This only underlines what everyone already knows: no Government act is independent from the political context in which it is carried out. Despite having no political figures leading it, the review panel has been told by Government what its findings should be; it will now proceed to confirm those findings. Michael Gove is a journalist turned political ingenue, while those leading the review are all involved in education and include some pretty big names – who have, ironically, reached their pre-eminent position by advocating and implementing progressive and non-traditional teaching, in an attempt to interest all children in school, not just those who would enjoy learning whatever style of teaching is used. However, the academics and practitioners on the review panel will have no opportunity to voice what they actually think about the way the curriculum should be reformed: they can never come to any conclusions other than those they have already been ordered to come to.

There is, of course, not much that’s new here; only, perhaps, the phenomenon of this political skewing of apparently “objective” reviews being reported openly and as a matter of course in the press. Governments have always used academically credible and politically impartial review panels as a mask for fulfilling their own agenda. The Rose Review, a so-called “Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum”, was Labour through and through. Led by Sir Jim Rose, who had long been a favourite of the Labour education policy people, it advocated in 2009 a massive overhaul of the the primary curriculum. It was clearly an enormous undertaking, consulting widely and emerging with some genuinely radical and well-thought-through ideas.

Of course, as soon as the Coalition took power around a year later, any steps towards implementing the Review’s findings were dropped immediately, and the Review was never heard from again, hidden in the archive of the Department for Education website. This is the kind of wastage that Government should deal with, over and above the ubiquitous “efficiency savings”: despite being an “Independent Review”, the Tories could not – even if they had wanted to – have used any of its ideas, for fear of assimilating what was effectively Labour policy.

On a personal level too, I find the ideas behind Gove’s new review somewhat chilling. He has explicitly said he wants more “facts” in the national curriculum, as if “facts” were somehow of value in and of themselves. Teaching over the past twenty years has shifted away from this idea of education as equivalent to the accumulation of facts, towards a view that it is concepts, skills and analytical processes that a child really learns at school. It is easy to see why: is it important to know the fact that George shoots Lenny at the end of Of Mice and Men? No, of course not. But it is important to understand the thousands of reasons why he feels he has to do it, his feelings afterwards, and how Steinbeck’s skilful writing allows the reader to understand the significance of this ending to this book.

It is Gove’s understanding of education as simply this process of empirical building up that offends me, and it provides a consistent conceptual thread throughout his policy. He has also denounced the idea that GCSE English Literature requires the study of only one novel – as if making pupils study ten novels in the same timespan would somehow make them better-educated than studying one in great depth; nevermind that fact that this is a minimum; and that as well as novels each pupil will also study a good body of poetry, and several short stories, plays and non-fiction texts.

I find myself agreeing again with Chris Keates when she colourfully says that teachers “want another curriculum review like a hole in the head”. This review is clearly nothing to do with what is good for teachers, and especially nothing to do with what is good for pupils: it is an overtly political act, and nothing more.

Select Committees do their work in the way that I think most people hope all work is done in Parliament: a group of intelligent and interested MPs sit down with the leading experts in the field, listen to what they have to say on a particular subject, discuss with them their areas of disagreement and debate, read and question the evidence from all sides on an issue, and then do it again and again until the ways in which Government policy needs to evolove become clear. They then produce a report which discusses this whole process in an open and transparent way, and make non-partisan recommendations for the way forward. It is a beautiful, obvious and, above all, sensible way of creating policy, according to the evidence and opinions of those who will be most affected by policy decisions.

Take homeopathy. Before the election, the Science and Technology Committee – chaired by the sadly departed Phil Willis (a Lib Dem) and a mix of members of the other major parties – took evidence and published a report on the efficacy of homeopathy. After following the process above, the Committee made its recommendations:

The Science and Technology Committee concludes that the NHS should cease funding homeopathy. It also concludes that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should not allow homeopathic product labels to make medical claims without evidence of efficacy. As they are not medicines, homeopathic products
should no longer be licensed by the MHRA.

The Committee carried out an evidence check to test if the Government’s policies on homeopathy were based on sound evidence. The Committee found a mismatch between the evidence and policy. While the Government acknowledges there is no evidence that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect (where a patient gets better because of their belief in the treatment), it does not intend to change or review its policies on NHS funding of homeopathy.

