John Hemming's Web Log

This week's glee club was particularly good. I copy below a photo of the event: Thanks to Jonathan Wallace for the Photo. There are a number of short videos on twitter .

theparentsunion.co.uk www.theparentsunion.co.uk theparentsunion.org.uk www.theparentsunion.org.uk Have now been started up. They are in fact all the same website, but this is to ensure that the Domain Name is linked in cyberspace.

One of my favourite albums of the 70s was Dark Side of the Moon. This is an interesting alternative version in a Reggae style. Mainly I prefer the original, but This version of Time (I have linked to the start) is interesting.

Karen Wilkinson and I have today resigned from PWAS (Parents Want a Say). The group has achieved some notable successes in the campaign to reverse the term time holiday regulations but it is clear there are irreconcilable differences over governance and organisational development. We believe the issue of unreasonable treatment of parents by schools in terms of absence as a result of government pressure remains important and we will be creating a new campaigning organisation to continue the campaign in this area.

I have recently had a look at This post which references Martin Narey's speech about adoption numbers earlier this year. In that speech he said: I don’t think adoption can ever be suitable for other than a minority of children in care. But I think that minority is probably more than 5,000 or just 7% of the care population” This goes to the nub of the statistical misunderstanding that has gone on for over a decade. The number of children in care is a static number. The number adopted per year is a number of children per year. You cannot sensibly compare one to the other. Because children stay in care for multiple years you need to look at the numbers of children going into care (per year). I take the view that you need actually to ignore the children placed in care under S20 and also to concentrate on those for whom adoption is a likely option (the younger ones). The sad thing is that this innumeracy lies behind the drive to increase adoption numbers to stupid levels.

It was interesting to read today the proposals from Warwickshire County Council that the city region combined authority for Coventry should be one for Warwickshire as well. Frankly this is a bit of a no brainer. Warwickshire curls around Coventry and is clearly in the economic city region. It is only people who reside in the Whitehall that believe that Coventry is best placed with Greater Birmingham. City Regions work as units of devolution if they have essentially economic city regions of a city and its travel to work area. Hence Lichfield, Bromsgrove, Kidderminster, Tamworth and Redditch fit comfortably into the wider Greater Birmingham area, but Coventry does not. It always caused tensions in the past and will continue to undermine the common interest of a Greater Birmingham City Region if it is continued.

Maryline Stowe's website kindly invited me to do a guest post. I did this about adoption statistics . A response with questions has been written by Lucy R on the transparency project blog I have written this blog post to answer the questions and reconcile the statistics. All figures are figures for the English jurisdiction. Most (if not all) are based upon the SSDA903 return. The SSDA903 return is an annual electronic return from Children's Services Authorities to the Department for Education. It includes details of each change of legal status and each change of placement status for children in care. I have had additional analyses done by the DfE statisticians - which is what the source of the spreadsheets that I have uploaded is. The most widely known analysis from the SSDA903 return is the Statistical First Release. This is normally issued in the September after the end of the Financial Year that it is relevant to. Hence the 2014 SFR can be found in a PDF form he...

When I did my maiden speech in 2005 I had some research from the House of Commons Library about the Yardley Constituency. There has, in fact, been a constituency of Birmingham, Yardley since 1918. I think I have uploaded the maps prior to Yardley joining Birmingham (1911). From the 1832 Reform Act Yardley was part of East Worcester constituency until I think 1885. I have scanned and uploaded all the maps I had from the House of Commons Library and link to one of the documents on this page. If I have a lot of time I might organise them in a structure. Flickr allows paging through Images, however. Hence if you want to see what is available click right and left

The Ordnance Survey have uploaded here maps of the historic counties of the UK. These varied over time, but I have extracted the boundaries for Birmingham so show where the old counties used to end. What I found interesting was that Stoney Lane through to Walford Road were the boundary between Worcestershire and Warwickshire making the junction of the Stratford Road and Warwick Road fully in Worcestershire. Thanks be to the OS. I am not sure of the date and I thought that Harborne was at one stage in Staffordshire. Having glanced at Wikipedia it appears that Harborne moved into Warwickshire in 1891. This demonstrates the relationship between historic counties and current ceremonial counties in the North of England.

These photos are from my archives and I found them when getting rid of some old floppy discs. They were taken in the late 1990s. I thought they were an interesting historical record, however, so have uploaded them to flickr. I asked a question of the Prime Minister (when it was Gordon Brown) about bus regulation. I think the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is getting the powers to do this. I hope we make similar progress in the West Midlands. I don't think such dangerous driving is commonplace today, but would be interested to hear of any examples. I remember getting some media attention for the issue in the 1990s when these photos were taken, but beyond the GM combinened authority I am not sure any progress has been made on the underlying issue (Which is about sector tendering).

I spoke yesterday at a meeting of the Birmingham UNA about The Magna Carta and the British Constitution. We attempted a livestreaming of this, the bandwidth was too low. Hence I have uploaded the recordings. There were two short recordings of 1 and 4 seconds that I have removed, but there are two recordings of a quarter of a minute and then a recording of 1 hour 17 minutes. These are here: I have since updated this by trying to improve the sound and putting the three videos together. That is why the start is a bit disjointed.

