Steve Hemingway

At the beginning of the snowy weather I fell over and dropped my phone, the excellent HTC G1 Android phone. It showed now obvious signs of damage, but later it refused to start, and was later pronounced unrepairable by Phone Touch. I therefore decided to buy a replacement. I originally thought about getting another android phone, but I was tempted to try something completely different. After spending far too long reading specifications of all sorts of phones I decided on something completely different, a
The Sony-Ericsson P1i.

This is a complete change of strategy for me as it means that I'll be moving back towards a MS operating system: Windows Mobile. My last two phones were Linux-based: the excellent Motorola A1200 and the even more excellent HTC G1, the latter being an Android version. I am not sure whether Windows Mobile has a future, but with the price of the P1i much less than half the price of a high-quality hardware phone with Android I couldn't resist.

My main concern is that I can get Google Sync to work. I have found Google Calendar on the Android phone by far the most useful feature of a smart phone. If this works and I find that I like Windows Mobile the next thing you know you'll see me installing Windows 7 over Ubuntu on my laptop!

In the old days the excuse used to be 'I was on holiday at the time'. Now we have mobile phones this doesn't work. The current favourite seems to be the 'administrative error'. This is the defence used by Zac Goldsmith in Unicorn Gate. The mainstream media seem to be buying the line that the cheques from Unicorn had 'From Zac Goldsmith' written on them. This seems totally implausible as (i) there's no obvious place on a cheque to write messages like this and (ii) nobody under 70 makes payment by cheque any more, certainly in London where the post is so unbelievably unreliable.

Of course, administrative errors are not restricted to the Conservatives. In the Cleanergate scandal the argument was that Lady Scotland had examined Loloahi Tapui's passport and satisfied that her work permit was in order but that she failed to make and file photocopies, that being simply an administrative error. This sounds forgivable enough until you realize that Ms Tapui's passport has never had a valid work permit and that for Lady Scotland's story to be true it is necessary to believe that Ms Tapui went to the effort to have a fake passport produced, with the permit, simply for the purpose of getting a six-pounds and hour job legally, as opposed to working as a cash-in-hand cleaner of the sort that regularly advertise in post offices and newsagents in most suburban areas.

I spend a lot of time keeping records in order to complete my various tax returns (personal and a couple of small company returns). I am pretty sure I don't miss much, but I doubt if the tax inspector would accept a plea of "it's only an administrative error" if I left out any income. But I guess the tax inspector will guess that I will not put in a call to the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he gives me any grief.

We all loved The West Wing. Apart from anything else it was a wonderful change from police procedurals, whodunnits, and the staples of TV drama. The dialogue was fast-paced and funny, and you felt that you got a glimpse of what really went on behind the scenes - the horse-trading and log-rolling and kow-towing to lobbyists.

But as the sainted Juliette points out in this blog entry, the TV series paints a wholly implausible picture of what goes on in the real whitehouse. The character of Josh Bartlett owes more to The Waltons than any real-life president of the modern era.

I suppose that TWW is entertainment, not education, and that on balance it's better to have an idealised image of what happens in the White House than none at all, but I fear that, as always, youngsters who decide to go into politics because they imagine that it's like TWW are destined for a terrible disappointment. I suppose this is a common fate for politicians and explains why they so often turn to drink. At least there are a lot of nice, subsidized bars in the Houses of Parliament.

There is a predictable outcry for banning Islam4UK, a bunch of nutcases who want to draw attention to the number of good Muslims who are killed by Our Boys in Afghanistan. What on earth would we gain by banning this organisation? I think we lose a lot by publicising it heavily, especially on the BBC. It must have a lot of name recognition now, and by facing a ban it will attract the sympathy of those who distrust the state.

It will be impossible to ban a march specifically by this organisation. Therefore if a ban is to be enacted it will have to be drafted in more generic terms. This inevitably opens up the possibility that the ban will apply to another protest, about a cause which hasn't even arisen yet, which you and I will support strongly.

This is always the problem with opposing laws which restrict freedom. Very often the freedom that is being lost applies to actions that we haven't even conceived of yet. It is hard to organise a rally to support the right to do something we haven't even thought of doing yet, but little by little the sorts of authoritarian laws that recent governments love enacting are eroding fundamental freedoms.