Beautiful. Clean, crisp, evidence-based policy recommendations, made by a Committee which despite having several Labour MPs contributing to the report – in the run-up to an election where they might well lose their seats – does not shy away from making robust criticism of Government policy where it is patent nonsense.

David Treddinick MP (he of astrology software expenses claims) promptly launched an Early Day Motion (basically, a Motion registering an objection to something Government is doing or not doing) attacking the Committee for various things, including taking evidence “from known critics of homeopathy” such as Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre – as if the only criterion for valid evidence would be that it comes from people who had never before criticised homeopathy! As far as I know, Paris Hilton has not publicly criticised homeopathy – no doubt she will not be overlooked next time evidence on its efficacy is required.

So, Select Committees are brilliant and Tredinnick is a bit of a loon: so far so good. Presumably, then, the Government will stop funding homeopathy? After all, the Committee is unequivocal in suggesting that the evidence supports this course of action, and David Cameron declared only two weeks ago that “I believe in evidence-based policy.” The perfect opportunity, one would think, to follow evidence-based policy and make savings at the same time.

The Government’s response to the SciTech Committee’s report was released a few days ago. Overall, it dismisses most of the original report’s recommendations – which were, let me stress, evidence-based – and says it will continue funding homeopathy. The most astonishing single sentence in an astonishing document is this: ”There naturally will be an assumption that if the NHS is offering homeopathic treatments then they will be efficacious, whereas the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice.”

The Conservative’s belief in evidence-based policy proves to be a fiction: ‘personal choice’ takes its place as the holy grail, just as it has in education policies such as free schools and the Academies Bill. This is where Select Committees run out of puff: while they are a fantastic idea, they are also totally toothless, with absolutely no ability to compel Government to take their recommendations seriously. Still, at least there is a silver lining to this depressing fact. The newest member of the Health Select Committee? Mr David Tredinnick MP.

On The Politics Show last weekend, Cameron came up against an eminently sensible and measured teacher voicing her opinion, and promptly rubbished all her many years of experience actually doing the job. The exchange makes interesting reading:

REMNEY MANN: The current research in England corroborates experience I’ve had in this country for the last eighteen years as an educator and it is that what really drives that quality in education, what really inspires creative and innovative teaching and fosters engaging learning experiences is not competition.  It’s actually collaboration.  You talk about choice.  Mr Cameron, isn’t that just a euphemism for competition?

CAMERON: I’m afraid we fundamentally disagree and this happens sometimes and there’s no point trying to softsoap you.  I absolutely believe that competition between schools and choice for parents is a thoroughly good thing, and of course schools in a locality can collaborate and work together and do things together.  That’s great, but in the end I do want schools to feel they are competing with each other, they’re trying to put on the best education possible, they’re publishing all their results and parents have greater choices.

I’m afraid – I’m not afraid – that’s what I believe, I really think that choice and competition, they work in so many other parts of life, actually choice and competition drive up standards and I think they work for education.

I completely agree with Ms Mann, as do every one of the other teachers I’ve spoken to. Collaboration drives up standards, not competition. To me this seems obvious: if I want to find a better way of teaching a certain skill, I will ask a colleague. If they have taught this area successfully before, their ideas will help inform and improve my teaching. If we have a Government saying that teachers are meant to share best practice, this scenario will translate across departments, schools and local authorities, meaning that more students get better quality teaching. The result: collaboration will drive up standards and improve outcomes for pupils.

Compare this to Cameron’s competition model: I have developed a great way of teaching a topic; and, as a result, the kids I teach do really well in their exam. When colleagues ask me if I have any tips to help them teach that topic, however, I say no: after all, competition is the name of the game – I want the students I teach to perform better than any others. As a result, the kids my colleagues teach do poorly in their exam.

So I win, yes? Well, in a way, I do – but if I see this as a win I should probably not be a teacher. Ms Mann puts it well in her response:

What we really need is education professionals working together and being able to collaborate without the fear of the competition, because choices will then be made which are business-driven and not really with the best interests of the children.

Education is not a zero-sum game: if I ‘win’ (i.e. my kids get great results) this does not mean that everyone else must ‘lose’. The education system should always strive to get the best outcomes for the greatest number of children.

My point is this: competition in education inevitably means that one set of students, one school, one borough will lose out because another needs to win. Instead, the Government should create conditions where every child will have the opportunity to do as well as they possibly can.

