Constitutional changes are window dressing

Of course it was politically impossible for Gordon Brown to have the final say on appointing English bishops, so he's lobbed this in with a mishmash of other small changes to create what is said to be a constitutional change package.

Oh dear, just as The Sun is calling on the government to "rip up the INhuman Rights Act". It was the judiciary who gave us ineffective control orders. Of course judges are "independent" - also known as "unaccountable". It seems to be frowned on to criticise a judge by name. This should change.

Of course Gordon Brown thinks it's fine for Scottish MPs to vote on English issues. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he. But it's still unjust.

Astonishing mess at the Child Support Agency

By October 2006, one in four applications for maintenance received by the Agency in 2003 were still waiting to be cleared, there was a backlog of a quarter of a million cases, and around 36,000 cases were just stuck in the system.

Essentially this is debt collection, which the private sector can do on the basis of payment by results. But politicians waste taxpayers' money by getting the generalist Civil Service to do it.

As you'd expect, the IT system is behind schedule and its costs have risen, to £1.1bn. An IT project on the scale of the CSA's system needs to be done in stages, and managed by high calibre IT professionals. Instead it was managed by politicians and generalist civil servants.

More NHS waste

Reports The Telegraph -

Almost a third of nurses - some 4,000 - had not found jobs six months after qualifying last year, according to official statistics.

More than half of physiotherapists and one in five midwives were also still unemployed half a year after completing their studies, the Department of Health admits.

The Royal College of Nursing says, "It is a big problem. Entry-level jobs, for which newly qualified nurses apply, have been frozen because trusts have been told to reduce their deficits. We think trusts need to be given more time and flexibility to manage their deficits as otherwise it's a waste of taxpayers' money."

This is only tinkering. There is no solution in better management for an organisation with 1.5 million employees.

Medics sometimes call for "Tesco management" of the NHS. No Tesco manager would take this on. The Nationalised Health Service is too big and too complicated for anyone to manage effectively, even if they were freed from interventions by politicians (and medics?).

There is a stark choice: break up this nationalised monolith, or continue to pour taxpayers' money down the drain. No prizes for guessing where we are going with Alan Johnson, public sector pensions appeaser, in post.

A perversion of news values

I'm delighted that BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been released physically unharmed. But for the BBC to give it the first 11 minutes of the main BBC1 30 minute news bulletin this evening is a perversion of news values.

Amusing political appearances last week

Alan Duncan said he had volunteered to appear on Newsnight to savage Quentin Davies. What a failure! He delivered no blows at all, despite his smirk and his sheaf of notes. Duncan emerged as a nasty piece of work, and not even effective at being nasty. He made Quentin Davies look good, which was presumably not his mission.

Davies has made merry at Cameron in his resignation letter.

Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything.

It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda....

The trouble with trying to face both ways is that you are likely to lose everybody's confidence....

You have displayed to the full both the vacuity and the cynicism of your favourite slogan 'change to win'....

Equally it seems that your hasty rejection of nuclear energy as a ‘last resort’ was also driven by your PR imperatives rather than by other considerations. Many colleagues hope that that will be the subject of your next u-turn.

You regularly (I think on a pre-arranged PR grid or timetable) make apparent policy statements which are then revealed to have no intended content at all. They appear to be made merely to strike a pose, to contribute to an image....

Although you have many positive qualities you have three, superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve....

And who could fail to enjoy Alastair Darling being duffed up by John Humphrys on Today?

Cabinet ministers' previous failures

The Taxpayers' Alliance has released a guide to previous failings by members of the new Cabinet, though it's sadly incomplete.

Don't blame God, blame Beckett

Not a theological dispute from the reign of Henry II - the Beckett is not Thomas, but Margaret.

First of all, off to planet barking. The Telegraph has "senior Church of England bishops" claiming that the flooding is due to "God's judgment on the immorality and greed of modern society".

This mainly seems to mean the Bishop of Carlisle, who gets extensively quoted -

"This is a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant in going its own way," he said. "We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused.

"We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate.

"In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as 'the beast', which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want," he said, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws highlighted its determination to undermine marriage.

"The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God's judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."

He expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but said that the problem with "environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate".

The West "has set up dominant economic structures that are built on greed and that keep other nations in a situation of dependence. The principle of God's judgment on nations that have exploited other nations is all there in the Bible."

