World's most trusted broadcaster

The world's most trusted broadcaster, the BBC, reports through its clinically neutral Washington correspondent, Comrade Matt Frei, that George W Bush has a lot to be gloomy about at the end of 2005. This just three days after Bush's approval rating with the American public shot up by eight points.

NHS collapse

The other day, my mother - a long-standing Liberal (and latterly LibDem) voter said that she thought that the NHS was going to collapse. I found this pretty startling for someone who is a child of the fifties and has the statist mindset to match. While collapse is probably not on the cards, what I expect to happen is that public support for the NHS might give way suddenly.

Could this happen sooner rather than later? It's hard to tell, but nobody seems to be writing up the boy Cameron as a potential saviour of the NHS - he is abandoning the idea of patient passports and there seems to be an assumption that he will merely promise to run it better than Labour. This is probably the correct way to get yourself elected, but what the NHS needs is someone with a mandate to tear it to pieces.

Blogging the NHS

This blog could be to the NHS what the Policeman's Blog is to law and order. Read it to understand why with all that money being spent on the NHS you still can't get any treatment - it's because the money is being spent on people whose job is to stop you being treated.

Brilliant economics post

Up there with "I, Pencil" is this posting from Tim Harford on the lunacies of state trade policy.

Hat tip: Amit Varma

How many policies has David Cameron got?

Having had his education policy half-inched by the Labour party, Cameron now seems to have had another of his key ideas nicked. The Chancellor slipped this little snippet into his speech today:

There will be a new community youth service to help fund gap year students doing voluntary work in the UK.

Which sounds awfully like the national service idea espoused by DC. I have no problem with Labour pinching good Tory ideas. But who is the bigger plonker here - the plonker who thinks up a daft idea or the plonker who pinches it from him?

Conservatives

If Zac Goldsmith became a Conservative MP would that be the end of the right in British politics?

There goes Cameron's education policy

Hot on the heels of its theft of the Conservative policy on independence for the Office of National Statistics, the government have made their first bid to undermine David Cameron by stealing his policy of pushing phonics in primary schools. This leaves Cameron's education policy as a rather risible hope for more discipline in schools.

It's sad to see this. The Conservative policy of education vouchers which was secreted away in the depths of their last manifesto was the only really exciting policy of the whole campaign from any party. Cameron's silence on the issue and his woolly managerialist approach to politics suggest we have seen the last of it for a while.

New blog

Cicero's Songs is a new blog which looks quite promising. "Musings on World events from the perspective of a Social and an Economic Liberal."