me.

Are the Lib Dems resorting to adverts to recruit candidates?

“Having difficulty recruiting the best candidates for your council elections?” it reads, rather like an advert for a stairlift.

It links to a page listing a range of recruitment rallies.

Apparently it’s part of some taxpayer funded (lucky us!) initiative called “Be a Councillor” from is a Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) launched in January 2009 and delivered by the Leadership Centre for Local Government for each of the three main political parties - although only the Lib Dems seem desperate enough to advertise - to “assist with the recruitment of a broader, deeper, and even more able pool of talented council candidates for future council elections. It is more about talent than about diversity but one leads to the other!”

But aren’t local council candidates meant to be…errr…local?

Something terrible is happening to our Police. Once someone I knew from abroad was shocked that our Police are generally unarmed. “Of course they aren’t armed,” was the reply, rather full of nostalgic sentimentality, “this is Britain, we don’t do that sort of thing here.” We have a national sentiment towards community policing, it’s part of who and what we are as a country; we are Heartbeat, Hamish Macbeth and Miss Marple rather than NYPD, Miami Vice and Starskey & Hutch. Regular day to day Policemen with guns would be harder to approach, more authoritarian looking; just not British.

But armed or unarmed something terrible is still happening. The “Bobbies” of our mind are largely a myth. These days it’s more Damien Green in the dock than Dixon of Dock Green;

An innocent man was hit in the leg with a baton and pushed with great force to the ground by a police officer, and later died.

An innocent schoolgirl is killed by a policeman driving at 93mph without his blue lights or siren on, matching a similar police speeding without sirens/lights killing near Ashford last year.

An innocent man is shot on the London Underground.

They all have the same root - the loss of genuine policing for policing of the action movie type. You have only to watch any ‘fly on the wall’ television programme about the Police to see that attitudes are sadly so often wrong. No one is condemning all the Police, but a number seem to take their driving advice from Top Gear and feel they are either invincible or in a Hollywood film. This minority must be dealt with before further damage and harm is done.

Whether Mr Tomlinson was libel to have a heart attack or not isn’t the point, it was an assault by a Police officer. We don’t need a review or investigation, we need this officer sacked. The fact of it being stressful - as some have used as an excuse - just doesn’t cut it; if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Britain is facing – depending who you ask – a crisis of variously dire proportions. The worst recession since WW2, a potential depression, a return to the 1970s, a rerun of 1990s Japan; all of these are predictions made by journalists over the last year who have been darting through history like aspiring Doctor Whos in the search for an easy comparison ideal for a simplistic background graphic laden with nostalgic archive footage.

And with them has gone the Government in the search for an easy answer and suitably simplistic sound bite to parrot on Newsnight. And as ever there isn’t an easy answer, but someone will offer one – it just won’t work. Of course that answer is from John Maynard Keynes, a man who once dismissed fears about the future debt levels on the basis that “in the long run we are all dead.” How reassuring, no wonder he chose economics rather than medicine.

So debt is back on the menu, and back big time. It’s like the Spam sketch – you can have anything as long as it comes with spam debt. “VAT cuts with spam debt, capital projects with debt, postponed taxes with debt, debt with debt, debt on debt, fried debt, scrambled debt, hidden debt, debt surprise…” But wasn’t excess debt part of how we got into this mess?

The Government is borrowing to boost demand, but the public sector crowds out the private; there is only so much credit out there and the more the government Hoovers up, the less there is for everyone else to borrow and the higher the real interest rate goes. And is boosting demand in this artificial way the right thing to do? We have got to face facts. The old levels of spending were built on unsustainable levels of debt and “easy credit” that aren’t coming back, we have got to once more adapt to survive.

