A teacher told me schools used to make a little money by selling uniforms to parents. Last year, however, Obiang’s family opened a textile factory and insisted all schools bought uniforms from there, increasing their wealth a tiny bit more and further undermining a poorly resourced education system.

Wasn’t it Bokassa who did the same, made school uniforms a family monopoly? Then imprisoned and killed those children who protested?

So, on the official EU measurements there is “more poverty” in this country than in Poland. That is what happens when you misdescribe inequality as poverty. As Professor Saunders mordantly observes: “The people in Britain who get defined as poor actually enjoy a standard of living far higher than most Poles. Polish workers move to Britain in search of a higher standard of living, but, according to the EU, they make themselves poorer when they do so.”

Dominic Lawson

Hackney, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, saw a 25% drop in its teen pregnancy rate; Blackburn, also with high levels of deprivation, saw a comparable improvement.

Have they controlled for a change in the local population?

This is very much a question, not an assertion, for I don’t really know. But anecdotally I’m under the impression that Hackney and Blackburn are two parts of the country which have had high immigration in recent years. Specifically Muslim immigration as well.

Now I really would not be surprised if in areas where the indigenous post-Christian population has been replaced by a culturally conservative (and whatever we might say about Islam, I think that culturally conservative over sexual matters is a fair description) Muslim one, teen pregnancy rates will drop.

So, does anybody know? Are these successes as trumpeted by Mad Mahdi actually successes of the programs, or of changes in the population the programs are being applied to?

Almost one in six children in Britain are living in households in which nobody has a job, according to a new report.

The UK average for children in jobless households is 15.3 per cent, but this rises to almost a quarter in London and 18 per cent in Wales, the North East, the North West and the West Midlands.

The study, released today by the Office for National Statistics, also shows that 22 per cent of British children live in low income households.

The figures are highest in the North East, where 28 per cent of people under the age of 20 live in families with an income at least 40 per cent below the UK average of about £34,000.

At one level of course this is true. We’ve a national definition of poverty and it’s a measure of relative poverty.

However, that national level grossly overstates the actual level of poverty (even relative poverty) if we were to measure it properly.

For, wage levels vary widely across the country (as do the costs of living). One notable number is that white collar female jobs in the NE pay 60% less than white collar female jobs in London. If we took London as our standard (we don’t we take the national level as the standard, but bear with me) then every female in a white collar job in the NE would be poor as compared to one in London.

Which simply ain’t the right way to be measuring poverty, even of the relative kind.

We need to be measuring consumption, adjusted for the regional cost of living, not money income adjusted for tax and benefits.

I’m convinced that the supposed high level of poverty in the UK is in fact a statistical artefact, simply a measure of the way in which London and the SE (with high costs and high wages) dominate the economy in a way that happens in no other large European country.

According to the DWP, the median weekly income in 2007/08 for a couple with two children was £601 before housing costs and £533 after housing costs.

Such a couple would be considered poor if their monthly income pre-housing was £361, or £322 after housing.

But this is hardly scrape the ground with a stick style African peasantry poverty, is it? Nor is it Dickensian. This is simply inequality, some having less than others.

I might disagree with those who insist that such inequality is a scandal, one which conclusively proves that taxes must rise to fund more redistribution, but that’s a disagreement. What irks, if not angers, me is the co-opting of the word "poverty" to describe an income that is, by any historical or global standard, living extremely high upon that fattened hog.

The government insisted supplies were secure but the price of diesel rose 10% amid panic buying of fuel by motorists.

Never believe anything until this government denies it.

Guidelines on safe alcohol consumption limits that have shaped health policy in Britain for 20 years were “plucked out of the air” as an “intelligent guess”.

The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever.

An "intelligent guess by a committee" apparently. Some truth about booze:

One found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rate in Britain. Another concluded that a man would have to drink 63 units a week, or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller.

Yes, of course alcohol can be dangerous. Depending upon how the rugby goes, tonight’s consumption could even be so. But isn’t it lovely the way we’ve been lied to over what is a dangerous level of consumption?