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Jeremy Paxman interviewed Gordon Brown tonight. Here is a transcript:

“Globalglobalglobalglobal nothing I could do globalglobalglobal I did everything possible globalglobalglobalglobal I me I me I me globalglobalglobal don’t cut this year don’t cut this year globalglobalglobalglobal Tories wrong values globalglobalglobalglobal didn’t start here not my fault globalglobalglobal read my speeches from 1998 globalglobalglobalglobal NHS cancer old people pupils globalglobalglobalglobal one million in one million out points system points system immigration falling globalglobalglobalglobal hobblegibblegobbledibbledabbledobble thankyou”.

OFFICIAL: Economy urinating into ocean of debt

When it comes to the state of Mammon at the moment, there is I think a parallel of great importance, and it’s this: people confuse the economy with the deficit in the same way that the warming-or-not debaters confuse weather with climate.

Talking about ‘the economy’ and how it may or may not be pulling out of a recession is a bit like going to the Copenhagen conference and saying “It was 34 degrees on my patio yesterday”. The only reason that piece of information might be relevant would be if yesterday had been 27th December in northern Europe. The same is true of economic ‘recovery’.

Wall St went marginally potty today because the US economy grew by 3.2% in Q1 2010. Some of you may have spotted that it’s been very quiet over at Lord Mandelson’s Ministry of Alchemy this afternoon; not even he can compare a 0.3% UK growth rate with 3.2%. Although Mandy can describe a dead sheep sitting in a DIY hole as “barnstorming to victory in the debate”, he’s too cute to suggest that maths can be denied. But as it happens, Wall St is silly to get excited about just one quarter anyway.

Business generally has had the quarterly return instant-gratification disease for nearly three decades now. The difference in the 2010 context is that responses to such short term data are even dafter, because getting a rise of 3.2% a year is not going to do a lot for the employee who earns £30,000 a year – but owes his creditors £680,000. This is a roughly accurate analogy. More concerning for we Brits is that getting a 0.3% rise when you earn £18,000 isn’t going to do anything to pay off creditors owed £1.3 million. This too, sadly, is an accurate comparison.

This morning on the Daily Politics show, I heard Ben Bradshawe – the man who thinks a balance sheet is ecologically sound bed-linen – whingeing on again about how taking all £6 billion out of an economy worth £1.3 trillion will spell the end of Blighty as we know it. His mentor Mandelson in turn demands we accept that this removal of just 0.4% of largely uneconomic activity will be enough to squash the fragile recovery. This is fragility of a different order to anything I’ve ever experienced.

So here for your delectation is a fact to put some if this nonsense into context: the UK economy could be growing at 6% per annum, and we would still be in a well of deep doo-doo. The economy is only important in the sense that its medium term GDP needs to be of a large enough size to facilitate paying off a debt of terrifying proportions - and an O-level Economics student could tell you that, structurally, the UK economy does not make or grow anywhere near enough of what would be necessary to pay off half the debt by 2014. Or rather, not without swingeing rises in taxation and cuts in welfare services.

I read earlier that Consumer confidence in the UK fell for the second straight month in April – down one point from March to a score of -16, according to a poll conducted by the European Commission. This is encouraging evidence that at least a proportion of the electorate isn’t entirely deluded. But I also read that the main Parties had the gall to defend their plans for spending cuts – despite another think tank (the NIESR) warning that far more will need to be done.

Of course, Mr Brown continues on his merry way of refusing to use the D-word, preferring instead to indulge in E numbers. But Andrew Neill rightly pointed out this morning that the voters aren’t stupid. And even Will Hutton admitted that the cuts were “nowhere near enough….and they’re capital cuts, which are never a good idea”. Will is obviously feeling a lot better following his spell in The Priory.

Politicians are evading what they will do with OUR votes, and evading the issue of how THEIR dilatory control of the finances means a coming decade of austerity. This isn’t democracy, it’s fraud. We should all make our point – insofar as the electoral system allows us to do this.

So this evening – having at last received my postal vote – I have written on the ballot paper ‘None of the following’. And next to the Labour candidate, I added ‘Especially not this one’. It will be treated as a spoilt ballot paper. But this is merely the insufficiency of an arrogant electoral system: it didn’t spoil my experience of doing it one bit.

TWO DAYS AFTER AVIVA RESEARCH SHOWS PUBLIC UNREST….

