The digital revolution sweeps on. Much  of it is miracle technology that makes lives easier and better. It is transforming shopping, entertainment, media and much else.

Parts of the public sector though are making technology into a  misery machine to spy on us , infuriate us and thwart us. Let us take the NHS CV 19 app and proof of vaccination which we now have to show in order to attend certain events. We all have a perfectly good card with our name on it and the schedule of vaccines administered with dates on them. Why can’t I just show that? When I came to print out the computer record as requested I found I could not read and check the computer record because it was encrypted in a scan code.I have no idea what it says and so do not know if it is accurate. I had to go through a duo access procedure which did not work at all on the first two occasions I tried. Eventually I was able to  print out a scan code but the paper also then said it was only valid for two days although the explanatory note said it would be for a month. As I was preparing  diary items a week in advance it meant I had to go through the palaver the night before the event again!I dread to think how much we taxpayers had to pay for such a poor and pointless service.

The other day I had to park in a different Council area to my own in west London. The Council had blocked many of the streets permanently and several temporarily so it was difficult accessing the on street parking  and I like most of the traffic had to spend a long time crawling  and stopping in congestion on the main roads. When I eventually found a surprising three slots empty for two hours next to a ticket machine I was overjoyed, only  to find the machine said it was not functioning. Like others I was too afraid of tow away and of high fines for not paying  so I carried on circulating.
Eventually I found a single slot. It said I had to pay by phone. I rang the number . I was told I had to download an app. I did so. That told me I had to register. I did so answering a range of questions about me and the phone. Then it asked me details about the parking. I supplied those. Then it told me I had not supplied details of the car so I had to go back to registration to do that. It eventually let me specify the parking I wanted to do. The guide to the parking was ambiguous about hours and prices.  I guessed a time I wanted, only then to discover after 10 mins the parking would   be free all evening. I ended up paying  £1 for the ten minutes and had peace of mind that I had complied.All this  had to done on a tiny phone screen which was difficult to read in sunlight. It was so much easier when you simply put coins into a ticket machine.

Wouldn’t  it be a good idea if these public services thought more about the convenience  of the users. Will you write in with your examples of bad service from the public sector?

A few years ago I gave a talk to students in Cambridge. There followed one of those rare conference events when  I was asked an unusual and difficult question that was not drawn from the spin and media commentary of the week. “Mr Redwood, do you think the A levels I gained were of the same quality as the ones you gained?”

I had never expressed a public view on exam standards. A series of traps flashed into my mind of how certain answers could in true BBC fashion be spun or misinterpreted against me. I decided on a safe answer. “I have  no reason to think that the  Advanced  levels I got were of a lower standard than the ones you must have got. Do you think otherwise?”  As I feared  but had decided to dodge, he was sure his A levels were of a lower standard and he was worried about what he saw as the downwards drift. I tried to rally him and others in the audience by saying I understood that the Exam Boards were very conscious of the need to guarantee comparable standards between years, and reflected that in the chosen mixture of  the complexity of the papers, the severity of the marking scheme and the choice of grade boundary year by year.

This year some newspapers and commentators are asking the student’s question again. How can it be, they ask,  that 2021 has seen by far and away the best results in both A levels and GCSE s ever, when we are also told that the education of young people was harmed by  school closures, a shortage of face to face teaching and by the imitations of the on line alternative. We are told that there can be no proper comparison and that this year’s assessment is fair for the students involved given the difficulties lockdown created. It is also a year when some schools decided to teach the full curriculum for the exams and used new technology well to do so, whilst others felt more constrained by technology limitations or were delayed by slow deliveries of personal equipment to pupils in need. We are told the gap got bigger between different regions and income groups which is not a desirable outcome.

Next year will be a crucial year. Assuming that the remaining measures against CV 19 can be dropped as the vaccines work their magic the Exam Boards and teaching profession have to decide how to get back to public exams and how to calibrate the difficulty of papers, the breadth of the syllabus, the severity of the marking scheme and the grade boundaries anew. I do think exams are the least bad way to assess learning and achievement, and it should be easier to be fair between every student cohort if each year is examined to a similar standard on a similarly difficult and wide course. If too many get Grade A  Advanced levels then elite universities will simply invent sterner tests to differentiate between the good and the very good. There are signs that some universities are inventing tests to do just that. I would be interested in thoughts about how  the system should be re-established or reformed next year. There will doubtless be more arguments about the role if any of course work assessed by teachers, and the desirability or otherwise of students being able to take aids like dictionaries and smart calculators into exams.

The emergence of many more higher grades in this year’s A level results has produced problems for universities used to a higher failure rate to achieve required grades.  Some courses at some universities are as a result oversubscribed and the Universities are having to make offers for the following year or encourage some other switching to try to resolve the difficulty.

I was a product of a different system for Oxford and Cambridge. Before or after A level Oxford and Cambridge set entrance and scholarship exams which they used rather than A level results.