First Set Second Set Band Website Livestream Website

I haven't linked to this Article by Ricardo Hausmann about Greece on my blog. I have referred to it on twitter, but I wish to have a record on the blog. With things getting much worse in Greece (unsurprisingly) the government there still seem to be unconcerned about reality. If the Greeks vote no then many of their banks will probably be insolvent in Euros as they will hold Greek Government Debt which is clearly not worth its face value.   I haven't looked at the balance sheets, but the greek banking system has a debt as a whole of about EUR 90bn to the ECB for ELA.  On the credit side they have government debt.  I don't know how much.  It is unclear what the discount should be, but it does not look good. I did make this point on Yanis Varoufakis' blog, but it has not got through the censors. Not surprising really as the government are campaigning for a no vote.

As a result of the assault by a Magpie on my laptop I have now obtained an updated laptop and am in the process of setting up everything to work on the new machine.  I had avoided leaving the XP operating system because I had a large email archive. I also don't want to use IMAP as I want my database where I can see it. I thought it would be a good opportunity to try out a number of different POP email clients and to write notes as to my experience of them. The first one I tried was EM Client. This was quite good although the cursor had a tendency to disappear in some circumstances. The next one I am trying is DreamMail.  This is written by someone in China whose English is not particularly good, but their computer programming seems quite good (although it crashed in a strange way to start out - this may been linked to trying to get the pop and smtp parameters automatically.) I particularly like the facility to import a *.dbx file.  In fact you can load a number ...

Elections are happening in Spain in which a party with a similar view to the Greek Syriza  (Podemos - We can) is putting forward an "anti-austerity" platform. The difficulty in government is that policies have to work.   The Greeks appear to have put a major hold on payments to suppliers prioritising employees and other objectives.  Inevitably suppliers have put a hold on supplying the Greek government with the consequent damage to public services.  On a cash basis they may have a primary surplus, but with a purchase ledger of EUR 4.4bn and spending EUR 2bn less than budgeted something has to give. Claiming that they have a primary surplus when it has mainly come from not paying suppliers is obviously misleading.  None of the Eurozone finance ministries are stupid enough to believe what the Greeks are claiming. Then again when you have this idiot as finance minister it is not surprising they have problems.  Quoting from the linked article: "Greece’...

It remains that some people (sometimes known as Freeman of the Land - aka FMOTL) continue arguing a case based upon a strange interpretation of the UK constitution.  This ends up with a strange distinction between common law and statute law and an attempt to argue really quite unorthodox things. I am not in itself opposed to things which are unorthodox, but if people do not follow the procedures defined in the UK constitution they should not expect anything to come of this.  I know of a case where someone's mental capacity was removed for relying on this.  I believe that decision to be wrong, but whatever it may be it does not help. Every so often people try to rely on these theories.  Can I emphasise: I have never heard of anyone succeeding in the UK on the basis of FMOTL legal theory.  I am quite happy to look in the comments at something. The most important point to understand is that the UK constitution is based upon a popular revolution from 1688. T...

People vote for all sorts of reasons.  Some vote as to who they want to be the local MP.  Others vote as to who they wish to see as the prime minister and there can be combinations in between. The postal votes in Yardley which were cast about two weeks before polling day gave me 40%, but on the night I only got just over 25%.  This has happened previously. I had been for some time of the view that the attempt at equidistance from Labour and Conservative was likely to be problematic.   Once we had gone into coalition with the Conservatives we would lose support from people who were unhappy with the government.  Hence if we go into the general election saying we might put Labour in we run the risk of losing support the other way. My personal view is that we should have campaigned for the continuation of the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition.  That would at least have had some certainty about it.  People tend to vote against risk.  It would also h...

This is from Table 241 from DCLG. Social Housing is important. For example families with disabled children cannot get adaptations to private rented property. Average number of completed properties. period private registered social landlord council 1980-1997 (Conservative) 159,495 21,953 24,415 1998-2010 (Labour) 161,068 24,800 487 2011-2013 (Coalition) 108,473 30,243 2,563 On average the coalition built over 5 times the number of council houses compared to Labour and over 5,000 more social houses in total per year. Year RSL LA Total 1980 21480 88530 110010 1981 19700 68330 88030 1982 13740 40090 53830 1983 16820 39170 55990 1984 17290 37570 54860 1985 13650 30420 44070 1986 13160 25380 38540 1987 13150 21830 34980 1988 13490 21450 34940 1989 14600 19320 339...

One of the threads of the General Election debate both in Yardley and nationally is what is happening to the more vulnerable people in society. All the vaguely rational parties (and I include part of the Labour Party in this) accept that we need to get government finances under control. The government has income (from taxes and levies etc) and spends money on services (the NHS, police etc). As it stands when the expenditure exceeds the income we have a deficit that needs to be borrowed each year. The government sells fixed term bonds which pay interest each year and then after a number of years the government pays back the capital. Each year also the government has to reborrow some money to pay of the bonds that mature in each year. If the government has a surplus (after paying interest) it can reduce the amount of debt by issuing less debt than it pays off. The government has been benefiting from being able to reissue debt at a lower interest rate.  This has reduced the ...

I had hoped that there would be a video recording of the Hustings at South Yardley Library, but sadly although there were people who said they wanted to do it. It did not happen. However, there was a video recording of the short presentation of the four candidates who went to the Birmingham Mail Twitter Hustings. I have extracted those comments for the four candidates. Jess Phillips Teval Stephens Grant Bishop Me Current Odds