Americans are more aware of the dangers posed, and always hope that their constitution will protect them. Their problem is that the framers of their constitution never conceived of the things that are being banned now, leaving unelected lawyers and supreme court judges to make these vital decisions.

I regularly get called up by mysterious salesmen offering wealth beyond the dreams of avarice if only I will sign up to their brokerage and start trading on the wonderful research they will give me.

I just spoke to Matthew Taylor of Finsoul.com. He was offering tax-free investment, offshore trading, between my repeated attempts to bat him away. I think I am just too polite even to cold-calling reptiles like him.

Anyway, it's interesting to see that this operation has jumped on the Big Green Bus of companies that are working to save the planet. I suspect that a lot of fraud will be conducted under the auspices of environmental responsibility. Not that I would suggest that Finsoul are remotely fraudulent, although I may change my mind if they call me back on Tuesday as they have promised.

There are a lot of articles around saying how scandalous the behaviour of bankers has been. This is one of the better ones.

There is a massive barrier to entry into banking, erected largely by the FSA and similar regulatory agencies around the world. Although bankers complain in public about these agencies, in private they congratulate themselves and their politician stooges for enacting the legislation that give rise to these agencies. Ostensibly these agencies exist to protect the public. In practice they exist to make it prohibitively expensive for entrepreneurs to start up new banks and break into the industry.

The result of this barrier to entry is supranormal profits. Profits beyond the normal costs, including the cost of capital. These supranormal profits accrue to the scarce resource. Normally this would be the shareholders, the owners. Increasingly these are not rewarded, because the gatekeepers to these profits are the managers. In theory the board is the agent of the shareholders, but since they face essentially no incentive to provide more return than shareholders can get investing in other similarly risky assets, the residue is kept by them.

Financing costs for banks are in any case much lower than any other firm because of their special relationship with the central bank, and because savers have few choices when it comes to finding an investment that guarantees (courtesy of the government) a full return of capital.

Sadly the only solution to this problem of excess rewards to bank boards is to treat banks no differently to other enterprises, as described here. Unfortunately our leaders, and the population as a whole, have been mesmerized, to use the apposite word coined by Simon Jenkins, into thinking that such an approach to regulating banks would be suicidally reckless.

Until we resolve the problem of the power of the bankers we are, I fear, doomed to follow the exact path trodden by Japan, in the two decades since it's financial crisis of 1992.

I love peanuts and peanut products. My mother is the same. When I used to commute into London I would often run down to the station in Knebworth clutching a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Now I like nothing better than to have a nice piece of wholemeal toast spread with a mixture of Vegemite (first) and peanut butter (probably Waitrose own brand, but not essentially). At a pinch I will use Marmite in place of Vegemite, but it's not the same.

I love salted roasted peanuts, and I will enthusiastically eat any confection involving peanuts and chocolate. MarathonSnickers Bar.... mmmm!

I have, however, never been a convert to peanut brittle. The combination of glassy, filling-destroying hard toffee and peanuts has never much appealed to me. This is until I discovered Gourmet Buttery Peanut Brittle from Virginia Diner, courtesy of my wife's relative, Jim Pullen, resident of Fredericksburg, VA. This is the most delicious peanut butter I have ever tasted. The salty sweetness blends perfectly with the peanuts, which are present in the perfect proportion for satisfying crunchiness.

I am not capable of describing the taste of this stuff in a way that will remotely communicate its deliciousness to you. If you love peanuts you will love this stuff. Please ask to taste some if you drop by, but you'll have to be quick - I have only one pound of it and I do not have the willpower that would allow me to ration its consumption.

Much of politics today is theatre. Politicians are like actors, saying their carefully-learned lines, never willing to ad-lib for fear of being ridiculed. I really wonder what the point of all these staged enquiries and commissions that tell us absolutely nothing, but keep the mainstream media news machines fed with 'news' that is nothing but stale re-hashing of old stories.

The Prime Minister told MPs: 'I think it is right to have run a large deficit. I think it has been essential for us to have the recovery that is necessary for the economy.

Read more: here.