I was in America this summer, at the height of the healthcare controversy, and was amazed at the pure vitirol aimed at anyone who dared to defend free healthcare. Fighting for space on the TV, alongside seemingly endless Bible channels where earnest men in shirtsleeves spout evangelist nonsense in English, Spanish and Cantonese, footage of tempestuous town-hall meetings with Democratic Senators were all over the news.

In the papers, alongside seemingly endless adverts for POM-X Pomegranate Antioxidant Superpills™ (strapline: “Antioxidants are a necessity – not a luxury. Recession-proof your health with POM-X”), stories of Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and death threats aimed at these same Democratic Senators abounded.

What was the cause of this public disgust? Had these politicians finally gone one indiscretion too far, and drowned a bag of puppies in the Pacific? Worse than that: they had proposed that if a poor person has, for example, a brain tumour, he should be able to have it removed without losing his home.

Like many people in the UK, I find it difficult to understand why the idea that medical decisions should be made on the basis of a person’s medical need, rather than on a person’s ability to pay, should be so controversial. Considering what a hard time the performance of the NHS gets from the public and politicians in the UK, it’s worth remembering how lucky we are it exists at all. It is such a British institution that we can pretty much guarantee that whatever horrible things the Tories do in power, scrapping the NHS will not be one of them. It’s likely that whatever Obama’ administration is able to introduce, it won’t be anything approaching the NHS in its current incarnation: even with the growing raft of privatised services (dentists, opticians, etc), we still have it pretty good.

The main argument from the right against Obama’s plans is that they would amount to a government takeover of healthcare. Here’s a classic soundbite from Candice Miller, a Republican from Michigan, after the vote : “We are going to have a complete government takeover of our healthcare system faster than you can say, ‘this is making me sick’”. The fact that government involvement in public health is seen as a bad thing is instructive: in the USA, general distrust of government – and the possibility of government-run social projects impinging on personal freedom – is enough to win most arguments at the national level.

Of course, it all comes down to money: how much of it you have to pay for yourself and those you care about; and how much you are willing put in the common pot, towards the common good. Whatever the answer to these questions, I am certain of one thing: I would much rather be poor and ill in the UK than the USA.

It was instructive, then, that Conference season passed us by without any further mention of the radical changes we were promised. You could almost see them thinking, ‘It’s been three months – I bet no-one even remembers what that was all about!’ The closest we got was Gordon Brown’s speech, and that was deeply unimpressive on reform. Labour are such pussies that even in the almost certain knowledge that they wouldn’t actually have to live up to anything they proposed, the best they could come up with was a referendum. At some unspecified point in the future. On alternative vote. It’s a stunning lack of ambition, especially since Labour promised a similar referendum in 1997 and never delivered.

This is not good enough. So time for some wishful thinking: perhaps the most obvious and, at the same time, the most seismic of parliamentary reforms would be the end of the three-line whip. Here’s what the phrase ‘three-line whip’ means: a given MP has a strongly held belief that X is the case. On the order papers telling him what will be debated in Parliament that week, he sees that X is scheduled to be debated. His party’s whips office has underlined the details of this debate not once, not twice, but three times. An additional note from that office tells him that the party’s view is that X is not the case. The ‘three-line whip’ means that not only must he attend the vote, but he must vote with the party and against his beliefs. If he doesn’t, he will be effectively thrown out of the party. This means that no-one ever disobeys a three-line whip, because to do so would be to sabotage your career beyond repair. Come next election, you’d be out.

I find it absolutely astounding that an MP can be effectively coerced into voting a certain way. Surely this completely undermines the democratic process: we elect MPs because we trust they will work consientiously and believe their judgement is sound; but, as it turns out, their good judgement is irrelevant on the controversial issues.

Abolishing the three-line whip is an easy way to restore some confidence in a shattered system; but instead we are offered tweaks to the voting system which will make no real difference, and which we will have to wait years for. The whip is the best tool the parties have for keeping their MPs in line, and they can never afford to lose it. After all, as far as the party leadership is concerned, a rebel MP is a wasted MP.

I’m working in a Central Government department in Whitehall for a few weeks, answering letters from disgruntled members of the public. At lunch today, I found myself walking alongside David Miliband down the road to the Foreign Office entrance. With his purposeful stride against my lazy saunter, he quickly passed me, as did his harassed adviser in tow. As they passed, he turned to his adviser and offered a demonstration of his fabled fierce intelligence and political cunning: “Looks like it’s going to rain again.”

