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The coalition and Europe: The veto that wasn?t

FOR all its eventfulness, 2011 only produced one incident that really shifted the opinion polls. David Cameron?s refusal to support a new European Union (EU) treaty last December went down well with voters, who rewarded the Conservatives with their first lead over Labour in a year. It also cheered Tory MPs, many of whom had never warmed to their leader.Their initial joy increasingly looks misplaced, and they know it. Mr Cameron had initially said that the countries which signed up to the new ?fiscal compact? to strengthen the euro?potentially all 26 other members of the union?would not be able to use EU institutions such as the Commission and the Court of Justice. These are part-funded by the British taxpayer and meant to serve the whole EU.Soon after, Mr Cameron was deluged by behind-the-scenes legal advice, which suggested that Britain would not get its way on the institutional matter, and by angry Liberal Democrats, the more pro-European of the coalition parties. Sure enough, by the time of an unofficial EU summit in Brussels on January 30th, the government had watered down its position. It now says only that it has ?legal concerns? about the Court of Justice being used to enforce new fiscal rules. Although Mr Cameron says he will take action if the new arrangements compromise British interests, it is hard to see what, if anything, has been prevented by his veto.The...
Policing reform: Body count

The kitten-heeled revolutionary
MIDDLE-CLASS Britons tend to like and respect the bobbies on the beat. So most politicians do too. For almost half a century no government has dared to interfere seriously with the way the police service is run. David Cameron?s coalition is turning out to be different.Several big changes are afoot. Central-government grants to police forces are being cut by 20% over the four years to 2014-15. New police and crime commissioners to hold chief constables to account will be elected in November. And radical changes to the way police are paid, to reflect skills and qualifications and anti-social hours actually worked, have been proposed by a commission under Tom Winsor, a former rail regulator.The last reform has caused the greatest unhappiness to the greatest number of police. On January 30th Theresa May, the home secretary (pictured), accepted the findings of a pay-arbitration tribunal including some but not all of the commission?s proposals. The police have too, though they say the deal will take �165m ($262m) from pay packets already reduced by the...
The farming boom: Muck and brass

One grand, two grand, three grand?
AT MELTON MOWBRAY cattle market, a maze of concrete barns heaving with cows, sheep and chickens, the mood is characteristically downbeat. Grey-haired farmers in battered waxed jackets complain about the government, the European Union and the weather.?Farmers are a miserable lot?, says Chris Wesley, a 30-year-old Lincolnshire farmer who is here to buy calves. Leaning on his stick in the winter sunshine, though, Mr Wesley admits that things are far better than they used to be. In 2006, he says, commercial cows sold for �1 a kilogram, on average; today they go for double that. Lamb chops are also dearer.Commodity prices are surging. Last year wheat fetched heights of �200 ($315) a tonne, up from �80 only three years ago. A disastrous harvest in Russia is one reason for the surge. But a quickening appetite for grain-fed meat in emerging markets like China has also pushed up prices and, as Mr Wesley puts it, ?taken some of the power from Tesco?. Meanwhile growing biofuel use means more competition for crops. Around 40% of the American maize crop will be...
Locating airports: Hub caps

I wonder what it?s like in cabin class
IN 1943 Frederick Miles, an aircraft designer, had the intriguing idea to build an airport near Gravesend, along the Kent coast, to serve London. The plan never took off?but Miles?s vision lives on.Though London now has five international airports, pitches for new ones in the Thames Estuary keep coming. In March the government will consider yet another when it consults on a ?sustainable framework for UK aviation?. The latest plan to build a hub in east London, dreamed up by Boris Johnson, London?s mayor, was until recently pooh-poohed. Now it is being seriously considered. So are plans to expand existing airports in the south-east.Ministers certainly need to solve the problem of London?s airport capacity crunch, which threatens to throttle the economy. Heathrow, the world?s busiest international airport, is already full. Its two runways operate at 99% capacity. Though passengers loathe the congestion, delays and often shabby facilities there, last year 68.7m of them passed through the airport, more than London?s four other big airports...
Bashing finance: Royal Bank of Salem