For good measure, the Bishop of Liverpool says that, "If we live in a profligate way then there are going to be consequences.... We have a responsibility in this and God is exposing us to the truth of what we have done."

What a charming deity. What pompous asses. Is this official christian Doctrine?

As Booker points out, Margaret Beckett is much more to blame.

When Margaret Beckett made such a shambles of handing out EU subsidies to farmers, Brussels responded by withholding up to £350 million of its payments, leaving a massive hole in the budget of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Gordon Brown refused extra money, so she cut £15m off the budget for flood defences. Margaret Beckett will not be missed.

David Miliband succeeded her at Defra and refused to reverse the cut. Now he too has been promoted to Foreign Secretary.

The budget cut was reinforced by incompetence at the Environment Agency. More than £1 billion intended to bolster flood defences failed to reach the communities most at risk - the National Audit Office found that 63% of flood defences were not properly maintained, and that in 54% of areas at high risk of flooding there was no guarantee that the defences would hold back rising waters.

Meanwhile, the agency spends £30m on "travel, subsistence and entertainment". Very nice.

Television reports talk of areas not being back to normal for weeks. It will surely take many months for houses to be clean and dry and habitable again. And -

Paul Temple, the vice-president of the National Farmers' Union, predicted that hay harvests and pea crops would be ruined. The combination of water and warm summer temperatures might also lead to potato blight.

"We're talking about thousands of people's livelihoods here," said Mr Temple. "It can take years for crops to get back to normal."

There's a useful summary of some flooding issues here.

What's the point of the EU now?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in his blog writes ironically about the swings and roundabouts of the latest EU negotiations.

So we lose a functioning EU single market, the one benefit that makes membership worthwhile.

We keep the Common Agricultural Policy, which we all so love.

Our net payments double by 2011.

Then he compiles an ironical list of "gains".

Mr Blair suggested that Sarkozy's manoeuvre on competition policy didn't change anything. If that was so, why would Sarkozy have done it?

Tony Blair tells us that “free and undistorted competition” lives on, even though it has been excised from the treaty. A protocol will see to that, he insists.

Nicolas Sarkozy had a different construction, telling French reporters that it opened the way for a “true industrial policy” and for “national champions”. The Anglo-Saxon “dogma” of free markets had been defeated.

I spoke to two of the EU’s ex competition commissioners over the weekend. Both were nearly apoplectic about the Sarkozy coup. Mario Monti told me this was the start of the disintegration of the single market, since it would become impossible to enforce state aid rules or stop governments slamming the door in the face of foreigners.

Let there be no mistake. The Brussels competition police are the enforcers of the EU market, with powers than even exceed those of the US Justice Department. Without them the system slowly slides back to the 1970s. Perhaps not so slowly.

Does anybody in Britain think we now have a better state of affairs?

Overall, the agreement represents 90-95% of the constitution voted down by the Dutch and the French. That's according to governments in Finland, Spain, Ireland and Italy for a start.

Has anyone but Blair taken an opposite view?

France's strategy was about moulding the EU more to its liking. Blair's strategy wasn't about securing any advances at all, but tellingly just about protecting the UK's position in limited areas.

Of course it's not the end of spin

The silliest spin around the Gordon Brown government is that it will give up spin.

Gordon Brown's budgets were monuments to cynical spin. Bad news was relegated as far as possible to the small print of supplementary releases, so much so that it became pointless to try to form a budget judgement on the basis of the speech alone. His spinning reached its nadir in his last budget, when he flourished a cut in the basic rate of income tax which was counteracted by the abolition of the low 'starting rate'. This only made sense as spin if your audience were very stupid, or Labour MPs.

So Brown has a record on spin as bad as Stephen Byers. Liam Halligan points to the annual report of the Financial Assistance Scheme, which "just happened to be published on Wednesday - precisely when Brown entered Number 10 and, therefore, the busiest news day of the year".

Yet no fewer than 10,000 pension-theft victims are past the retirement age for their scheme and, in theory, eligible for help.

Most of those who have been paid have received only paltry initial payments. And almost all the lucky few on regular FAS support get less than £5,000 per annum - despite many being due annual pensions of £15,000 or more.

Most shockingly, the FAS last year paid out just £3.5m, but spent more - almost £4m - on systems, administration and staff.