Now I am not an expert, but I do know that most businesses facing difficulty are in trouble because of a lack of previously available credit, that the housing market is dire because of a lack of credit in the form of mortgages, and that consumer spending is falling because of a lack of credit. It is a largely credit related issue, hence the term “Credit Crunch”. Therefore the government gobbling up what limited credit is out there is a terrible idea – we need less credit crowding, not more, and this means reducing the current operational deficit as well as the ‘extra deficit’ being created for the stimulus. We need to make huge savings, and fast.

As even if the fiscal stimulus does boost demand it’s temporary. Therefore priority – other than reducing the government defect to ease credit demand – should be for tax cuts and measures that help businesses stay afloat on the new sadly lower levels of demand.

I imagine it as a treadmill, let’s call it the cost treadmill. The burden of debt and other costs has been speeding it up more and more; the runner has been running at an unsustainable rate, is now out of breath and can’t go on much more. Brown’s answer is a fiscal stimulus to artificially boost demand – an injection of some dodgy performance enhancing drug or adrenalin. It may restore the old turbo speed for a while but sooner or later will wear off, leaving us with the nasty side effect of a faster treadmill in the form of higher taxes. And what if natural demand doesn’t return, another dose? Surely the better answer is to slow the treadmill and get our breath back at a sustainable speed?

Cutting or abolishing Business Rates and Employer NIC would reduce the costs of running a business so far more could survive on the new lower “post-easy credit” levels of demand. It would slow the cost treadmills faced by businesses. So too would cutting regulation, red tape and other costs created by government.

Over time individuals, firms and the government would then sort out their finances by repaying debts, with credit become freer and spending begin to rise again – natural spending, rather than artificial; sustainable growth, rather than debt growth.

And to speed these individual recoveries the government can help individuals sort out their finances by giving them lump sum rebates (if affordable, and they sadly aren’t). Rather than VAT cuts purely to boost demand, this would let families utilise the money in the way that best suits them. Some would save it, but what is the problem with this? Banks need greater reserves to lend, and having savings with boost the individuals own confidence, in turn leading to spending. Some would repay debts, aiding banks again and reducing their monthly outgoings, leading to their recovery and return to spending; and others may spend immediately, boosting demand (although as I said, I believe supply-side measures of debt reduction and individual financial recovery the key).

In short what we need is to look again at this crisis and – instead of believing we can stop the recession, keep spending unsustainably and beat the markets – work to minimise the damage, minimise the time span and position ourselves for the strongest recovery possible. And come to think of it, didn’t a previous Prime Minister have doubts about “all sorts of curious notions, like the more you spend, the richer you get”.

Today sees yet more protests, this time anti-NATO.

It’s a curiosity of the 21st Century in historical terms that we are accustomed to peace and freedom. We attribute no significance to the fact that we can work, act and travel largely without restriction and largely without fear of falling victim to some horrific act of war or some other perilous fate; and even less to the fact that you must go back several generations from that born today before you find one that must risk their lives under military conscription. No other generations have known peace, freedom and prosperity in such quantities as those since the Second World War.

This freedom and prosperity is the result of our liberal system, and these principles have been firmly underpinned for the last 60 years by a magnificent organisation. Despite EU claims that it has created peace, it hasn’t. No Eurocrat put up the fight for free nations in words, let alone bullets. I have not read every last one of its directives or laws or regulations, but I am quite convinced that not a single one prohibits war among its members, let alone protects them from the aggression of external forces.

You don’t have to look through the North Atlantic Treaty establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for long however to find such. At 1232 words including footnotes, it has just 14 articles, number 5 reading - in very plain English - “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

It’s plain, it’s simple, and it’s why Russia didn’t come wandering into Western Europe: We want peace and to be left alone but if you attack us, we’ll attack you back, and so will our friends.

Which makes me wonder how anyone can be against NATO, and what on Earth they’d replace it with? They are rather like the G20 protesters - the usual suspects, the usual hotchpotch of things they hate and contradictory list of illogical demands. I think it’s summed up nicely by this quote from Kenneth Clark (the historian): “I can see them still through the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in, I don’t know.” - Clark, Civilisation, Episode 12.