Spain is to partially close 30 of the nation’s 47 state-run airports in an attempt to reduce the costs of its “white elephants” built throughout the nation during the boom years.

Hmm.

Some of the airports have no scheduled flights yet are fully staffed and operational in what has come to symbolise the reckless public spending projects that have left Spain crippled with debt.

Now the ministry of industry and AENA, the state-run company that controls the nation’s airports, are considering plans to reduce operating hours at three quarters of the airports to include only those when flights are due or with a skeleton staff to operate in an emergency.

Among the worst performers are Badajoz airport, near the Portuguese border in western Spain, which saw its last commercial flight take-off in January.

In Huesca, a town in northern Spain billed as the “gateway to the Pyrenees”, local authorities have subsidised the rare passengers flying in, just 2,781 of them in the whole of 2011, spending an estimated €1,600 on each traveller through its terminal last year. The fully staffed terminal in Huesca, including numerous restaurants, are open year-round even though the commercial flights bringing skiers to the region only operate during the winter months.

In all, there are 20 airports that handle fewer than 100,000 passengers a year, well below the estimated half a million they need to be profitable.

And if anyone thinks that planes are different from trains or art galleries or roads or bridges then I’m afraid that you’ve just not been paying attention to the way that politics assigns capital to such projects. Nor is it just in Spain of course.

Edinburgh’s trams, there are any number of now shuttered lottery funded boondoggles, California is trying to build high speed rail between two Podunk villages, even when complete between LA and SF it will take longer and be more expensive than flying and, amazingly, would need more than the entire travel on the route to even break even. Then there’s the light rail project in Scottsdale AZ (hmm, mebbe Tucson,): it would actually have been cheaper to give a free Prius to each and every one of the daily ridership.

Yes, building infrastructure creates jobs right now, yes, we do actually need some infrastructure too. But that just ain’t a justification for building anything everywhere….

Written evidence submitted to Parliament by a former chief auditor at A4e shows how an “unethical culture” led to “systemic fraud” at the company, which holds major government contracts. When concerns were raised about wrongdoing with senior managers, little was done to address the widespread abuse of taxpayers’ money, the whistleblower alleged.

Of course this should be investigated:

After the Labour Party came to power in 1997, they introduced the back to work New Deal service for those on Jobseeker’s Allowance, requiring claimants to attend classes or risk losing their benefit. A4e was the largest provider of New Deal services in the UK, and had contracts for the New Deal worth £80 million.[10][11] When the New Deal was wound down in 2010, A4e was paid a share of £63 million in “termination fees”.[12]

A4e was awarded a contract for the Pathways to Work scheme in 2008,[13] with a target to get 30 per cent of participants into employment. In February 2012 the Public Accounts Committee heard the success rate was 9 per cent.

There’s enough potential mud there to screw up both major parties.

We have a criminal justice system too: so use it.

Just one leetle, leetle point though. Sins did not start, if sins there were, in May 2010. So no investigation into sins should start there either, should it?

Worst civil servants to be sacked
Under-performing civil servants will be identified and fired under plans to rank all government officials in order of ability, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

From the union side will come outrage about the very idea. Employers should train up the incompetent, not fire them. And isn’t it discrimination against idiots and the lazy anyway?

From everyone else will come outrage as well: WTF? Wasn’t this happening already?

A new Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill. An adjudicator will be given legal powers to ensure that supermarkets give their suppliers a fair deal. Supermarkets bullying or treating farmers and other suppliers badly will be “named and shamed” and may be fined.

Is St. Vince an idiot or a fool?

A quarter of the population is involved in providing some form of care for older family or friends, it finds.

And almost one in five of them regularly spend at least £100 a month.

The figures emerge from a report detailing how a “secret generation” of carers is helping prop up Britain’s crumbling social care system.

That’s good, isn’t it?

The good people of this nation are good people. Caring for their families and friends as they age.

Far from this shwing that the social care system is crumbling it shows that it is in robust good health.

As to the State social care system, we only need that to fill in the gaps of what people do not do out of love of family and friends don’t we? So the existence of this private network also lowers the pressure on that State network.

Trebles all round really.

Although, sadly, that’s not quite the way that even the Telegraph reports it.

Mr Moore added there were “well-rehearsed plans” in place and the agency was “fully prepared” for busy periods during the Olympics.

Asked how he would feel if there were four-hour queues to enter Britain during the Games, he said: “If that is necessary in light of the threats and risks that we face at that time, then so be it. We will not compromise on safety.”

Safety, just like anything else, is a trade off.