And Mr Brown has instructed his MPs to tell voters how "inspiring" and "exciting" they find him and what a "pleasure" it is to work with him. Does anybody work "with" Gordon Brown?

An example of Brown spin and news management was headlined in yesterday's Financial Times, reporting that "Brown quietly slashed by a third this year's hospital building and equipment budget in one of his last acts as chancellor".

Prompted by the tightness of the public finances, the new prime minister, who has placed the NHS as his "immediate priority", cut the capital budget of the English NHS for 2007-08 from £6.2bn to £4.2bn. The move could delay the government's hospital building and reconfiguration programme in England.

However, Mr Brown avoided equivalent cuts to the Scottish and Welsh NHS budgets even though the funding formula for the UK nations suggests they should have shared the pain.

Just in case the dim Opposition haven't got the point, the paper adds that the decision "leaves him open to criticism that he favoured patients in his home country".

The report reminds us that the PFI hospital programme had already been cut from a future programme of £12bn to £8bn, with further reduction likely, "amid worries the inflexible payments PFI demands do not fit well with the new system of money following the patients".

Doubtless the government will restore some at least of the spending, claiming that it is new money reflecting the importance Brown places on the NHS.

Private Eye has recently highlighted what poor value hospitals' PFI is, having obtained an aborted report by the National Audit Office. PFI provides worse value, poor design, fewer beds and therefore occupancy rates which are too high, and bad and expensive maintenance and cleaning.

Was it burning?

Sky News continue to insist that the two men rammed a burning car into the main terminal of Glasgow airport. The witnesses were clear that they were of asian appearance, and I don't recall anyone saying the vehicle was already on fire before it hit the building (except the rolling news media, repeatedly).

The BBC is now saying that their Jeep Cherokee crashed into the main doors and burst into flames. This agrees with the police press conference yesterday, where they said that it burst into flames on impact, but it is only part of the truth, in that the two men were of asian appearance, and it's clear that the jeep was deliberately driven hard at the airport building.

Glasgow airport

A good press conference from the Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police. He confirmed that the man taken to hospital had a "device" (later confirmed as a suicide belt) on his person. (Why ever wasn't it found until he got to hospital?) So it wasn't a spur of the moment thing. He also said there were similarities between this incident and the London incident on Friday.

Given that the incidents are connected, the security services are speculating that they are just the start of a series.

Liverpool airport has evidently closed.

Glasgow was a failed atrocity. This was the one of the airport's busiest days of the year. Schools have just broken up, and families with children are flying out on holiday. There's no justification for such an atrocity. If there is such a place as hell, may the planners and perpetrators burn there for eternity.

A very European coup

Excellent continuing coverage of the new EU constitution, sorry, treaty, at Eureferendum. All the legalistic posturing by eurocrats about the binding nature of the agreement is politically beside the point - Poland and the UK can doubtless bring the business of the EU to a crawl if they so choose.

Incidentally, eureferendum has also picked up that the agreement signed by Mr Blair was not the six or so pages the public have seen, but 150. Mr Blair was well known to be a master of detail!

As for the assurances that Mr Sarkozy's removal of competition as a prime objective won't change anything - nonsense! He didn't spring this for no reason. One wonders when Mr Blair knew.

Questions about the Glasgow airport incident

Politicians will doubtless queue up to praise the police over the next few days. But Strathclyde police have been plodding along behind. Out of the blue they announced there had been 4 arrests. No, plods, wrong. It was two, as the BBC and Sky News had been reporting. It took them a further hour to announce that they were treating it as a terrorist incident. Oh please.

Now, though, you can see plenty of shots of police standing around doing nothing.

Vehicles should not be able to crash into airport terminal buildings. That seems obvious, does it not? Worked well at Glasgow, didn't it. BAA should be in line for some hard questions and some hard work. Maybe we can give the Health & Safety Executive something to do.

Media are reporting that a blazing vehicle crashed into the building. It seems it hit the building and then burst into flames.

People are still sitting in planes on the tarmac. First it was said that emergency vehicles have to be on standby whenever a plane takes off and they had all been diverted to the incident. Fair enough. But hours later the passengers were still there. Now it is suggested all of them will be disembarked to be interviewed by police. We saw pictures of miserable elderly couples and young families. If this is true, it is an abuse of power by Strathclyde police.

