I’ve spent the interstices of the past week trying to find some part or aspect of this country’s infrastructure that the Labour government has yet to break. It’s not been easy.

The score so far: They’ve broken the economy as comprehensively as any group of fanatics could; demolished Britain’s civil society; crumpled its Parliament and constitution, selling most of it to the lowest bidder, Brussels; crushed education beyond recognition; force-fed the health service so heedlessly it collapsed with a massive heart attack, while simultaneously starving the British Army and Royal Navy of resources despite sending them into unwinnable wars and never-ending losses.

As if all that were not enough, Gordon Brown’s long-term strategy of feeding welfare dependency has diminished the overall character and strength of the British people. Money for nothing is as powerful a spur as any drug. What do we normally call someone who peddles addiction?

Labour also set about dismantling the United Kingdom itself, blew up the banks and nationalized them — a long-cherished goal, whatever they may say — collapsed the nation’s biggest asset, the City of London, and finally broke the special relationship with America.

I’m sure readers will spot elements of this scenario I’ve inadvertently left out.

The question we have to ask is: how is it possible to do so much damage and survive politically for 13 years? One possible reason is that the visible effects of this cumulative destruction came rather late in the day, when Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair.

In other words, Labour has had the same catastrophic effect as a huge termite attack on the foundations of a building. Nothing seems amiss for a long time, then the whole edifice falls to the ground. Termites destroy without thought for replacement.

Was this deliberate, or were the perpetrators simply incapable of understanding the consequences of their interference in a complex structure that has evolved over centuries and has little immunity to rapid ideological bulldozing?

Everything Gordon Brown does speaks of his contempt for the United Kingdom, and of England in particular. While quite at ease using them as vehicles of his own power, strange aspects of his character reveal an underlying distaste for the country he has forced himself upon.

Two weeks ago it was pointed out that he has done irreversible damage to the historic despatch box he speaks from in the House of Commons. It seems he jabs his pens and fist into the box compulsively as he speaks. Any psychologist will tell you that’s a sign of serious repressed anger. It supports other descriptions of his aggressive behaviour inside Downing Street. He is said to throw mobile phones and printers at people who disagree with him, or bring him bad news.

So what is he up to now in the dying days of his premiership? He’s said to be colluding with Peter Mandelson, who has his euro pension to consider, in forcing the Lisbon constitutional treaty down Britain’s throat, against every natural instinct of the nation. This follows his earlier ratting on a manifesto promise of a referendum on the European constitution.

We also hear he is relaxed about handing over chunks of regulation of the City of London to Brussels, when he knows very well what they will do to it. Farewell, then, to the world’s biggest and best financial centre.

Finally, is there any consolation to be found in this knackering of the nation? It is that having foisted this brute on us, and kept him there, it’s unlikely that the Labour party will ever be re-elected to power.

Neither New, New Labour, nor the 19th-century variety will ever be trusted again. Scant compensation for all the uncreative destruction, though.

John Evans

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Now that the English language is said to be the world’s lingua franca — a strange term for it, I’ve always thought — we are urged to pay some attention to how we use our mother tongue.

The slightly daft way we British go about spelling our own language raises its head again. Occasionally I get taken to task by denizens of these sceptred isles for adopting the “ize” convention, as if it were an act of treason.

“Are you an American?” they cry in despairing tones. If you don’t know what the “ize” convention is, here is a clue: recognise or recognize.

The ize way is unquestionably from the land of stars and stripes, right? Non, Monsieur.

It traces its origin back to 16th-century England, and, moreover, it is recommended by Oxford University and its imprint, the OUP. If you look carefully at spellings in most books published by major British publishers, you’ll find the “ize” convention in use.

Curiously, newspapers almost always use “ise”, as do most of the population.

Those of us who don’t mind standing in the traditions of 16th-century England (remember Shakespeare?), use “ize” but also the other British conventions. For example, travelling, rather than traveling — although the latter does save on printer ink; cosy instead of cozy (why?), and got before gotten (another old English usage).

But we also prefer hooligan (Irish) to larrikin (Elizabethan, but used widely in Australia). The old Empire sometimes has the edge on us, I feel.

But, to return to the “ize” convention : why should we adopt it over the weaker “ise” form? I call to the stand our star witness: Inspector Morse.

Addressing Sergeant Lewis, who, not surprisingly, used the “s” way, he cited the Oxford English Dictionary and proclaimed that “ise” was “completely illiterate”. I rest my case.

The European Union is also dipping its oar into English usage. Have you noticed that pharmaceutical products made in Britain never contain water nowadays?

That’s not a response to a global water shortage but an attempt to smuggle French words into English. “Water” has now become “aqua”. Whatever happened to the Plain English Campaign?