NHS WAITING LISTS ROCKETING AGAIN

TWO IN FIVE WAIT LONGER THAN 13 WEEKS

NEARLY NINE OUT OF TEN SAY WAITING TIMES ‘TOO LONG’

NHS waiting lists are still a top concern for the public, despite the introduction of the 18-week maximum wait, suggests a new survey from Aviva.

The publication of a poll among 3000 NHS patients by Aviva two days ago revealed that 86% believe that NHS waiting lists are too long, with 82% saying that the worst thing about the NHS is the amount of time spent waiting for an appointment with a specialist to find out what is wrong with them.

93% of respondents said that their number one priority was knowing what’s wrong with them when they are unwell, and 88% said that worrying while they wait for their illness to be diagnosed makes being unwell more stressful.

Now today’s release of NHS statistics on waiting times bears out the public perception: the number of patients waiting over thirteen weeks for inpatient care (ie, an operation) was up a staggering 42% to 55,300. And those waiting of over eight weeks for just an outpatients appointment was also up 34.2%.

The time-lines above are highlighted for two reasons:

1. These times mean that from going to the GP to receiving relief of a serious condition can easily take nearly six months.

2. These defined ‘medium’ waiting times have to be the ones examined these days, because for years the Government has been cheating on the ‘standard’ figures. These latter tend to show little or no increase in waiting times – but on that very sub-standard standard basis, the GP to theatre waiting time is nearly ten months.

In fact, it has become standard practice (by Trusts supplying these data to the ONS and DoH) to either (a) shift some longer-waiting patients into the shorter time data set and/or (b) have a blitz on seeing all those waiting a long time in the last part of a reporting period. Thus, because no statistics can be assumed inviolate any more, it is important to look beyond the ‘standard’ figures – because they are so easy to massage or falsify.

So ‘let’s be clear about this’, as politicians like to say, 13 years of New Labour has made dishonesty commonplace, produced no improvement at all….and cost a fortune. Sounds like a summary of the Party’s effect on the UK as a whole, but what of that last point: how much has all this standing still (and sitting around) cost us?

We start with the £21billion completely written off by Patricia Hewitt’s failure to connect for health. (The official figure was £13 billion, but The Slog was shown figures in 2008 completely dwarfing that estimate).

In his book Squandered, management consultant David Craig uses official data to show that New Labour has spent £270 billion more on health – a real increase of 87% – compared to the previous Conservative administration. (The Government openly boasts of having done so).

And thanks to Gordon Brown’s off-balance-sheet PFI accounting disaster, the Treasury gnomes inform me that NHS debt to private construction companies has just passed £80 billion…and still climbing….despite the fact that half the things they built are falling down already.

So £360 billion later, the very patient patient has enjoyed no improvement at all. The taxpayer has been ripped off by private business. And enough money to reduce the National Debt tomorrow (and wipe out the annual deficit at a stroke) has been casually urinated into the sewers of Whitehall.

The Government has pledged to repay half the UK’s debt by 2014. But New Labour doesn’t do repay: it just does spend. You judge for yourselves what the chances of them meeting that 2014 target would be. And be relieved that they won’t be power to miss it.

ANALYSIS: A SHORT HISTORY OF BALLS

Ed Balls is very good at pointing the finger at fantasy bogeymen,

and pretty appalling on every other criterion.

Some of this you may have read before, and some of it will (I suspect) be new to you. It may well all be academic, as either the electors in his constituency or the Anyone But Gordon tendency in the Labour Party will do for Ed soon enough – almost certainly before he can do any more harm to the plight of mothers and children in the UK.

But just as some media relish the chance to say somebody they don’t like ‘has a history of mental illness’, so with Ed we can easily evidence a history of balls. Did you know that:

* The root-and-branch Socialist tub-thumper went to a private boys school in Nottingham

* He’s yet another Oxymoron – studied PPE at Keble

* While there, he joined both the Labour and Tory associations. “I was there from 1984-87, and at that time Ed Balls was also a member of OUCA,” says Philip Hollobone, a contemporary, “It was well before he was famous, but I was secretary for one term and distinctly recall the name”.

* Having used the depth of ‘Thatcher cuts’ as a scare tactic in this election, in December 2007 Balls played a different tune when addressing the Daily Mail’s readership: “ she was a role model for women to see that you could reach the highest job” he enthused.

* Ed once told an audience that “ Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to be a woman in our country”. Such perception.



*On the same day he made that speech, Ed predicted “Gordon Brown will overcome his troubles to stage a winning general election comeback”. Such foresight.