I have had the good fortune to be related to some people, particularly Guy Yeomans Hemingway, who produced the Hemingway Family History in the 60's, helped by my dear friend Geoff Dart. This gives an idea of what it is about.

Kathie put some effort in researching our immediate family at St Katharine's House in the 80's, when all the records were still in dusty files. I combined this information in a GEDCOM file, which has gathered its own virtual dust on my hard disk ever since. I posted it to RootsWeb, here.

I am extremely bad and lazy about data. Once I get a piece of code working, I always think that it is simply for users to sort out the data. As far as I was concerned, the best way of doing this was in something like a wiki, where everyone who was remotely interested could create and monitor their own leaf of the tree. I looked around at the options for this and eventually decided that the cheapest option was phpGedView. I was slightly hesitant about getting it installed on my web server as my days as a serious programmer/administrator are well behind me. However I discovered that a combination of beautiful coding on the part of the developers, and excellent web-based administration screens provided by my hosting company, pair.com meant that I could get the interactive Hemingway family tree up and running in an absurdly short time.

Really it's only interesting if (i) you are related to the individuals on it and (ii) created as an individual user by me. I can't do anything about (i) but I can certainly sort out (ii). Just email me at steve.hemingway@gmail.com and I'll set you up. I think that you can just send a message to the administrator via the hosted tree as an alternative to sending me an email, but I can't see why you would want to do that.

While I am writing this I should own up to damaging the tree. I somehow tried to merge in a couple of incompatible trees of the Pullen/Palmer/Verrall/Houde families, which resulted in some awful confusion. Because I am only extremely distantly related to these families I have never bothered to invest the time to sort things out. Please help!

I have always wondered about the relationship between Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and Gordon Brown. Why on earth did Tony, who had the power to sack Brown, put up with this maniac for so long? How did an unelected tabloid hack come to have such a Rasputin-like power over the prime minister for so long?

Somebody, who shall remain nameless, explained it to me last night. He said that the problem was that (i) Tony had such shallow roots in the Labour party he felt obligated to Brown who a native-born member of the Labour tribe and that (ii) Tony was a brilliant public face of the party, but basically was incapable of imposing his will on colleagues and therefore was completely dependent on Campbell to do it for him.

This is consistent with the portrayal I've seen in 'The Thick of It' and will explain why Blair repeatedly gave power to people like John Prescott despite any evidence of an ability to run a department or communicate effectively. I suppose most of you are wondering why on earth it has taken me so long to understand this. Well, I have always found it very hard to understand why politicians behave as they do, and, in particular why their observed behaviour is so often at odds with their stated goals.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths University Enterprise Network. So now you know. You can find out more at stem-uen.org.

The idea of a UEN is to strengthen links between universities and industry and to promote entrepreneurship. Yes, it is a quango and as such has a lot of equality, diversity and inclusiveness rhetoric.

Currently the website is fairly sparse, but it's likely to collect a lot more content in the coming months.

This article by Jamie Whyte explains why it is such a bad idea for the state to interpose itself between willing producers and consumers, but also why the structure of politics makes it impossible for politicians not do exactly that. As Whyte says Alas, there is no prospect of an end to this waste, even if politicians understood it. When invisible costs are incurred for the sake of visible benefits, a politician will never consider them too great..

Terry Arthur, the author of an IEA estimate of the magnitude of this deadweight cost puts it at two-thirds of the value of tax collected, or, well over half a trillion pounds by my calculations. It seems astonishing that the bulk of those commenting on this article seem to think that this is a price well worth paying to avoid the cash nexus. This is typical of the responses:Human life has many "irrational" qualities that you ignore at your peril. Wives don't "pay" husbands to remain loyal fathers, Children don't "pay" parents to cook their meals for them. Friends don't "pay" each other for their company. Surely given the recent calamities it is clear that the gross simplification and standardization that has been brought into the understanding of human society needs to be radically changed, and that the "science" of economics needs to redefine what it can and cannot do. Then again, asking for humility and depth from a economists is like asking for an apology from a banker: a little futile..

So far so familiar. What is deeply depressing are the comments on Whyte's article. Even though this is the Times, not the Guardian or even the Morning Star the authors of the comments seem to believe that what is right and appropriate in a family environment (providing for other family members without the promise or receipt of payment) can be scaled up to work at the level of the state. Hayek called this "The Fatal Conceit". Sadly it appears to be as widespread and strongly held as ever.