The advantage of this system was twofold. The Universities were in full control of how many places they allocated and who would get them. The student if successful could press on to prepare more thoroughly for higher level study.  The Colleges  made their own judgements. Later as a young Oxford university teacher I became involved in  the marking process for the entrance exams. I was impressed by the system.  We blind double marked the papers, held conversations about all the ones where we disagreed, and used interviews to expose the issues where we did disagree about the achievement and potential of the candidate. We also sought to redress any unfair imbalance between students who had been well prepared by expensive schools for the ordeal and those who had not.

It looks as if some top universities are tiptoeing back to relying more on their own assessment of students. They need to be sure that the people they take can cope with the rigours and the independence of undergraduate study and are the best of the many who now achieve a grade A.

The establishment elite  that perform  the rites and fashion the weapons of the war on carbon are in danger of slipping into the bad practices of some  past priesthoods. The officials and grandees  tell us they need to fly around the world to conferences like COP 26 to spread the word. I can see the case for the chairman of the global conference to meet key players face to face in their own settings  to try to do a deal, but the case for others is by no means clear.  Too many fly around the world to   tell others not to fly but to holiday near to home and to communicate on Zoom or Teams. When challenged about their own lifestyles which seem detached from Mission Net Zero they reply that it is fine because they are “offsetting” all the carbon their flights, chauffeured cars, air conditioned hotels and meat banquets  generate.  In other words they use taxpayers money to grant aid activities like tree planting or renewable power installation to claim a carbon offset.

As one of leading advocates of net Zero, Bill Gates helpfully explains in his book “I own big houses and fly in private planes- in fact  I took one to Paris for the climate change conference – so who am I to lecture anyone on the environment?” “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high. .. In 2020 I started buying sustainable jet fuel and  will fully offset my family’s aviation missions in 2021. For our non aviation emissions I am buying offsets through a company that runs a facility that removes carbon dioxide from the air”. At least Bill Gates uses his own money to offset that carbon footprint and grasps that others might see it differently.

I am disappointed that  COP26 is not a virtual conference. The combination of the messaging on jet travel and the wish of many governments to restrict jet travel to stop the spread of covid would seem to make a strong case for a virtual meeting. There will be critics who will not be easily assuaged by knowledge of carbon offsets. There will also be plenty of examination of the nature of those carbon offsets to see if  they are genuine and not being miscounted.

The efforts to place a price on carbon are creating inflation in various green investments as well as the more useful boosting of investment in things like trees and renewable power. They are also leading governments into seizing another new way of taxing us, by placing carbon taxes and carbon border taxes on items we need.

Governments  need to explain how they will tax non fossil fuels in the world they want where they lose most of the tax on oil and gas.They also need to set out where all the electrical power is coming up   from to fuel the electrical revolution.

The news from Afghanistan is worrying. Twenty years after the first military actions by the US and her allies in Afghanistan President Biden announced a rapid withdrawal of US forces. I have no disagreement with the aim of getting out. I agree that the UK also had to leave quickly as soon as the larger US force left. We were a smaller part of a coalition force and had to think of the safety of our forces in a volatile situation. I do have a disagreement with the sudden speed of the USA planned departure, and the apparent shortcomings in reassuring the Afghan government and leaving in place enough advice and support to make their task easier.

It is surprising that given the longer term cross party aim in the USA to leave defence and policing to Afghan forces that more successful plans were not already effective  for advice and training of the now considerable Afghan forces. A lot of effort had we are told gone in to allow them to handle any insurgency or violent subversion of the state. There was a good argument to say that keeping foreign forces there for too long to suppress violence could be seen by some Afghans as a provocation that helped recruit more opponents against democratic government.  There was an even better argument that at some point to prove Afghanistan has become a self sustaining democracy it has to be left to Afghan people and institutions to defend its new order and to subsume critics within a democratic system to resolve or handle differences. They can of course ask for advice or specialist help from allies, but Afghan forces should take full responsibility for law and order.

Russia and  now NATO have found Afghanistan a difficult place for operations. President Biden seems to lack a clear vision of what if any role he wishes the USA to assume in the Middle East. We know he is not as pro Israel and as anti Iran as President Trump, but we do not yet know what he is trying to achieve and how he sees the new threats instability bring in the region.

It has taken the Anglican Church long soaked in the views of the international elite an age to discover the cause of England. Despite carrying our country’s name in its own the C of E has regularly adopted fashionable global and EU tropes that are unwelcome to many in a doughty independent island country with global reach and ambition.

The Archbishop is by inference attacking the Lambeth Palace and Brussels oriented views of recent Archbishops of Canterbury by remembering his own Northern roots. He then reveals he too lacks understanding of how Englishmen and women feel by recommending we get another dose of regional devolution within England. So like the EU elite he wants to break up and balkanise England whilst leaving Scottish and Welsh devolution whole at the country level. The whole point about the English case is we wish to have for England some of the  same devolved  rights that Scotland  enjoys.