* In September 2007, with his wife Yvette Cooper (she is cosily esconced in the neighbouring constituency) Ed was accused of “breaking the spirit of Commons rules” by using MPs’ allowances to help pay for a £655,000 home in north London. It was alleged that they bought a four-bed house in north London, and registered this as their second home (rather than their home in West Yorkshire) in order to qualify for up to £44,000 a year to subsidise a reported £438,000 mortgage under the Commons Additional Costs Allowance. This was despite both spouses working in London full-time and their children attending local London schools.

* Relatively few people are aware of the role that Ed Balls played in the scandal surounding Gordon Brown’s favourite think-tank, The Smith Institute. TSI (named after Labour Leader John Smith) has allegedly been in breach of the charity laws covering party political activity on several occasions.

* Following a Charity Commission investigation initiated by the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics, the board of the Smith Institute ‘charity’ had to resign.

* In the year between leaving the Treasury as Brown’s Special Adviser and becoming an MP, Ed Balls was paid close to £89,000 to write just 2 (two) pamphlets for the Smith Institute.

Ed Balls is an idiot, but it’s good to know that we are also parting company with an MP who is a corrupt, bandwagon-jumping, double-standards hypocrite from the same tired old elite that has been busy ruining Britain since the 1970s.

Cameron prettier, Clegg the winner

I’d say “it’s obviously me”, but I don’t think it is: I think that, once again, it’s the media.

‘Thrilling finale to big debate’ warbled The Times this morning. Thrilling?

But anyway, here’s some evidence that backs us, not the media: the viewing figures between the first and second debates more than halved – from 9.9 down to 4.4 million folks variously yawning, groaning and not so much nodding as nodding off. I made it to the end of this one, but the event was awesome in its ability to make one wish there was something better on. Only a strong sense of journalistic duty kept me from watching the third repeat of the Angolan snail Derby over on UKdavegold.com.

The Tory press hailed Cameron as the victor, and the opinion polls seemed to say the same thing at first glance. Well, he didn’t do it for me. When challenged, as the camera cut away to him, the Conservative leader looked every inch the schoolboy having trouble with his algebra. What he didn’t look like was a Prime Minister – whereas sadly, Nick Clegg did.

I say ‘sadly’ because neither he nor Cable have any credibility at all in Whitehall….and especially not at the Treasury. Nevertheless, Clegg remained what he’s been from the start: plausible, and different. And if you look at how floating voters responded, he won hands down. Last in the post-debate beauty contest perhaps – but very effective at what he was trying to do. Cameron has, I’m afraid, spent his whole time preaching to the converted.

As for Brown, the first post-Duffed-up opinion polls show no backlash against Labour – probably suggesting two things: they knew all that about Brown anyway; and the Party is now down to those supporters who would vote for Gaddafi if he was Leader. Having until now looked merely self-serving, Gordon is finally looking self-destructive. And ill.

The TV debates have, said The Times ‘profoundly changed electoral politics forever’. Well, a Newscorp paper would say that (the whole thing was Sky’s idea in the first place) but I would take issue with the suggestion that this has been profound, and the implication that it may have been a force for good. I think it has paved the way for Britain’s Berlusconi – wherever he might be at the moment.

One extremely superficial man representing a confusing rag-tag rainbow of a Party has emerged as having serious credentials for the top job. Thus would be controlling a tricky coalition at a pivotal time in our history. His folksy ‘break up this squabble between the other two children’ style and childish ‘How much? Yes or No?’ aggression belie the fact that he is himself evasive, dissembling and full of himself. He is also a big-State EU trougher, and probably the very last thing Britain needs right now. But then, being the last thing we need is the one measure upon which the three debaters have run a dead-heat – inseparable even by a photo-finish.

EXCLUSIVE: TREASURY MANDARINS ‘UNABLE TO MAKE SENSE

OF LIBDEM MANIFESTO NUMBERS’

Treasury officials at all levels are finding it impossible to relate figures quoted in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto to the money likely to be available, The Slog has learned.

Following the first televised debate and issuance of the three Party policy documents, work was commissioned by the Chancellor’s civil servants to establish the relative costs of the plans outlined in the main Party manifestos. In the middle of last week, The Slog was told by a senior Treasury official that the work on the LibDem figures was ‘lagging behind’. Asked to expand on this, the source told us:

“The Government’s figures are straightforward, and as you’d expect the Conservatives differ from it on strategy….but the only fundamental disagreement between the two is on timing. The problem with the Liberal Democrat plans is that they agree with the Government on the timing of savings, but we can’t make their figures on expenditure and cuts make sense.”