I used to work for a big bank, and my manager had the idea of taking his team on various physical activities, walking around islands near Singapore carrying heavy backpacks. It didn't really work because some of us were reasonably fit and others were terribly unfit. Therefore the experience varied from being a stroll in the park for some, to an exhausting endurance trial for others. This simply did not cause us to bond. To be fair to the guy who organised this event, he was an excellent manager, something extremely rare in the banking or in IT, and the experience probably did produce some subset bonding.

This article shows bad it could have been. A group were practically cooked alive by a management guru. Almost nobody believes that management gurus are any better than corporate witchdoctors. Lucy Kellaway has practically made a career of mocking their pompous idiocy in her weekly column in the Financial Times. But still there are managers out there who think it's a good idea to steal their staff's leave in order to subject them to what is, for some, ritual humiliation.

Thanks to Flip Chart Fairy Tales for the lead.

This article by the evergreen Samuel Brittan shows how bad we have been hit in the UK. On a reasonable estimate, UK production is now down ten percent compared to where it would be if we had sustained the very modest 2.6% pa growth that it is estimated is consistent with non-accelerating inflation. Per capita real incomes are obviously worse affected than this since the population is clearly not dropping, whatever stories the government puts out about eastern Europeans all flooding back to Poland and the Baltic States.

A couple of years ago many commentators invoked Hyman Minsky as a guide to what we should do. As I understand his work, we cannot escape the bad effects of recessions without a large public sector to provide the 'automatic stabilizers' which maintain demand that would otherwise wither. I don't think any economist would argue against the dire effects on productivity that results from having the government account for so much (55%) of total spending in the economy. I think the massive damage to our output shows that this is a price not worth paying.

Of course, politicians are not interested in this sort of analysis. Spending other people's money to buy votes is just what they do.

This article explains how US drones operating in Afghanistan are having their unencrypted signals picked up by the Taliban for the cost of a satellite dish and a $26 piece of software.

It is typical that electronic hardware developed, typically at unbelievable cost, for the military has lower functionality than you can buy in your local branch of PC World. Who would, these days, not bother to encrypt his wireless router with at least WEP if not WPA?

Years ago I remember talking to someone who designed printed circuit boards for a living. He explained that the boards that were being used for military satellites were a generation or two behind boards in the then-current production of mobile phones. As Adam Smith observed, the bigger the demand for a product, the cheaper it is produced. Our image of a supply-demand curve is that as the quantity demanded goes up so does the price. But of course a big demand translates into large volumes of production which then allows the development of more specialisation and investment in production equipment. To hand-craft a cheap modern car would cost millions, even using current metal working equipment. Because there is huge production there can be whole factories devoted to production of the tiniest component which then is available at fantastic quality for very low price.

Thanks to FGH for alerting me to the drone story.

An elderly relative who lived with us died recently. I am his executor and have been informing various organisations of his demise. One of these is the TV Licensing Authority. Initially I just went onto the website to buy myself a licence, but this seemed to want to backdate my application into the distant past.

I decided to take my chances of using the telephone. I just loathe calling about this sort of thing as I usually have to spend far longer than I would by using a website or sending an email or a letter. However I was able to give the current licence number to a helpful chap who said that I will not need to buy a licence until October when the current one runs out. This current one was valid for 3 years, so if my elderly relation had delayed dying until October I might have got a free licence until late in 2013.

Obviously this is nice for me, but it seems a bit unfair to millions of other licence holders. Frankly, the whole idea of giving old people free stuff is generally just a little bribe to keep them onside, as the stuff is not actually free, but just paid for by all the people who don't get the bribe (younger licence payers in this case).

The TV Licence is just a regressive hypothecated tax. I would happily pay the same sum to access the BBC's output but the compulsory nature of the charge just leads to the usually thuggery and bullying. If you don't believe me, take a look at this site.

The triumph of the Median Voter Theorem means that politicians no longer attempt to capture our votes by offering distinctive policies. They are therefore forced to distinguish themselves in other ways, by presenting themselves as less dishonest, better looking, more empathetic, or more sexually athletic for example.

