In January this year, the PM watered down the veto and caved into Euro dealmaking as usual. Labour this morning is apparently back to 5 points ahead in the polls.

How much of an expert political strategist do you have to be not to draw the obvious conclusions? …

They are, explained my constituent, “the sort of things I voted Conservative to stop. Yet they just seem to happen anyway”.

No one voted to allow industrial-size wind turbines to march across the countryside, changing the English landscape forever. Yet officialdom is actively encouraging it.  For all the talk of localism giving people more power, it is often impossible for local people to make more than token objections.  Worse, every householder is now forced to pay for wind farms via hidden surcharges on their energy bills. 

No one seems quite sure when it was decided that we could no longer deport people we do not want to live in our country. But it just sort of happened - and nothing any politician says about it seems to make any difference.

We thought that we had stayed out of Europe’s single currency. Yet under governments of all three parties, we have somehow been slipped the bill to prop it up. When …

August 21st 2007: David Cameron on the Human Rights Act;  "It has to go.  Abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights, which sets out rights and responsibilities. ..... It is a glaring example of what is going wrong in our country.”

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Is it really Clegg and co stopping us from sorting this mess out?  I doubt it. 

Like so much else about the blunted radicalism of this administration, the Coalition arithmetic in the Commons is cited as the excuse for failing to go far enough.  It is seldom the real reason.

In too many policy areas, we are more or less carrying on with what the previous adminstration did not because of Clegg and co, but because we seem only too happy to t ag along with what Sir  Humphrey says we should do.  

There is, to be blunt, insufficient  verve, determination and strategic thinking to drive …

Years of Western credit bubble economics cannot change that. 

Strip away all that central bank confected credit, and we are a lot less well off than we suppose. 

Worse, not only has all that fiscal and monetary stimulus failed to engineer Western wealth creation, it seems to have made things worse.

Perhaps when the bond bubble has burst, and bailout-and-borrow economics has run its deadly course, we might be asking India for some spare rupees, please?…

Over that period as a whole, the UK economy has more or less flat lined.  The downturn has taken us pretty much to where we were.  About the only double digit growth has been in our levels of public debt - which continue to soar.

Is this all an unavoidable consequence of a crisis made in America    the banking sector the Eurozone? 

Or a result of what happens when you stick to a high tax/spend orthodoxy, keep throwing cheap credit at a problem caused by a glut of the stuff, and don't have any new ideas to set wealth creators free to make wealth?

(* - Measured in national currency GDP terms, in US$ terms the growth is even greater)…

But in the struggle to ensure democratic oversight of the Whitehall mandarinate, she is spot on.

For years, regardless of which party sat on which side of the Commons chamber, most key public policy decisions have been taken by a remote mandarinate.  This cosy clique of erudite, Oxbridge-educated officials ran government - with only a few ministers occasionally able to shift established priorities. 

As far as the Whitehall grandees were concerned, squabbling parties competed to provide the different departmental spokesmen.  The views of the vast bulk of MPs were irrelevant. Those of the voters that elected them, comprehensively ignored.

From immigration policy, to Europe policy, to endless defence procurement cockups, failure went unchallenged.  Discredited orthodoxy – in the Treasury and education department in particular – went unchanged.

Thanks to the internet - and the MPs expense scandal - deferential democracy is dead.  People are demanding more accountability over their MPs. 

As a consequence, MPs are starting to demand accountability …

£10 billion – size of latest shortfall in UK defence budget

126 – number of French-built fighter jets India will receive

0 – the number of aircraft able to fly from British aircraft carriers this side of 2019

£2.9 billion – UK aid to India between 2005 - 2009

£120 billion – the amount of extra money UK government will have to borrow this year

23 percent - India's external debt to GDP ratio

476 percent – UK’s external debt to GDP ratio

Discuss.…

I wonder what judgement is due?  What ruling are the guardian council handing down from on high this time? 

No doubt it will be in the papers and news bulletins over the next few hours.…

He said the new arrangements would not be administered by the EU institutions. Turns out they will be. By the government's own admission, they are not satisfied having the European Court adjudicating.  The new set of "non-EU" rules will be presided over and administered by EU institutions.   

So how did this happen?

I suppose if you;

a) believe that proping up the Euro with British billions is in our interests

b) take the view we must remain in the EU on any terms

c) listen to the advice from the Europhile Whitehall mandarins over and above your elected MPs ....

.... you kind of end up where we are today.

A mess. More or less where every Prime Minister these past forty years has ended up.

 …

A few weeks later, after the Whitehall mandarins have been left in charge of the small print, we give our tacit support to the creation of a new FU arrangement. In return for our mandarins getting back at the top table not much.

So despite us saying “no” to the rule changes, the rule changes take effect within the club of which we are a part – and without our approval.