Last night, other sources confirmed this. One in particular confirmed the story run three weeks ago by the London Evening Standard that Vince Cable had been contacted in confidence by Treasury officials, and asked to supply more detailed calculations. The other told us that after the Clegg surge, these figures became a more urgent consideration. We were told:

“There’s been a total failure in Whitehall to understand what the the LibDem manfesto is on about. We certainly now think more highly of Osborne and Darling than we do of Mr Cable, because we can’t make head nor tail of his figures”. Expanding on this, our original source said:

“There are examples of vagueness like ‘prison reform’ and ‘cut cost of politics’ which don’t relate to any existing norms at all. On this basis, if the Government put something in the Budget next year saying ‘do education differently’ we wouldn’t know which way to hold that up either”.

So it seems that, after all, there is an even bigger mystery in the LibDem manifesto than the disappearance of the words ‘proportional representation’.

GREECE: NOW THE TOTAL REQUIRED REACHES 135 BILLION EUROS

German Economic Minister Rainer Brüderle told Der Spiegel that the rescue package for Greece will almost certainly amount to €135 billion over three years, adding, “I can’t rule out the possibility that the amount will be higher.”

In the Daily Telegraph, Edmund Conway suggested that Greek needs of around €100bn over the next few years can only be 20% met by the IMF. The Slog’s enquiries suggest a similar limit. This now really is when push comes to shove.

The Telegraph quotes Hans-Werner Sinn’s observation that Greece is likely to “ask for Germany to waive the debt.” Asked if he believed taxpayers might get their money back, he said, “To tell you the truth, no.” This is probably why – despite a concerted attempt to win the German electorate round over the last week – the latest survey still shows 65% of them ‘implacably opposed’ to the Greek bailout, with just one in seven Germans in favour of it. Confidence in the Euro now stands at a mere 34%.

Responding to this national mood, Angela Merkel said last night that it has been a mistake to admit Greece to the Eurozone. She would only commit to the bailout if Greece undertook further austerity measures. But Andreas Loverdos, Greece’s labour minister, said the Athens government “cannot accept” EU-IMF demands for further wages cuts. So it’s a Mexican stand-off.

However, Athens is in no position to be intransigent. Marketing Greek bonds at the moment is like selling premium gefillte fish in Teheran – and as revealed here last week, world’s biggest sovereign lender PIMCO now rates Greek debt at a level slightly more radioactive than a Chernobyl isotope.

Nick Clegg, meanwhile, is unique among the Prime Ministerial candidate in being as keen as ever to join a currency that is clearly imploding. Poor Nick: his main pension is in that currency,so he has no choice but to talk it up.

WHY GREECE IS ONLY THE BEGINNING: A Plain man’s guide to EU banking madness.

In the Eurozone, any government can finance itself by issuing bonds to commercial banks. These banks can then have those banks borrow, using the bonds as security, at the European Central Bank…..in return for more Euros. The commercial banks do well because the Trichet Toytown charges them very little for those loans, while the governments get lots more money – and carry on living beyond their means.

We are three months now into the Greek meltdown, and Trichet’s ECB still hasn’t done anything about this. In fact, the ECB and the EU put huge pressure on each nation to bail out any commercial banks pulling this stunt which get into trouble. They are, you see, all members of the Bankers’ Amelioration Society, and the needs of this club must never be ignored.

So when new members join the Eurozone, their banks win access to a large amount of cheap financing – knowing that they’ll be bailed out whatever happens. They too can massively expand their balance sheets…in order to lend rashly with poor security to bad credit risks.

Small wonder that, until Greece, everyone wanted to be a member of the Eurozone. And no surprise at all that this insane whirlygig of money, bonds, more money, daft lending and fairytale budgeting is crashing back to earth.

But the commercial banks involved in the Bonds-ECB-Money back alchemy have nothing to fear, even if they’re from outside the Eurozone. For this is only what’s called a ‘carry’ trade. They face no risks – in fact, no consequences – at all.

All aboard for the Flying Circus….

Police force members: Let’s be discreet

If you’re Indonesian and have had your penis extended, you won’t get a job with the police, according to local media reports citing a Papuan police chief.

In future job interviews, each applicant “will be asked whether or not his vital organ has been enlarged,” said Papuan police chief Bekto Suprapto last Friday, adding “If he has, he will be considered unfit to join the police or the military.”