I proposed to David Cameron that we gave England EVEN, English votes for English needs, in the Commons. Instead of setting up a costly new English Parliament with extra MPs and a new building, why not let UK MPs elected to Westminster carry the dual mandate and meet as a Grand Committee at Westminster for any legislation or budgetary review matters that would mirror those powers devolved to Scotland or Wales. Mr Cameron on advice from Mr Hague watered that down to an English veto on English laws, with no right to initiate an English proposal for English MPs. Now Mr Gove has removed even that.

Meanwhile we need a BBC that gives equal billing to England as to Scotland. Why is there no BBC England? We need an anthem for English teams that we know and want to sing, and a better and more sympathetic presentation of English history, literature and culture by English and UK institutions.

Readers of this blog may be interested to hear my interview this morning on COP 26 and UK Domestic Heating.

The full interview is available here:

Yesterday I looked at targets and controls to ensure prudence. I recommended the existing targets for inflation and debt interest.  Today I want to look at an additional target to replace the Maastricht requirements and to provide some balance to the controls. There should be a growth target to remind Whitehall and the Bank that growth brings higher living standards and brings the state deficit down more quickly than austerity.

Choosing a growth target is not easy for an economy that has been like many others so badly bruised by lockdowns and other anti covid policies. The pre financial crash economy could have sustained a growth rate of 2.5%. The post banking crash economy struggled to sustain 1.5%. With much better financed banks now and with plenty of cash  around in  the banking sector it should be possible to sustain a 2% growth rate for the next five years. That would make a sensible target, with symmetry around 2% inflation and 2% growth. That would mean typically wages rising 4% a year and real incomes 2%.

What actions should a government take to seek to sustain such a target? Just asking the question would be refreshing after years of asking how we meet the Maastricht lower debt and deficit targets with an implied emphasis on doing and spending less. I have set out in  past blogs some of the components of a successful growth strategy. We need more and cheaper energy, we need more domestically produced energy, industrial products and food. We need a policy aimed at cutting the large balance of trade deficit, with opportunities to replace imported energy, food, timber vehicles and much else besides. We need more intelligent use of government purchasing to back competitive UK products. We need lower taxes and easier rules on the self employed and  businesses as they take on their first employees. The UK economy needs a larger small business and self employed sector, with more competition for the large businesses with strong market positions.

The UK economy is recovering from the big hit initial lockdown brought. The Chancellor did well with his generous furlough and business schemes which cushioned unemployment and limited bankruptcies. A combination of looser money policy and a large public deficit sustained activity somewhat at a time when public policy to curb the virus led to a sharp decline in output in all sectors needing social contact between customers.

Today the Bank of England thinks the sharp rise in  wage and price inflation that we are witnessing will be short lived. They nonetheless aim to end their Quantitative Easing programme of new purchases of bonds by the end of this year, before the USA and the ECB. They have pencilled in the need for some modest further tightening in the following two years, which could take the form both of small increases in interest rates and an ending of purchases of government bonds when old ones are repaid. They may be optimistic in thinking we will have restored all lost output by the end of this year, and need to be careful not to dampen confidence too much too soon before recovery is well embedded.

The central task of keeping inflation down to around 2% remains a crucial target for policy. The Bank thinks inflation will be back a little below 2% in two years time, after first hitting 4%. That is possible, and I have no quibbles with them running at current settings whilst monitoring carefully wage and other cost pressures. I think the USA which has administered around twice as much monetary stimulus as the UK relative to its size and is planning to continue with a large bond buying and money creation programme has a more serious inflation threat. The USA should be doing at least as much as the Bank of England to move back to a more prudent policy given its much larger injection of cash.

Meanwhile we await the government’s decision on what targets if any the Treasury needs to impose on itself. I wish to see the end to the state debt as a percentage of GDP targets continued from the Maastricht Treaty. The relevant issue is net  debt interest as a percentage of GDP or of public spending. The state debt figure they use appears very high because they look at the gross figure which includes all the debt the state now owns. What matters is the debt they owe to others and the cost of servicing that debt. Despite the big increase in gross debt the position has improved since the pandemic hit, both because they have been able to buy up large quantities of the debt, and because they have forced interest rates down lowering the additional cost of new debt or of refinancing old debt.

Japan has been doing this on a colossal scale for years and has got away with it because it is a low inflation economy with a high propensity to save. The UK has a lower average age with more private sector  propensity to spend and borrow so we should not assume we can continue doing this without awakening  the inflationary dragon. A sensible target for debt interest and  a well paced monetary tightening sensitive to growth rates is what is needed. The UK already has a debt interest target which is fine. We do not need an austerity policy brought on  by a wish to get gross debt down as a percentage of GDP. That would slow growth and make it more difficult to remove the deficit. The new policy must be growth oriented.The Bank needs to watch carefully possible inflationary transmission into wages and or excessive credit creation by commercial banks which would warrant earlier corrective action.