ARISE, Mr Goodwin. On January 31st the Honours Forfeiture Committee ruled that Sir Fred, as he has been since 2004, should be stripped of his knighthood after his tenure as chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) ended ignominiously with a huge bail-out. Mr Goodwin joins a list of ex-Sirs that includes Anthony Blunt, a Soviet spy, and Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe.Mr Goodwin?s replacement, Stephen Hester, has also faced opprobrium after the company?s board agreed to pay him a bonus worth �963,000 ($1.53m). Perhaps confusing the man responsible for the failure of RBS with the one hired to fix it, politicians and one newspaper assailed Mr Hester?s ?reward for failure?. Within days he turned down the bonus.If stripping one failed banker of his knighthood and hounding another who is making a decent fist of a difficult job looks like a witch-hunt, that?s because it is. Galling as it may be to imagine Mr Goodwin insisting on being called Sir Fred at his local corner shop, or offering his hand to be kissed at the bus stop, no power flowed from his title. Shame is an important sanction when well-paid people screw up, but Mr Goodwin?s reputation was already in the gutter following the bank?s failure and a nasty public row over his pension. Knighthood or not, he was not about to walk back into public life.True, Mr Goodwin had a cocksure management style that...
Press regulation: Guarding the guardians

THE press, everybody agreed, was out of control. Pushy photographers were making people?s lives miserable. Newspapers had got hold of, and printed, private phone conversations. Politicians declared that something must be done. There should be an inquiry, led by an eminent barrister. The institutions that had failed to control the press should be swept away and replaced with a more muscular body.That was two decades ago. One of the intercepted phone calls was between Prince Charles and his future wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles. The eminent lawyer was Sir David Calcutt. And the body he created to rein in the newspapers was the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), a tougher version of a predecessor which had been around since the 1950s. This outfit, which would hear gripes about misbehaviour by newspapers and magazines, contained a mixture of lay members and editors. Calcutt hoped that it would be robust enough that Parliament would not have to pass a law regulating the press.That hope has died. Far worse behaviour has come to light, beginning with revelations of phone-hacking at the News of the World...
Bagehot: Lessons from a great school

DANIEL RILEY, a young trainee teacher from west London, attended a school so bad that it was shut down while he was there. It was, he recalls with commendable understatement, an ?unstructured? place. Fewer than 20% of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including mathematics and English (the main benchmark for secondary students, involving exams commonly taken at 16). There were fights. Some, involving knives, ended with arrests. There were drugs?the school drew its pupils from tough housing estates, and gangs prowled at the gates. The teaching was ?not inspired,? Mr Riley says, sticking with the understatement. He recalls lessons spent copying texts from books.As happened to a few dozen failing institutions under the previous Labour government, Mr Riley?s school was turned into an academy?a state school removed from local council control and given new freedoms over staffing and teaching methods. Six years on, Paddington Academy draws its pupils from the same estates. But the school is unrecognisable.Last summer 69% of pupils met the benchmark for good GCSEs, easily beating the national average. More than half...
Universities: Pile them high

ASKING students to pay more for their education was supposed to encourage competition among universities, not just lighten the load on taxpayers. That was the idea in December 2010, when Parliament voted to let English universities charge tuition fees of up to �9,000 ($14,400) from this September, almost treble the existing limit. But demand for higher education is so great, and the fee increase so ringed with restrictions, that universities are not competing for students and responding to market demand. Instead, students are competing for places.At first glance, statistics seem to tell a different story. The number of British people who applied for a full-time university course fell by 8.7% this year, according to figures published by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service on January 30th. But the decrease was mainly among older folk, who may have been unwilling to quit hard-won jobs. And fewer people are leaving school in 2012. Adjusting for that decline, applications by school leavers were only 1% lower than last year, when a bumper crop dashed off to university to avoid the fee increase. High youth...
The economy: Squeezed

THERE was never any doubt that Britain?s economy was destined for a stormy close to 2011. Its proximity to the tempest engulfing Europe guaranteed that. All told, the economy?s fourth-quarter performance?a contraction of 0.2%?is a bit worse than expected, but hardly surprising. Is worse to come?The answer depends overwhelmingly on whether Europe?s crisis deepens or is resolved. A sharp decline in European industrial production from September hit both demand and confidence among British businesses. In the fourth quarter British industrial output sank by 1.2%. Yet the euro-zone economy seemed to be stabilising by the end of the year. Industry on both sides of the English Channel fared somewhat better in December, and in January the euro zone posted a surprise increase in manufacturing activity.Things are somewhat cheerier at home, too. Consumer-price inflation fell from 4.8% to 4.2% from November to December alone. That should reduce pressure on real household incomes, buoying demand. The hangover from December?s gyrations could leave Britain in recession through the first quarter, but growth is expected to return thereafter. The IMF now forecasts growth of 0.6% in 2012, a bit better than the average economists? projection of 0.2%. Those figures hinge on continued progress towards a resolution of Europe?s crisis.
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The Economist: Britain Thu, 02 February 2012 16:03:13 GMT