Now we are into the an election campaign we are getting the same old tricks. Gordon Brown has captured the headlines by crying in the middle of his carefully scripted interview with Piers Morgan. Presumably Gordon was persuaded about this cynical act of exploitation of his dead child by none other than Alistair Campbell, who has been doing a bit of prime-time crying himself although presumably in his case it's just so that he can keep his name and face in the headlines to maximize his future income as a pundit, rather than in an attempt to get himself elected.

As in any branch of showbusiness, publicity is everything, which is why politicians need to spend so much of their energy on keeping the press on board. Piers Morgan himself, in his autobiography, was astonished at how often he was invited to lunch by Tony Blair when he was prime minister, and speculated how often his counterpart in the politically more important Sun would have been invited around to 10 Downing Street for tea and biscuits. It somehow seems very appropriate that Morgan's background is as a showbiz correspondent.

The result of all this is that we'll end up with more and more politicians that look and sound good delivering sound bites on TV, and less and less good at understanding the economy. I am not hopeful, but there are a lot of mordant bloggers around who have seen through this charade who, eventually, might have an impact on how people vote. I am not holding my breath though!

Nobody can be a reader of Private Eye for as long as I have and think that UK libel law is anything other than an abominatio. There is now an organised campaign to get it reformed. I urge you to sign now here.

This post by the brilliant Charles Crawford says it all better than I can and has links to background info, if you are interested.

This post should be X-rated as this is truly the scariest man to have lived in Britain in the last 100 years. I stole the image from this post, which is from a blog written by someone who is probably certifiable, but just might have spotted something that the rest of us have missed. Thanks for Jackart for the lead.

Austin Mitchell is the only Labour MP whose blog is in my blogroll. He's old and ill, and held in complete contempt by NuLab and its acolytes. His blogging is less frequent and scrappier now, but he does continue to speak truth unto The Net.

This post makes a very valid point: that if Tony had got his way and we entered the Eurozone ten years ago, our economy would now be completely screwed. What he does not say, however, is that in order to get out of this mess we're going to have devalue the currency and have a raging dose of inflation. This will save the economy, but only by sacrificing the savings of the old and the middle class, but since when did Gordan care a damn about them?

The experience of Sweden with free schools is positive, in spite of attempts by the BBC to claim the opposite.

Stevenage has some rubbishy schools. The New Schools Network is a new charity which is being set up to take advantage of the Gove proposals. Maybe, just maybe, now is the time to establish a decent school for Knebworth kids, other than the appalling proposals put forward by Judith Pomeroy.

This might happen, but clearly there are a lot of vested interests which will be opposed to it.

This article is well worth careful reading. There are plenty of exegeses of this around, e.g. this one by Andrew Green of Migration Watch.

I suppose the official line is that this is a nonsensical conspiracy theory. However, nobody has refuted it. It certainly seems plausible-enough to me, although even I am reluctant to accept the Green explanation at face value.

This story is hardly covered in the MSM, and, when it is, is treated with kid gloves, as you'd expect this kind of topic to be treated. As opposed to this article which dives in with both feet.

The Olympic movement has noble origins, and undoubtedly gives some good publicity to minor sports that otherwise would get very little. When else would we be glued to the TV to watch a curling event?

However, the cost has been getting alarmingly out of control. The cost of the Beijing games is of course a state secret, but has been estimated at around $50 billion. This is a lot of money even for a country as rich as China, and translates into a lot of rice that could otherwise be eaten by starving peasants.

Of course, nobody likes to be heard saying at the Olympic Games are rubbish. It's even as unacceptable as saying that the Paralympic Games are an embarrassment. The games are a perfect event for politicians, national and local, and media types, to get a free holiday at the taxpayers expense. Martin Lewis would definitely approve because, because of the extraordinary sums spent on preparations and security, the games are stage micro-managed to ensure that they produce only Good News.