Lingua franca indeed.

John Evans

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The extraordinary failure of the public sector in Britain, despite massive funding by the Labour government, needs some explanation.

The poster child for this disaster is Baby P, who died at the hands of monsters who were meant to protect him. The Social Services department charged with preventing it, failed so completely that no confidence can be placed in any similar organization anywhere in the country.

The people in charge barefacedly claimed they “followed procedure”, as if procedure were their only duty, not actual child protection. Failure of the procedure was the fault of politicians, not their own. Unhappily, that is mostly true.

The appalling rash of incompetence across most of Britain’s public sector, involving the police, child protection agencies, exam boards … and many other examples, highlights the need for a total reform of how Britain is governed.

Superdemocracy is an idea I had a long while ago while musing on the optimum hierarchy for any organization. It’s really a variation on meritocracy, so will be dismissed by followers of the postmodern tendency.

Imagine if you will the billions of decisions taken daily in businesses, agencies, governments, and other organizations up and down the country. Most of them will be made at nodal points where power has settled and accumulated over time, and where empires are ruthlessly defended. In other words, they will be taken well above the level of optimum efficiency — the Point of Maximum Competence.

A little thought reveals that almost all decisions are made at points where the decision-takers are not fully aware of the complexities of the task. In today’s technical society, that disjunction is growing all the time.

If each decision is depicted as a small arrow, it’s not hard to visualize most of them pointing downward, albeit by a tiny amount. Day after day, these billions of small decrements add up to a massive efficiency deficit, which can only be supported by vast quantities of public money propping up the whole edifice. They will also need statistical fallacies to claim success where failure is the norm.

Small businesses, by contrast, develop the expertise to avoid this tendency or they die, which is why they are usually the most dynamic elements in any economy.

Big businesses become more like governments as they mature, even creating social security and foreign affairs departments — look at Google and Microsoft.

But government is the principal problem. In the UK, central government operates the highly technical National Health Service, with predictably dismal, and costly, results.

Government also runs the State schools, transport and other big areas of public concern. It now appropriates getting on for 50pc of national income and employs 25pc of the workforce. Let’s call that, Decremental Drainage. The losses are huge and ongoing.

Governmental decisions are taken at the Level of Minimum Competence. In the UK, we also have the even more remote European level in Brussels — the Level of Maximum Incompetence. Why would any decisions, beyond essential cross-border issues, ever be sent to Brussels?

Conjure up a vision of decisions being taken much further down the food chain at the point where all the complexities and variations of the particular case are fully appreciated. Imagine all those billions of arrows pointing upwards by a small increment.

Jump forward a year or so and listen to that faint, distant rumbling of a tidal wave just visible on the horizon. It’s a tidal wave of MONEY. In the public sector that would translate as COMPETENCE, and hence lower public debt.

Look at any successful operation and you’ll see decision-making at the Point of Maximum Competence, or quite near to it. Examine any failing organization and you’ll discover decisions being made well above those levels by people miserably ensconced in positions of conceit and self-delusion. There is no exception to this rule. Decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, will always rise to the top.

All decisions therefore should be taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. The CEO role should comprise little more than shaking the milk bottles all day long.

Superdemocracy and representative democracy
Representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West, is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

Point 1, of course, is easily bypassed by determined politicians with a decent majority in Parliament. Elective dictatorship is a curse of the British parliamentary system, caused mainly by “the Sovereignty of Parliament” — but that’s another story.

As Churchill may well have implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of X Factor televised beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, “is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information and experience, while being ignorant of the complexities of the case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders paid for by the rest of us.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to the often hick-town amateur actors who rise to the top in the election process.

Using Superdemocracy as the principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the dilettantes of power and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Simply passing power downwards — or sideways, in the case of “devolution” — is not enough. A root and branch examination of decisions, and who takes them, is vital to rebalance the system.

David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, and the next Conservative Government should put constitutional change on its agenda as a matter of urgency.

John Evans

Well, that’s the Olympics over for another four years.

What! I hear you say, it’s only just starting? Are you having a laugh?

In modern times, the opening ceremony has become the Olympic Games. The rest is substandard minority sports played out by complete unknowns on behalf of various pharmaceutical companies.

A few score cyclists riding round and round a velodrome — how many know what a velodrome is? The Tour de France is a much greater spectacle.

Meanwhile, half a hundred rowers pull their way down a canal in a park. I don’t think I can stifle this yawn for much longer.

And all those athletes running round a track in pursuit of the big advertising contacts a gold medal will bring. Everyone wants to be a model these days. Whatever happened to real men?