It is not only the veto that has been circumvented. What assurances do we have that Euro club cannot now make yet further changes without our approval?

It is not only Greek government bonds that have a credibility issue.…

Just look at the mess they have made of it: a common fisheries policy that has failed to conserve fish.  Financial regulation suffocating the City.  A large bill to bailout a currency we did not even join.  Talk about deregulation that is only ever talk. 

Now it appears that vetoes  one month unravel the next.

With ministers and mandarins left in charge, we have lurched from one disastrous Euro deal to the next.    

Worse, many of the key decisions that affect our lives are no longer taken by the MPs we elect, but by remote and unaccountable officials in Brussels. 

Over 70 percent of our laws now come from the Brussels machine.  EU regulations are often drawn up in the interests all kinds of corporate lobby groups - but rarely ever in the interests of the British voter. 

It is time for the people to take back control.  We must stand up and demand that the political class give us the …

Part of me wonders if it might not actually be a good thing.  If the FU becomes a kind of spin off from the EU, and crucially, does not involve us, the why oppose it? The FU could then take the Euro institutions with it, and be the main fulcrum for European integration – minus Britain. What would there be not to like?

We would find ourselves in a dead husk of the EU, making it much easier to then extricate ourselves entirely.

On the other hand, if the new FU rules are wrapped up in to the EU by 2017 – as some suggest - it would be a disaster. The veto would have proved worthless, and in effect we would have a new arrangement with the Eurosystem without having had a referendum.

But the key point in all this is not what I think. Nor what other MPs think. Nor, …

Erudite and intelligent, Britain's top EU mandarins see their role as splitting the difference between what ministers want and what the Euro system will allow. And because they only answer to other Whitehall mandarins, they can ignore what the voters think.

With all that in mind, how has the decision to appoint Gordon Brown's top EU adviser, Jon Cunliffe, as the Coalition's top EU negotiator worked out?

Last year, as we all know, David Cameron vetoed the new Fiscal Union treaty. Three cheers! He made it clear if the rest of Euroland wanted a Fiscal Union, they should set up seperate arrangements outside the EU. Bravo!

But since then, the small print deal making was been left to Cunliffe and co. Oops.

Tomorrow, I gather, we will discover that the Fiscal Union rules must be incorporated into the EU rules by 2017. So …

As Fraser Nelson puts it in his brilliant article in today’s Telegraph “The list of undead Brownite policies lingering in the Treasury is long and ignominious.”

The Coalition – despite the spin – continues to borrow on a Gordonian scale. "A Government that is widely regarded as radical, and hawkish on the deficit, is making virtually no economic progress, while running up the debt like there’s no tomorrow”.  Indeed.  During this Parliament, we will borrow more than the last Chancellor managed over thirteen years. 

Under this government, just like the last, the Bank of England has been encouraged to print money recklessly and conjure up candy floss credit. The sugar rush has yet to produce real growth.

The economy is flat lining as though Gordon Brown was in charge because the economic thinking from his era still pervades the Treasury.

“Where are the Conservative ideas?” asks Fraser.

Too …

The Sheriff will have oversight over local policing, perhaps in time overseeing public prosecutions, too.

Despite the Sheriff having the power to fire the Chief Constable, critics of the new arrangements have claimed that the Sheriffs will have only a limited impact. The police will, they say, keep slavishly following Home Office directives. The new Sheriff will be little more than some sort of directly elected Police Authority.

Not if you read the small print, they won't.

Mark Reckless, the brilliant MP for Rochester, has ensured that the new Policing Protocol Order, which sets out the powers between Sheriffs and Chief Constable, allow the Sheriff to call the shots.

Since Lord Denning's 1968 ruling, operational independence has been interpreted widely. Mark Reckless' new Protocol Order ensures that the Chief Constable must answer to the Sheriff on all matters, except on "specific operational matters and decisions ... in arresting ... and pursuing investigations".…

The Sheriff will have oversight over local policing, perhaps in time overseeing public prosecutions, too.

Despite the Sheriff having the power to fire the Chief Constable, critics of the new arrangements have claimed that the Sheriffs will have only a limited impact. The police will, they say, keep slavishly following Home Office directives. The new Sheriff will be little more than some sort of directly elected Police Authority.

Not if you read the small print, they won't.

Mark Reckless, the brilliant MP for Rochester, has ensured that the new Policing Protocol Order, which sets out the powers between Sheriffs and Chief Constable, allow the Sheriff to call the shots.

Since Lord Denning's 1968 ruling, operational independence has been interpreted widely. Mark Reckless' new Protocol Order ensures that the Chief Constable must answer to the Sheriff on all matters, except on "specific operational matters and decisions ... in arresting ... and pursuing investigations".…

Gulp. If this all-crises-must-come-to-an-end line is the best our top economic technocrat can come up with, it is hardly reassuring.