P.S. Gordon Brown has just made a short statement demonstrating his lack of communication skills. (Among other things he praised the dedication of the police, when they have been doing their job rather badly.) Then he turned his back to the cameras, walked away down a corridor, and let himself into a room. Does no one in his team have the imagination to see what this will look like?

BBC as campaigner

Oh dear. Just as the BBC says it isn't appropriate for it to be a campaigning organisation, oops up pops the series "Saving Planet Earth".

Campaigning on a base of dodgy science.

Is it the EU constitution over again?

Is it or isn't it the EU constitution lightly disguised? It seems the UK government are alone in their position. Open Europe and Eureferendum have combed through the document. And senior politicians in other EU countries seem to think it's the constitution in all but name - indeed, maybe it's worse since Sarkozy quietly got open competition removed as a primary objective.

Open Europe are delighted with their press coverage.

In an analysis article in the Sunday Telegraph Open Europe Director Neil O’Brien argued that “Anyone reading what has been agreed in Brussels this weekend will quickly realise that the "new" treaty is merely the EU Constitution with another name.” A leader in the Sunday Times with the headline “Now a vote on Europe” said, “As Open Europe, the think tank, put it: “When you look at the detail of what has been agreed, it is clear that this is just the old EU constitution in everything but name.” Open Europe was also quoted in the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Express, separate articles in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times, today’s Express and BBC online. On Saturday’s BBC PM programme Open Europe Chairman Lord Leach argued that the opt-out on the Charter of Fundamental Rights would almost certainly not be strong enough to stop EU judges from changing UK labour law.

Perhaps more tellingly, Open Europe and EUReferendum have pulled together similar opinions from senior politicians.

Thus In a BBC interview on Saturday morning Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett admitted that "There are some power transfers" in the new treaty.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that “the fundamentals of the Constitution have been maintained in large part… We have renounced everything that makes people think of a state, like the flag and the national anthem.” El Pais (25 June)

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that the mandate approved by the EU will “preserve the substance of the constitutional treaty”. Agence Europe (25 June)

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero said, "A great part of the content of the European Constitution is captured in the new treaties”. El Pais (25 June)

Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said, “Given the fact that there was strong legal advice that the draft constitution in 2004 would require a referendum in Ireland, and given the fact that these changes haven't made any dramatic change to the substance of what was agreed back in 2004, I think it is likely that a referendum will be held... thankfully they haven't changed the substance - 90 per cent of it is still there."

On the change of name for the EU Foreign Minister he said: "It's the original job as proposed but they just put on this long title - High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and also vice President of the Commission. It's the same job […] it's still going to be the same position." Irish Independent (24 June)

The Irish foreign minister agreed on RTÉ radio, as reported by The Irish Examiner declaring that new agreement had not dramatically changed the substance of the 2004 agreement brokered during Ireland’s Presidency of the EU – that agreement, of course, being the failed EU constitution.

Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen: “The good thing is...that all the symbolic elements are gone, and that which really matters – the core - is left." Jyllands-Posten (25 June)

Finland’s Europe Minister Astrid Thors: “There’s nothing from the original institutional package that has been changed” TV-Nytt, (23 June) Finland's State Secretary for EU Affairs Jari Luoto, according to YLE News, said that there were few differences between it and "the constitutional treaty which has already been ratified by Finland's Parliament".

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has claimed victory, saying, “This was France’s idea from the start.” Libération (25 June)

During a press conference Sarkozy said “Competition is no longer an objective in itself – it’s a tool at the service of the internal market but is no longer an objective of the Union… for the first time… the Union has to help ensure the protection of citizens… the word protection is no longer taboo.”

At the Paris Air Show Sarkozy also said that Britain keeping the pound amounted to unfair competition. He said other countries, “can't go on imposing social, environmental, fiscal and monetary dumping' on Europe. I ask that we do with the euro with the US does with the dollar or even what our English friends do with the pound.” CNBC (24 June)

Sarkozy also dismissed the change of the EU Foreign Minister’s name as of no significance. "What does it matter what we call him?" Telegraph (24 June)

Eureferendum reports that "the Dutch "no" campaign isn't buying it either".

More money down the drain

The government will have to pay Clinicenta millions of pounds to cover its bid costs, reports the Financial Times, after cancelling one of the biggest schemes aimed at getting the private sector to treat NHS waiting list patients. The London South scheme – a £40m-a-year contract to treat 18,000 patients annually – has been scrapped, even though it had reached preferred bidder stage.