(Reuters)

Unnatural penis-size allegedly causes “hindrance during training,” said police spokesman Zainuri Lubis in Jakarta, quoted by news portal Detik.com. This brings a whole new double-entendre to the words ‘policeman’s truncheon’. In future, police officers will greet each other with a Dixon of Dock Green-style “Wotcher Cock” – and really mean it.

It seems that Papuans use a local technique to achieve biggadick syndrome. According to a sexologist quoted by local newspaper Jakarta Globe, wrapping the penis with leaves from the “gatal-gatal” (itchy) tree makes the male member swell up “like it has been stung by a bee,” the expert said. And – presumably – itchy too.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee – that’s what I say.

THE UKIP ELECTION BROADCAST: OTHER PARTIES TAKE NOTE

Nigel Farage may be a bit of a mealy-mouthed smoothie most of the time – and sound like a ranting nutter part of the time – but the Party he represents could teach a few media lessons to the Big Boys.

I’ve waited and pondered before posting this piece, because the UKIP Election Broadcast gave me mixed feelings – and I needed to work these out. I’m not endorsing Nigel Farage, because I don’t trust the bloke any more than I would any other politician; and because I rather suspect he’s a bit of a berk. But the PPB of earlier this week was by far the best one from any Party in this election so far.

First of all, the set was cheap and the props minimal. Farage sat before a video monitor, talking in a relaxed and seemingly genuine manner. It felt very ‘no shit’ in style. This was a good idea, and reflects the Party’s strapline (‘Straight talking’) perfectly.

Second, there was no weaselly, yes-and-no-perhaps-in-the-event-of drivel. From the outset, all was clear: no more of this, a lot more of that, in this, out of that, this is what we’d do. None of it sounded bonkers. None of it felt like the ‘trying too hard’ stuff the Establishment puts out.

Of course, Parties with no chance of winning can do this kind of thing. But as a former adman, I’d put my shirt on the likelihood that this spot – despite its low-ratings time-slot – got Nigel and his merry men at least another quarter of a million votes. I bet Labour PPBs aren’t getting anything near that: and I persist in predicting that the UKIP vote will be one of the major shocks of this General Election.

UKIP supporters are what David Cameron (who calls them ‘BNP Lite’) and Gordon (‘bigoted woman’) Brown see as the enemy. Why is this? For myself I tend to find the Party’s top wallies just as puffed-up and unpleasant as the so-called mainstream shower. But a lot of their fellow-travellers and grassroots supporters are nothing of the kind: they merely want some justice for those who are quietly prepared to be good citizens.

One such is the Muffled Vociferation blogger Mark Wadsworth. Mark is standing for UKIP in the Uxbridge & South Ruislip constituency. He’s 44 and thus a mere stripling – but what he’s advocating lacks even a scintilla of bigotry. I’d call it hard-headed love for the little guys.

This week Wadsworth was featuring the work of former standup Pat Condell – also a good citizen, although hardly quiet. I first started watching Condell’s YouTube chats years ago when everything online was young. He struck me then (and still does now) as a cut above the norm of foul-mouthed yelling Guido admirers. He presents well, his stuff is rehearsed but natural – and it’s hard to fault anything he says. Is he a former bovver boy racist? I’ve no idea – I just know he makes a lot more sense than Nick Clegg ever will. Generally, he strikes me as a founder-member of the We Can Tell Shit from Putty tendency.

On balance, I’d say the difference between Farage and me is that I’m violently anti-Brussels but enthusiastically pro-Europe. I’m not sure he’d sign up for the second bit of that credo – and that’s what has always worried me about UKIP: the Little Englander syndrome. But blinding oneself to the appeal of the Party is what got them to where they are right now. I salute a professional job well done – and continue to feel that the worst bigots in this election are those who call decent and generally harmless electors bigots.

Pollsters, Big Societies and other Bollocks

“While people like the idea of the big society, they are too busy doing other things to make it happen.”

Ben Page of Ipsos MORI

Apart from getting the result wrong in about half the cases and all the Elections, research companies sometimes seem to go out of their way to be treated like wide-eyed adolescents. Either that, or the above quote from pollster Ben Page was a deliberate attempt to be ironically obvious. Anyway, this corker from Ben made me laugh out loud, and reminded me of the reaction of one witness to a crime I was trying to persuade to testify last Autumn.

“I don’t wanna get involved” said this chap, “but if you wanna clean this town up then I’m very happy for you to do it”.

Thanks like anything, chum. But it is of course what almost everyone’s experience has been in every culture for the last 5000 years: whether exemplified by the Good Samaritan or Gary Cooper in High Noon, a good man is hard to find when the bad guys are coming.