And we always, but always, trade off safety against other considerations. We would undoubtedly be less free but safer if we all had a luminescent bard code tattooed on our foreheads which the police could read at 200 metres. Despite successive Home Secretaries we are less safe but more free.

Part of the point of the Olympics is to show off London as a great place to come as a tourist or to do business.

4 hour delays at passport control rather fuck up the point of spending the £10 billion in the first place. At which point, this is the job that we pay you to do: sort it out mate.

“It is long established government policy neither to confirm nor deny speculation of this sort. However, given the intense interest in this case it is, exceptionally, appropriate for me to confirm that Mr Heywood was not an employee of the British government in any capacity,” the foreign secretary wrote in his reply.

Employee has, of course, a legal meaning. One that HMRC takes great pains to clarify at times.

Strictly speaking Hague has just denied that Heywood was paid through the PAYE system.

Which really isn’t what anyone was asking in the first place, is it?

Here’s another eccentricity: if a basic-rate tax payer – ie 87% of the population – gives £1, the state adds another 25p in gift aid to the charity, but the donor gets no tax relief. Only 40% or 50% tax rate donors can claim a personal benefit and get their tax bills cut. Since those in the bottom 10% give a higher proportion of their income than those in the top 10%, that seems unfair.

No, the Treasury doesn’t add anything nor does the higher rate donor claim a personal benefit.

It’s all simply a mechanism of allowing charitable gifts to be made out of pre-tax income. We could do it another way. As indeed the US does in part (it’s more complex than this but…). Everyone in the country has to file a tax return. When you calculate your taxable income you subtract from your gross income your charitable donations.

Put that way we can see that the Treasury isn’t making any extra donations nor are higher rate payers getting any personal benefits. Everyone is one exactly the same level paying field: everyone gets to donate to charity out of pre-tax, not post-tax, income. The only way Polly’s argument has any traction at all is because of the method we use to achieve this goal, rather than looking at the underlying effects of it.

As to this:

I had an email exchange with Stanley Fink after that breakfast, pointing out that big time charitable donors could do far more civic good by campaigning among their own kind against tax avoidance and in favour of a living wage.

That’s really very strange indeed. For it’s the bastard neoliberals like me who have, quite successfully actually, been campaigning for years or a living wage. We’re actually getting there, slowly, under the coalition.

For as we all know, the difference between the current minimum wage and the living wage as determined by JRF and the like is the taxation that is applied to low incomes. No, really, if those on minimum wage did not have to pay NI and income tax then the current minimum wage is within pennies per hour of the living wage. Which is why the ASI has campaigned for years for a serious rise in the personal allowance (and a raising of the NI limits). Something which has made it into the Lib Dems policy book, UKIP’s, heck, we’ve even had Oxfam endorsing it nd the current coalition actually implenting it at least in part.

Want to make the poor richer? Stop taxing them so bloody much!

And tax avoidance instead of charity? Poll dear, there’s a logical point to be made here. If we feed the money into the maw of government then it gets spent on what politicians want it to be spent upon. If we send it off to a charity there’s at least a chance that it will get spent on what we want it spent upon. Which is rather the point: true democracy on offer, pound by pound by pound.

For example, I might want the drowing to be rescued from the sea in which case I will donate to the RNLI. And it’s very dificult indeed to say that it is better to confiscate that same cash from me at gunpoint and insist that it be used to pay Vince Cable’s SpAd. Giles is a nice bloke and all but preventing bloated corpses washing ashore seems a better use of my money to be honest.

I do recognise why you might not agree: you’ve got great influence over how the tax money is spent what with that position as a national columnist and all. So of course you’d rather it all went into one pot that you have influence over the spending of. You know, those years you argued for Sure Start for example: you got to campaign for our money to be spent as you wished. Which is rather the point really: we’d like to spend our money the way we wish, not as you do. So charity, not government.

Despite the Coalition’s five-year programme of spending cuts and tax increases, the national debt is to rise from 72 per cent of gross domestic product this year to 76 per cent in 2014-15. Debt will peak at £1.5 trillion in 2016-17.

As a sensible precaution against future crises, the OECD said the developed countries should have a long-term goal of bringing debt down to 50 per cent of GDP.

He should have been spending a lot less than he was precisely so as to leave room for Keynsian fiscal manouvering as, if and when, the bust came.

That’s the real crime, he wasn’t Keynesian enough. At the end of the longest boom in modern history he should have been running budget surpluses of several percentage poiints of GDP. Not splashing the cash around as he was.

But then of course that’s why such crude Keynesianism doesn’t actually work. There’s just no way, given political reality, that a government can run such budget surpluses of the necessary size, year after year. The pressure to spend it all is just too strong (really, try reading Polly’s columns from 2002-2008. She can always find something to spend the oceans of cash upon).