Economic crises do indeed come to an end - but usually because those in charge start to do the right thing. Mervyn King's Bank of England has been doing the wrong things. Unless he changes course, he will compound our current crisis, rather than resolve it.

Mr King was at the helm as the central bank kept interest rates recklessly low in the years before the credit crunch, stoking up a credit bubble and mistaking it for growth.

Once the credit bubble burst, it was Mervyn's Monetary Policy Committee that slashed rates further, hoping to cure the patient by giving it more of what made it ill.

At almost every stage he has talked of deflationary dangers as inflation has been taking hold. The MPC has consistently failed to meet its inflation …

Smith's book is full of corking ideas if you're a little stumped for a growth strategy.  Plus it has been around since 1776, so hopefully someone in the Treasury has had the time to pop out and get a copy.

I just got this reply from Mark Hoban MP;

“Treasury Ministers and officials consider a wide range of view from a variety of sources to provide the historical and international context to the UK’s economic policy”.

Perhaps you can now see where the growth strategy got to?  Never let it be said that Sir Humphrey runs the Treasury.…

Sir Nicolas writes as though it was this supranational quango from the 1950s that invented the notion of limited government.     

British lawyers, Sir Nicolas seeks to assure us, played a very major role in the development of the court’s role.  Perhaps. But what about the British people? 

Mere "governments of the day" and "popular opinion", must not, Sir Nicolas seems to suggest, be allowed to stand in the way of the superior wisdom of these legal technocrats.  I'm sure Abu Qatada would agree.  

Sir Nicolas seems to have reverted to the pre-modern idea that an elite must govern wisely from on high, accountable not to the people, but to their own consciences to tell them what is right. 

In defence of his court, Sir Nicolas cites several cases where the judges have clearly made rulings most reasonable folk would believe to be right.  No one …

What I find so so remarkable is that for all the talk of austerity, the UK government continues to spend even more now than it did when Gordon Brown was in charge.

"Cutting government spending", say the experts in Whitehall, "is like trying to turn around a super tanker.  Not even Thatcher managed it .... Must be done incrementally .... blah blah blah"

If government is so hopeless at reining in government, try giving the job to Parliament. …

What I find so so remarkable is that for all the talk of austerity, the UK government continues to spend even more now than it did when Gordon Brown was in charge.

"Cutting government spending", say the experts in Whitehall, "is like trying to turn around a super tanker.  Not even Thatcher managed it .... Must be done incrementally .... blah blah blah"

If government is so hopeless at reining in government, try giving the job to Parliament. …

Indeed. Bravo.

So how the heck did ministers manage to spend two years, and many billions of pounds, kidding themselves that it is in our interest to prop up the Euro?

Set aside the rights or wrongs of ministers committing large sums to sustaining a currency we chose not to join. Pushing more debt onto bankrupt nations will not reduce their debts.  Every one of the Euro bailouts since 2010 has left the debtor nations with more debt. None of the Euro periphery nations will return to prosperity until they have escaped from Europe’s recessionary mechanism. 

Yet instead of recognising any of this, UK ministers seem to have simply drifted along with established Treasury thinking, trotting out the same old clichés; dangers of instability, a zillion billion jobs at stake, blah blah blah.

Fourteen months ago, I met senior Treasury officials and discussed all …

It gives you an insight on the evidence Zac Goldsmith and I gave to a Commons committee yesterday about the government's promise to pass power directly to the people.

If the people control Parliament, Parliament might start to control the government.  Then we might not perhaps have quite so many public policy disasters such as this and this and this .....…

The government has come forward with what it calls a recall proposal. Yet their proposal manages to get it 180 degrees the wrong way round.

Real recall ought to make MPs accountable to the people with two simple stages:

1.  The Petition – Before anyone is recalled, 20 percent of local people would have to petition the local returning officer to conduct a recall ballot - AND, the majority of local voters would then have to vote to approve the MP's recall.

2.  The Recall ballot - Only if over half of those whom an MP is supposed to serve voted "yes" to the question "Should your MP be recalled?", would there then be a by election (or perhaps one might call it the bye bye election?).

Real recall puts the trigger in the hands of the majority of constituents.  Fearful of vexatious attempts to unseat MPs, the …

What they didn’t tell us is that as French finance minister from 2007 she presided over the mess in French public finances that has now resulted in France losing its AAA+ credit rating. 

With the debtor interest now put firmly in charge of the bank, Britain is now being asked to stump up even more money to the IMF to help it bailout the Euro. There is talk of an extra £7 – 10 billion on top of the existing £40 billion – a sum large enough to give every business in Britain a corporation tax break. 

Our strategy ought to be to try to get the IMF to do in the Eurozone what it has so successfully done to rescue other debtor nations: a currency devaluation, debt write-off and structural reform - in return for the loan.

Instead with Lagarde at the helm, the IMF is being positioned to play …