For this, China has turned its capital Beijing into an armed camp, ringed by their version of Patriot missiles, just in case someone somewhere tries to disrupt the event. They have, but it’s in Georgia and it’s the Russians.

I have to admit though, the opening ceremony was without doubt the greatest show ever put on anywhere on the planet at any time. It wasn’t the most tinglingly enjoyable, like a big Royal event in London, but it had more Wow factor than any other comparable bash. It was massive, unremitting — it lasted four hours — and had a machine-like precision that was quite mesmerising.

Pity poor London which has to match that in just four years from now. Can a capital city every bit as ancient as the former Peking dust off its old bones and produce a show as scintillating as the new Emperors of the Middle Kingdom have done?

That is to miss the point entirely. Britain is not a command State like China. The English don’t go in for that kind of mass synchronized eventing. Anyone who has watched our football team knows how unsynchronized we can be.

We’re a nation of individualists who rather resent being pushed around by our rulers. Besides, we are more than a little ironic and prefer our patriotism laced with a great deal of humour. Think Gilbert and Sullivan and you’re on the page.

The problem London has is that its Olympics is in the hands of the same team that brought you the Millennium Dome, the Great Wall of Fire across the Thames that fizzled out like a damp squib, the Millennium Bridge that wobbled so much people were seasick crossing it, and a display meant to highlight 2000 years of British history that included a troupe of Brazilian dancers, snowboarding, an Irish presenter, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Way too much irony!

I refer, of course, to those prize Charlies, New Labour.

Tessa Jowell is the Olympics Minister. This is a lady who has been Minister for “Fun” for donkeys’ years and was demoted to her present position a year ago. She has never run anything in her entire life apart from bits of bureaucratic machinery. Naturally, the cost of Olympic contracts is rising by the week.

Her husband was allegedly involved in bribery scandals with the Italian Prime Minister, and such was the fuss, Tessa had to separate from him, while denying all knowledge of his activities.

Thankfully, London now has a real showman as its Mayor, one Boris Johnson, a chap who knows a thing or two about irony and has actually appeared on game shows. We should also have a different government in 2010, when David Cameron is almost certain to be Prime Minister — he’s 25 percent ahead in the key marginal seats.

Perhaps the most important point is that London can’t be taken over in the way that Beijing has. It’s essentially hundreds of small villages where the old fields in between have been built up over centuries. Many boroughs retain their villagey character. The Olympics will practically disappear when plonked down in that rather dismal part of London hollowed out for the even more depressing stadiums and fun arenas. Like the Dome, there will be no sign of it anywhere that tourists actually go.

I would like to be able to summon up more enthusiasm for this project than I can, but the Olympic Games has become a crashing bore. Only a bigger and more spectacular opening ceremony each time masks the fact that the sport is a sham and the nuts and bolts rusted beyond repair.

The irony is, London is just not capable of that kind of opening show. Amid the disappointment, we may finally realize that this overblown extravaganza is simply not worth disrupting our lives for.

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote a poem in support of a peasant’s revolt. When he presented it to the leaders of the uprising, they told him, “Our people won’t like this. Can’t you change it?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the poem,” retorted Brecht, “Change your people”.

Old Bertie would have made a fine President of the EU Commission in Brussels, for that comes very close to the European elite’s reaction to Ireland’s No vote in yesterday’s referendum on the proposed EU constitution.

Quick Recap for the Uninitiated
The original European Union constitution was rejected two years ago in referendums by the French and the Dutch. Had Britain been allowed the promised vote, it would have been slaughtered, but the No results on the continent saved Tony Blair’s face.

The bureaucrats of Brussels, urged on by Blair and Germany, then shuffled the pack, cut out a few cosmetic bits and renamed the document the European Reform Treaty. This is now in process of ratification around Europe. Only Ireland was given a referendum on it. Britain’s treacherous government under Gordon Brown defaulted on its manifesto promise and is currently forcing the treaty through Parliament to bypass the inevitable verdict of the people.

Yesterday, the Irish said No! … emphatically.
/Recap

This morning the EU is urging the other 26 countries to continue with their own treaty ratification processes, even though it requires unanimity to become law.

The simple fact is, Europe’s political class wants this “constitution” — so-called because it gives the EU a legal identity for the first time — while the people do not.

There are half a billion people against half a thousand politicians. Who will win?

The Commission’s legal team is already working on how to implement most of the constitution’s contents without the need for a treaty. In other words, smuggling most of it into law by the back door.

Why does Britain, the most Eurosceptic nation in Europe, put up with this ghastly authoritarianism? For the same reason we sleepwalked into two world wars in the last century. We preferred not to think about it until it became inevitable.

Sometimes apathy can kill.