And no, no, they’re not are they?

Hurry forward with policies in the making on house building, rent controls

Rent fucking control?

Have these people lost their minds?

Employers could be sued under age discrimination laws for taking part in Nick Clegg’s £1 billion scheme to get young people jobs, the Government’s own official guidance has warned.

Specifically subsidising jobs for the under 25s is age discrimination against the over 25s.

Makes you wonder how these people get their trousers on the right way around each morning.

Mr Maude also turned his attention to the government’s big private sector suppliers.

It’s entirely possible to have a principled stand that the same job should pay the same wage anywhere in the country. It’s a pretty bad principle and I certainly don’t agree with it but it is logically defensible.

However, that logic has already been breached. For we have London weighting on public sector wages. We already have an agreement that local wages in the public sector should reflect localwages/local costs.

If you’re really insistent that jobs should pay the same then you should argue to abolish London weighting. And if you don’t then you accept the basic point that wages should be variable.

After that the only question is how variable, isn’t it?

Cancer screening ‘risks being a casualty of NHS reform’
Councils given public health funds by Lansley will spend it on potholes instead, experts warn .

The argument being that when national politicians decide how money is allocated and spent they get it right but local politicians will inevitably mess it up.

So much for democracy and localism, eh?

They do not include those that involve the power of arrest and the other duties of a sworn constable.

Oh, so they’re not in fact privatising the police.

Back to sleep then.

David Cameron is “likely” to have ridden Rebekah Brooks’ ex-police horse, it has emerged

It was an ex-police horse. A retired one.

So, what does the Met do with retired police horses? Offer them out to whoever agrees to take care of them or what?

Would be interesting if someone actually did some journalism and went and found out really.

Chris Huhne has accepted a taxpayer-funded payout of more than £17,000 despite being the first Cabinet minister in history to be forced out of office due to a criminal investigation.

Well, we didn’t did we?

The four ceremonies together will cost £81m, after the government used public funds to double the budget following a presentation to the prime minister by Boyle and Stephen Daldry.

How lovely.

Every income tax payer in the country has to pay £2.75 each for a disco party for lycra clad druggies.

A disco party they’re not allowed to go to.

There’s a reason government costs so fucking much you know?

A shortage of private accommodation in London could mean homeless people are moved as far away as Hull, where rents are cheaper, housing charities are warning. They fear there will be an exodus from the capital of people at the bottom of the housing ladder as the coalition’s Localism Act, which comes into force this spring, empowers local authorities to place homeless people in private rented accommodation.

At least one London council, Croydon, is seeking to rent private accommodation in Hull and several other Yorkshire towns. It has also rented property in St Leonards on Sea on the Sussex coast. Other councils are predicted to follow suit, according to housing experts.

Now, the people complaining about this are those who at the same time insist that government must anticipate, plan for and produce the desired housing.

Not quite what I believe but let’s run with it. Let us create a rational planner.

What’s the first thing that rational planner is going to do? Note that there’s a number of people living in London without the means to afford housing in London. And no particular economic reason for living in London either. She’s also going to note that’s there’s great swathes of housing up North which is indeed affordable. And given that there’s no particular economic reason for those in London to be in London why shouldn’t they be on benefits up North in the much cheaper housing?

This will be, after all, greatly to the benefit of society even if a bit tough on the personal liberty side. But then that’s what planning of all these things is about, doing what is best for society, yes?

So you can see the amusement: the Statists, the planners, those who insist that society is more important than the desires of any mere individual, are in something of a bind. The current reforms to the housing market are producing exactly what a rational planner would produce. The poor are sent off to be poor in cheap housing, individual desires be damned.

But they don’t seem to like the outcome of that very planning that they advocate. Odd really…..

One senior civil servant was awarded an £85,831 bonus on top of their six-figure salary – at the same time as members of the armed forces have been subject to a two-year pay freeze and 20,000 are to be made redundant.

The bonuses have been paid since April last year and have seen more than 55,000 officials awarded extra payments for their performance – out of a payroll of 83,000.

This is the institution from which Parkinson’s Law is derived after all….

And as the corollary goes, the function of a bureaucracy is to be a bureaucracy. Not anything so trivial as actually performing the stated aim of the organisation, in this case supporting the Armed Forces. Dearie me no, and it’s entirely possible, indeed we seem to be getting to it, to have the purest essence of bureaucracy: in that we have the bureaucracy, funded and functioning, but there is in fact no end product of it. We just have the bureaucratic functioning and to hell with anything else: like an Army for example.