There appears to be a small nugget of truth to this story, but it has been exaggerated.

One does not build a hospital overnight (at least I hope one doesn’t), so the 2005 General Election figures are irrelevant to the number of hospitals built over the last decade. Compared to the 1997 results, the picture is somewhat different:

Labour: 418 MPs (63%) and 33 hospitals (70%)
Conservatives: 165 MPs (25%) and 10 hospitals (21%)
Lib Dems: 46 MPs (7%) and 2 hospitals (4%)

In other words, Labour is indeed over represented, and the trend increases if you take into account the 2001 election results, but not by terribly much. Once you factor out the fact that Labour has the lion’s share of seats, it doesn’t add up to much. If the whole system of where to build hospitals were conducted entirely at random, you might very well end up with a similar result.

The article also does not make it clear what areas those 5 remaining ‘cross-party’ hospitals cover. If they are predominantly Lib Dem/Tory areas (Cornwall for example), then the trend is even less significant. While Labour would remain slightly over-represented, the Lib Dem and Tory areas might not be under-represented at all.

Nice try Andrew Lansley, but I’m not convinced.

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Grant Shapps is frequently cited as one of the Tories’ brightest of bright young hopes, but if this is anything to go by, I wouldn’t get too breathless just yet.

Access to IVF on the NHS is a lottery, with different areas adopting different rules, an MP says.

…

Mr Shapps, whose own three children were conceived through IVF, said that PCTs were, to some extent, “playing God” - deciding who had the right to a child and who did not, based largely on the state of the PCTs’ annual budgets and deficits.

He explained: “Couples are effectively being told that they cannot have a baby while their friends on the other side of the street, who might have a similar set of circumstances, are able to obtain three cycles of IVF provided for them by the NHS.”

All of this may well be so, but how exactly does this square with Gideon Osborne’s plea yesterday about being “disciplined and responsible with public money.” It might not be a nice thing for people wanting IVF to hear, but the cost of offering fertility treatment universally on demand would be exhorbitant. In a debate about spending priorities, it is always going to lose out.

The solution is not offering universal health care, but accountability over local health budgets: replacing a postcode lottery with postcode choice. I thought the Tories were headed in that direction, but Shapps has clearly undermined this if it is the case. These sorts of headlines put pressure on governments to tighten the reins, not loosen them.

And as for going on about ‘playing God’ - IVF - healthcare for that matter - IS playing God! IVF has created a world whereby infertility is literally a death sentence in poor countries (no children means no-one to look after you in old age), and largely avoidable in the West. Invoking theology is lazy, kneejerk populism that dismisses the no doubt very real ethical dilemmas that healthcare managers have to face on a daily basis.

In short, Shapps has added nothing to the public forum apart from his own name. It looks like crusading politics, but I doubt he would ever want a government to rise to his challenge.

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So police warning letters are more effective than ASBOs, eh? The problem is, they don’t sound very sexy. Or tough. Got to be tough.

I think John Reid should rebrand them as “Police Instruction Missive Actions” and set a “tough” target for all policy authorities to send out as many as possible. Of course, renaming them must surely require primary legislation, so expect a new Criminal Justice Act detailing exactly what font size to use and how they should be worded to be tabled soon.

Hurrah! All crime has now been solved.

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Michael Lyons has just published his latest report on local government. It makes heartening reading for those of us who are not just in favour of the rhetoric of localism but the substance as well. Read it and champion it before Tony Blair and Gordon Brown catches sight of it and attempt to bury down a very deep hole.

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Don Foster’s press release on the BBC today caught my eye:

Ahead of Tuesday’s anticipated publication of the BBC White Paper, Don Foster MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary today warned the Government against a TV licence fee ’smash and grab’.

Don Foster MP said:

“The White Paper must rule out a TV licence fee ’smash and grab’.

“Government (i.e. tax payers) - not TV licence fee payers (i.e. tax payers) - should pay for Labour’s policy of a switch to digital TV (does this mean the Lib Dems oppose a switch to digital TV?!), and if Government introduces ’spectrum charging’ for broadcasters, licence fee payers shouldn’t foot the bill.

“Together these charges would be nothing short of a £600m stealth tax.

On the move to Manchester:

“The Government must ensure that the regeneration benefits from the BBC’s move to Manchester are paid for by regional authorities (What regional authorities? Local authorities or RDAs? Which?) not TV viewers nationwide. (I thought the move was about saving money by moving out of London? If this policy leads to a long term easing of pressure on the license fee, then surely it is reasonable that the short term costs come out of it as well?)

On governance:

“The White Paper must also make good Government promises that the regulation and oversight of the BBC be separated.

“In an ever more competitive broadcasting market it is crucial that the regulators of the BBC are not also the flag-wavers for the BBC.” (Fair enough, but 1 out of 3 ain’t good enough)

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Evidence has been dribbling in that Sure Start is not merely failing to help but is actually hindering the most vulnerable families in deprived areas.

This is a difficult one, and Lisa Harker is correct to say that it is too early to make any pronouncements on the scheme’s relative success or failure. However, Tim Worstall is also correct to point this out:

Wondrous. It’s all so difficult to measure that we’ll never know so we’d better keep spending money on it.

Thanks for that Lisa.

The problem with this scheme is that it is a classic case of national government trying to do local government’s job. Lisa Harker is keen to emphasise how each local Sure Start is profoundly different from the next, but why are national funds being spent on a scheme that is essentially uncoordinated?