The health department airily claims the decision was merely operational, taking into account “current strategic considerations” in south-east London.

Four of the 17 insolvent NHS Trusts are located there, with a major reshaping expected of the way their services are provided. This will be made more difficult by the fact three of them have big PFI buildings to which the NHS is contractually committed.

There are rumours that two more of the second wave of independent surgical treatment centres could suffer the same fate.

More wasted bid costs?

Read the sunspots

This is the heading to a piece claiming that mud at the bottom of Canadian fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change - suggesting that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling.

We are reminded that climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth.

The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

The fjords contain deep basins that are subject to little water transfer from the open ocean, and so water near the bottom is relatively stagnant and very low in oxygen content. So the floors of these basins are mostly lifeless and sediment layers build up year after year, undisturbed over millennia.

This gives one of the highest-quality climate records available anywhere today "and in it we see obvious confirmation that natural climate change can be dramatic. For example, in the middle of a 62-year slice of the record at about 4,400 years ago, there was a shift in climate in only a couple of seasons from warm, dry and sunny conditions to one that was mostly cold and rainy for several decades."

This revealed

repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region larger than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year "Schwabe" sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.

In the sediment, diatom and fish-scale records, we also see longer period cycles, all correlating closely with other well-known regular solar variations. In particular, we see marine productivity cycles that match well with the sun's 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-year "Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia. The variation in the sun's brightness over these longer cycles may be many times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle and so are seen to impact marine productivity even more significantly.

Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: the sun appears to drive climate change. But the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their own, not enough to cause the climate changes found in the sediment. "So there had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change."

In fact a mechanism has already been found.

As the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star's protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun's energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these "high sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

So much for the past. What of the future?

"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world.

Finally the writer concludes that -

we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change.

More coal everywhere

China is building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of one every week to 10 days. In late 2004, the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) reported that three countries—the United States, China, and India—are planning to build nearly 850 new coal plants. CSM said

By 2012, the plants in three key countries - China, India, and the United States - are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons.

Furthermore -

With natural gas prices expected to continue rising, 58 other nations have 340 new coal-fired plants in various stages of development. They are expected to go online in a decade or so. Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Turkey are all planning significant new coal-fired power additions.

And Germany, which is so keen on Kyoto, is planning to build 26 new coal-fired power plants. Also Russia's demand for thermal coal is expected to triple by 2020, with coal-based generation doubling its share of Russian power production from about 20 percent to 38-40 percent.

What price Kyoto then?

Labour's bad team dream

Stalin and Dimbo

Romanians selling babies

Go to a supermarket in France, and you may find people from our EU partner Romania offering to sell you a baby in the car park, reports The Telegraph.

Three adults were taken to the Angouleme police station. "How much do you offer?" a male member of the gang is said to have shouted at shoppers as he held the crying baby aloft, according to one witness.

A woman shopper alerted the hypermarket's security team who prevented the group from getting away by blocking exits with cars until police arrived.

The gang tried to fight off the guards using weapons including a baseball bat.

A similar incident happened in Portugal last month, says the paper, when the mother of a four-month-old boy was arrested for trying to sell her baby outside a supermarket in a town north of Lisbon.

The alleged selling went on for several hours on the city's main street with eight men serving as lookouts.

Again, the gang was believed to come from Romania.

Law enforcement hardly touches the underclass

Tens of thousands of people are paying fraudsters to sit their driving test for them, the BBC says. Fraudsters pass themselves off as the person in the photo on the provisional licence that candidates must bring to their test.

Shadow Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said: "This is yet more evidence that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of rogue drivers on our roads without tax or insurance and now, it appears, often without a legal driving licence.

"This is a huge road safety challenge and we clearly need urgent action to tackle the problem."

The BBC reports that two men from Oldham, Greater Manchester, were convicted of obtaining driving licences by deception.

Shazad Akhtar, 34, was sentenced to 200 hours of community service and ordered to pay £500 costs after pleading guilty to 22 counts of obtaining and attempting to obtain driving licences by deception. This is ridiculous. It is systematic criminal activity. But the government hasn't got enough prison places to be tough on crime.

The BBC says the fear is that the figures are the tip of the iceberg and that there are many more untested and potentially lethal drivers on the roads.