It’s part of research’s job to state the obvious, but I’d feel better about (one of) my former professions if that were merely the precursor to something useful later on in such reports. It certainly wasn’t in this case. Po-faced to the end, the Ipsos Mori study – based on numbers and focus groups – concluded:

‘Large proportions say the public should be more involved in local and national decisions, but only 5 per cent want active involvement and even fewer – perhaps 2 per cent – have actually done so in practice.’

Or put another way, “You jump into the cesspit, and I’ll hold your coat”.

But there are two old and important lessons to learn all over again from this research. The first is ‘watch what people do, not what they say’. This is where a good, intuitive Tory strategist would’ve chucked out The Big Society on day one: apart from the fact that it’s too dense a thought for the knuckle-draggers, it just ain’t what people want to do in their spare time. They might – if the culture hadn’t fixated them on material comforts for the last sixty years – but not if they’re working their knackers off ten hours a day just to stand still. Only sad people want to be Councillors and MPs.

Talking of whom, the second lesson to relearn from these results is that fey, middle-class, starry-eyed and not-quite-real politicians are going to have exactly those kind of ideas. Just as Michael Foot, Bertrand Russell, Lord Longford and his silly niece Harriet Harman entertain potty ideas about human nature on the Left, so too liberals like Blair, Cameron, Dame Joan Bakewell and Nick Clegg can’t get their heads around one simple notion: life’s not like that.

I remember groaning when Tony Blair said he would ‘shame’ feral yobs with ASBO orders. I remember throwing a slipper at the telly when Patricia Hewitt said she expected GPs to use whopping pay rises to invest in their surgeries. And I remember seething when I read some of the NHS buying practices leaked to me by a kind soul in 2008. Each of these could be summed up in the two words ‘utter naivety’.

Please don’t mistake this for cynicism. I’m not your Thomas Hobbes fan, not me. It simply goes back to my mantra: ‘It’s the culture, stupid’. Until the economic aims, familial behaviours, banking practices, closed elites and amoral media are changed by being placed in a culture that isn’t ‘totally relaxed in the company of the filthy rich’, public-spirited and honest folks in public life will remain few and far between. The Frank Millers will ride into town, shoot the sheriff dead…and then ride out again – unmolested by policeman too busy falsifying their crime stats to notice, and lots of townspeople holding coats behind sofas.

FRENCH CREDIT RATING SECURE, SAYS GOVERNMENT WHOSE ESTIMATE OF BENEFIT FRAUD WAS OUT BY A FACTOR OF TEN.

Francois Baroin

France’s credit rating is not at risk, its budget minister Francois Baroin said today. Everyone in Paris is therefore convinced this has become an eventuality. France enjoys a top AAA debt rating, although nobody here is entirely sure why: the annual deficit has been off-limits ever since the Euro’s launch, and it continues to grow steadily. There was little doubt in most official minds earlier this month to whom Angela Merkel was really referring when she mentioned the ‘regular fiscal indiscipline’ of certain members.

M. Baroin told RTL radio that France is still a safe haven for lenders seeking a reliable government borrower, but there is a growing feeling among such lenders that – certainly in the West – reliable government is an oxymoron. In Britain we realised the necessity of treating every Government as utterly unreliable round about 1990, and sovereign lenders are these days equally unwilling to believe much of the fantasy that emerges from european treasuries from time to time.

“Some of us think they just lie” said one to me last week, “but my own view is that they don’t have a clue what’s going on”. So I thought of that person this morning when the Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales announced that their previous benefit-fraud figures had been a gnat’s out here and there.
It seem that the total of all those committing benefit fraud in France is 20 times greater than initial estimates – and the cost to the system is 10 times bigger. They’re both silly-big numbers, but even so the fact that 20 is twice ten suggests that (a) people are ripping off less per head than they thought and/or (b) not many French realise how easy it is to do this on a grand scale and get away with it, or (c) Gallic fraudsters still have a sense of proportion. The report (which estimates that some 200,000 people are being paid benefits to which they are not entitled) was leaked to Le Parisien. Its unsurprising conclusion was that the authorities have a “major problem with detecting fraud”. Or put less politely, civil servants know not the cul from the tete.
Its costing the Tresor Publique €800m a year – which isn’t that much actually. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a similar report into French tax evasion. The average French self-employed worker regards this activity as a national duty, and a way to remind politicians as to the reality of who’s running things.

We should think about doing more of this in England.