Wouldn’t it be better to give local government the clout to be able to set up its own schemes (or not) and leave them to evaluate each scheme on its merits? A bit of Darwinian evolution can’t do us any harm here, and local circumstances demand local solutions.

The alternative is that the government will eventually come up with a one-size-fits-all “best practice” which is all but guaranteed to fail as it will inevitably be too inflexible, bound up by targets and red tape and crucially exist to serve the Man in the Ministry not the families on the ground.

This is an area that national government simply cannot succeed, and it shouldn’t even try.

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Okay, so first the government run around shouting about how their new plans will make all state schools independent and self-government. But then they introduce a one-size-fits-all system for teaching literacy? If it’s so good, then why not let the schools - and parents - decide for themselves?

Could you have a better example of Labour’s schizophrenic attitude towards decentralisation?

Oh, actually you can. All you need to look at is the consultation exercise that the party has prepared for its backbenchers to follow in their constituencies, complete with pre-written press release about how local parents are falling over themselves to support the proposals.

(Tip of the hat: Labour Watch, Tim Worstall, Jonathan Calder).

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Welcome to Pant Watch. Pant Watch exists to chronicle the dying days of the Blair administration. Technically, we are now at P-8, P-1 being the day that Steve Bell published this cartoon showing Blair wearing John Major’s pants of power. To be sure, Bell has portrayed Blair as a pant-wearer before, most memorably here, but it would appear that Blair has now acquired something unmistakeably Major-like in his impotence in administration now, as if we have reached, if not the end of the Blair administration, then at least the beginning of the end.

(for more on this by Steve himself, see here)

It would appear however that both the Tory contenders look at Blair’s pants with envious eyes. I mention the Tories here, not simply to make a gratuitous link to that ridiculous story, but because I think a lot of the commentariat has missed a point here.

The story goes that Blair has lost all authority and that his attempts to push through his reforms on health, education and welfare will all be for nothing, that he won’t be able to squeeze a single thing through. Those commentators appear to be missing one very important ingredient; pretty much everything Blair wants to do to health, education and welfare is broadly along the same lines that the Tories want to do as well. Indeed, Cameron has repeatedly emphasised that on a number of issues in the past, the Tories were wrong to oppose Blair.

Cameron is onto a real thing here and even if he doesn’t win the leadership ballot, it may well be that elements of his nascent strategy emerged under Davis anyway. Tactically, the best thing the Tories can do right now is work with Blair on these reforms, partly because it means they get broadly what they want despite not having the prerequisite bums on seats, and partly because it is likely to provoke an unholy civil war within the Labour Party.

How long will it be before Blair wins a vote on a ‘legacy’ issue, with the Tories bolstering him in the face of a major Labour rebellion? It didn’t happen in the case of the terrorism vote, and civil liberties in general, mainly because it wouldn’t wash with the idea of modern conservativism, whichever flavour you choose. Public services are a different matter.

What we could be looking at here is the beginning of an informal Grand Coalition, which has the potential to develop into a more formal arrangement after the next General Election. It would inevitably be more problematic for Labour than the Tories, but it would also be in Labour’s interests, or at least the Blairite-reformist wing that forms the majority of MPs. It is surely only a matter of time before they realise that a marriage with a rebranded, modern Conservative Party is preferable to one with Old Labour. Meanwhile, any Tory who can count - and I understand there are a few - is all too aware that however well they do over the next few years, they can’t form a majority in the Commons (pdf). Their future will either be spent in the wilderness or in coalition, and it is unlikely that the ‘natural party of government’ will choose the wilderness.

Many Labour supporters will snort in derision at this, but this is the precisely the corner that Tony Blair has got them in. This is the danger of triangulation, especially when the people at the top end up believing it. Abandon ‘modernisation’ and you open up ground for the Tories to capture. Stick with it and you will have to rely on the Tories to get everything through.

So even if the current wearer of the pants shuffles off, it may be that his successor finds them freshly pressed on his bed when he enters Number 10 for the first time.

Meanwhile, whoever the Tories choose for leader may find he has the real power in the country. Even David Davis.

Think about that one.

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With apologies to any American readers out there, a couple more notes on my bemusement of the sheer zaniness of British politics:

• The Government pontificating on the need to listen to professionals when it comes to the police, while doing the exact opposite in the far more complicated field of medicine.
• Labour legislating to prevent “losers” in first-past-the-post elections to the Welsh Assembly from also standing in the top up list elections, and calling for similar reforms to be made in Scotland, while simultaneously rewarding one of their most famous losers in this year’s General Election with a life peerage.

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Over at the Apollo Project, Peter links to an interesting article about selection in secondary education, and its inherent randomness.

It isn’t clear in the article, but the local authority it refers to could well be Bromley, where I grew up and attended the Grammar.

Either way, it certainly reflects my experience, where it did indeed appear fairly random who got selected and who didn’t. What’s more, plenty of people I went to school with had extra private tutoring to get them through the 11-plus (I didn’t), which was why it was disproportionately posh.

Resources will always be limited, and I don’t oppose choice in principle, so I’m not opposed to randomness in allocating people places. But just as catchment areas give rich people who can afford to move an advantage, selection rewards those who can afford extra support. If we’re going to have randomness, the least unfair way of managing it would be an actual lottery. Misty eyed nostalgia about the wonders of Grammars doesn’t get us anywhere.

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