Politicians always argue that the games bring in extra revenue in the form of tourism, even though the evidence is that real tourists actively avoid going to a country at the time that the games are taking place. Certainly the games are a perfect excuse for hotels and airlines to hugely increase their prices, but their windfall must be largely offset by low numbers. I was actually in Beijing at the time of the last games and the cost of accommodation had indeed increased around tenfold compared to normal. What I found amazing though was that hotel occupancy in the city was, during the period of the games, less than forty percent of normal. I am confident that during the London games we'll see a similar exodus of normal tourists from the City, to be replaced by a smaller, but infinitely better funded, members of the political class.

It is interesting to consider what long-term benefits accrued to Greece after its hosting of the Olympics in 2004. This article, written at the time, predicted that it would all end in tears: how prescient this now seems as we watch the collapse of the Greek economy brought about by its government's inability to get control of costs. One thing that is a racing certainty is that the London Olympics will cost many times more than the original budget, e.g. here. Don't forget that the original forecast cost to the public purse was a mere 3.4 billion pounds!

There is clearly a lot of resentment about 'Dave' Cameron following closely in the footsteps of his hero, 'Tony' Blair. His 'A List' of candidates which are imposed on local constituency associations shows that his support for the idea that MPs should be representatives of the local constituencies is only skin deep.

As ever, the Telegraph can be relied upon to dig the dirt. You can read all about it here.

The Conservative Home article written by Cash defending AWS (all women shortlists) is here. It is a dismally weak argument, and unites Cash with Blair in an implicit assumption that meritocracy, a word invented by Michael Young, is a desirable thing. What is encouraging is that the mass of comments on this mediocre essay are strongly opposed to Ms Cash's view. It is ironic that she calls for meritocracy but, clearly, is a candidate only because her husband was a school friend of 'Dave'.

Mervyn King is telling us not to worry about inflation. The argument is that the economy is so shot that there's loads of spare capacity and that output can be increased without any increase in marginal costs.

Capitalists@Work agree with Mervyn. It would be a foolish investor who bets against these economic forecasting heavyweights. On the other hand, I seem to remember that that another economic forecasting heavyweight, by the name of Dr Alan Greenspan, was forecasting, a few years before the financial crisis, that we'd entered a new paradigm in which we could experience a permanently plateau of high, non-inflationary growth.

Wat Tyler has a bit of an idée fixe about this. He blogged about it again today, here. He is very convincing to me, but unfortunately not to the market. The gilt market barely reacted to the inflation figures. However, more and more people seem to be saying that a purging does of inflation is the least bad option facing the government. Personally I think there is a better than even chance that the coming five years will resemble the 70's more than the 90's.

John Naughton's excellent article explains why we don't want more of our data on government-run databases. Unfortunately the famous NHS Spine is now being populated. At huge expense everyone in this are is being sent a letter about what are now called 'Summary Care Records'. Basically these are the initial attributes to be populated in what is destined to be a comprehensive, centrally-held medical record.

The system is appallingly designed, lacking even a mechanism to delete a wrong record.

Predictably my PCT is making it as difficult as possible for patients to exercise their legal right to opt out of the system. They vaguely say that the form for opting out from the system can be downloaded from their website, but the search facility in the website itself, and google fails to locate any reference to any opt-out of the summary care record. I did find the relevant form on the Stock NHS PCT site (here). The form itself needs to be downloaded, printed out, filled in with a pen and posted to your local GP. An natural and elegant solution that you would expect to find in a state-of-the-art database system.

Seriously, please at least think carefully whether you wish to express your passive support for one of the gleaming jewels in Tony Blair's legacy.

View Locations of Democracy Club events TONIGHT. All welcome in a larger map

Read all about it here.

Three white-collar convicts are chatting over their daily prison meal.

"What are you guys in for?" asks convict one.

"I set my prices too low and was convicted of predatory pricing" says convict two.

"Funny, my prices were higher then my competition and they hit me with monopoly pricing" says convict three.

"Ha! My prices were exactly the same as my competitors and they threw the book at me for collusion" says convict one in response.

This is a joke shamelessly stolen from the What the Hell do I Know? blog.

Basically, the argument is that there is no evidence that "competition authorities" have ever actually done any good in terms of levelling the playing field between producer and consumer. The reason is that cartels and monopolies naturally implode as economic rents attract the interest of firms in different industries, and different countries. Of course trade barriers in the form of tariffs slow down this process, and heavy regulation of the industry within a country also does. Clearly, in the case of services that Google provides, neither of these factors apply.

The political class of course is much more comfortable launching this kind of investigation than one into competition, say, in banking services, or utilities, or telecommunications services, fixed or mobile, or broadband provision, because the management of companies in these industries have taken great care to develop strong relationships with politicians. Did I really say that?

Mark 18th May in your diaries as George Hamilton IV is performing in Knebworth Village Hall for one night only. He will incorporate songs (his hits and familiar titles) alongside conversation. He is a great historian and will talk about some aspects of Americana.

You can read more about George on his website. Like all the up-and-coming stars he also has a MySpace page.

I will update this page with details of the event when I receive them.

This event is promoted by Tony Byworth of Knebworth.

A tax on FX (and possibly other) financial transactions is spectacularly bad. Generally all new taxes are bad, as at least the winners and losers from the old taxes have their gains and losses capitalised and stable. This article from the TPA is the most comprehensive demolition job I've come across, but generally every serious article that has been written about it has concluded that it is a unusually bonkers idea.

I know that Milton Friedman made some comment about the fact that he'd never seen a tax cut that he didn't like, and that reducing taxes had the effect of 'starving the beast' (of big government). I don't think that even he would have argued for a government that didn't raise tax for defence and the administration and enforcement of the law. My personal view is that most transfer payments (which, strictly speaking, are not government spending at all) are justified, and these are going to be a big part of spending for a long time to come.

We already have a tax on transactions: stamp duty. This is a disastrous tax, which John Major, when he was chancellor, promised to abolish. So much for promises made by politicians - from the Right or the Left. Sadly, I notice that some Tories are in favour of the tax. Once upon a time the Conservative Party wanted a smaller state.

On this day in 1968 this article appeared about how the Reorganisation Commission Marketing Board had decided that the Egg Marketing Board must go. It had been set up in 1957 and in fact clung on until 1971. The idea was to protect egg producers, and consumers, from instability in egg prices by regulating and controlling production of eggs.

I don't think that many people now regret its demise. Certainly egg production in the UK has not been a model of good practice, but it seems to me that the eggs we buy are of good quality and reasonable price. There are concerns about how healthy they are, which didn't exist in 1968, so much so that it would be illegal to use the 'Go to Work on an Egg' slogan which, apart from the little lion stamped on the eggs, is the only thing that people remember about the Board.

It's quite rare to see a story like this. Once a quango gets established it is very hard to get rid of it. The big losses experienced by the few (the employees) trump the tiny individual gains which would be experienced by the many (the consumers of eggs). However, in this case, somehow, the many prevailed. In a similar way the Milk Marketing Board went the same way. Interestingly this all happened when a Labour government was in power. Three cheers for Harold Wilson!

NHS doctors, like doctors everywhere, are not infallible. They make mistakes. In the USA they are damn careful to avoid making mistakes because they could be sued for millions and then find that they are uninsurable, and hence unemployable, for ever afterwards.

The NHS is not like that because, generally speaking, the doctors are part of the state apparatus that should ensure good practice. It's in nobody's interest to rock the boat, especially politicians who want us to believe that the NHS is the envy of the world (and of course fantastic value: a snip at a mere 110 billion pounds per year).

It's "the closest thing that the British have to a national religion" (N Lawson), so newspapers are loath to criticise it. However, the fact is that people die every day through bad decisions and diagnoses made by NHS employees. We should at least be told, because I believe that we are grown-up to be told the truth. It is quite possible that these errors are an acceptable price. I would be that last to suggest that it is worth spending enough to ensure that not a single life is lost or ruined through NHS failure, but we do need the debate.

Before you make up your mind, you might like to look at the National Death Service, a blog devoted to pointing out the cases when the NHS screws up.

I should declare an interest. My mother had bad abdominal pains, loss of appetite and a feeling of nausea. She went to a local GP and was diagnosed as having indigestion and prescribed an anti-emetic and Gaviscon. A few days later she collapsed, was admitted to hospital where she was found to have a tumour the size of a grapefruit blocking her colon. Fortunately, because she was operated on immediately, she survived and is now symptom-free. But only because she had a lucky break.