The prospects of both Milibands – Ed and David – have been talked up this week, with Ed’s Climate Change White Paper and David’s Afghanistan campaign dominating the headlines. Ed seems to have come out on top. David, I have heard it said, lacks the ‘killer instinct’ after failing to make his move for the leadership before the reshuffle last month. In fact, I think David is simply too clever to make his move now – who would want to lead a doomed Labour Party? Six or seven years down the line, when the media and the public have become slightly less enamoured with the New Tories: that’s when we’ll see the re-emergence of David Miliband as a frontrunner for the leadership.

In my opinion, Miliband is the most likely candidate for next Labour Prime Minister, in perhaps thirteen or fourteen years’ time, barring a Cameron-like rise (MP in 2001; party leader in 2005; PM in 2010) from a new Labour MP elected next year. Although the party’s most likely route back into power might be having a fresh-faced youngster at the helm, representing a complete break from this shambolic Government, I wouldn’t bet against Miliband somehow rebranding himself as a phoenix from the flames of the current Labour party rather than a central figure in it. After all, if there’s one thing that David Miliband is good at, it’s being a “politician”, with all that word connotes: the ability to refashion oneself according to what is politically useful.

A world away from these political machinations, a letter lands on my desk from Mrs —. Mrs — is a disabled 44-year-old with mental health problems, living on her own in a council estate which happens to be down the road from my flat. She composes 10-page narratives on her life, writing to Gordon Brown as if he was a personal friend. These end up with me, as she has a range of health problems and one of the few legible words in her latest letter is ‘surgery’. My job is to send her a stock reply.

Mrs — clearly needs more help than she is getting. Why is sending her a stock letter about surgery options the best that Government can do for her? What can be done to help her manage her life? To what extent can we make her life easier and more bearable in the context of limited resources? These are just a few of the many difficult questions, on all sorts of social issues, which need some kind of answer. So far, we are not getting it from politicians.

Everyone enjoys the political soap opera, but it has a major and detrimental effect on the work that Government and opposition parties can do on the real issues. The reasons why the media and politicians themselves are interested in the political soap opera rather than in complex social problems are obvious. The soap opera offers simple problems to which the solution is inevitably a change of leader. The harvest of this view for the media is a series of sensationalist headlines; while for the politicians involved it is the illusion of change – “now we are equipped to tackle the real issues” runs the cry. But, as everyone knows, they never really do get round to tackling them: because solving social problems requires an expensive, long-term commitment to measures which – gasp – may not even be headline-grabbing.

While second-home flipping and suspect renting arrangements are the stuff of which headlines are made, public scrutiny of expenses has revealed the weird and wonderful reality of some of our MPs. Let’s take…oh, I don’t know, David Tredinnick, Conservative MP for Bosworth. David Tredinnick has superb form in the field of, well, being an idiot. Over the years he has come out with torrents of rubbish, popping up to add his own ridiculous noise to any debate on homeopathy, alternative medicine or other new-age nonsense. In a debate on NHS homeopathy funding last year, his indignant support of public money being used to fund pseudoscience prompted one of my favourite ever soundbites from the House, from Rob Marris MP:

“In this country we use a lot of recycled water, but I am surprised that water, which supposedly has a memory, does not have a memory of the faeces that were in it and thereby make us all sick. My right hon. Friend has referred to research, but against that background is she aware of any peer-reviewed medical research that indicates that homeopathic medicine works through anything other than a placebo effect?”

This is about as complete a dismissal of a patently inane argument as I have ever come across. However, Tredinnick has often shown that he doesn’t need other parliamentarians to make him sound stupid. In one particularly enlightening speech – on the ‘evidence’ for alternative medicine – he wanders off the reservation completely.

“Another issue is the introduction of evidence-based practice, which tries to specify the way in which professionals or other decision makers should make decisions. Naturally, as its name suggests, it places a greater emphasis on evidence. The practice guide, however, asks for evidence-based design and development decisions to be made after reviewing information from repeated, rigorous data-gathering. That militates against complementary and alternative medicine, where there may not be a huge number of rigorous or repeated databases to work from. There is not a vast quantity of studies and that has been used against complementary medicine as an excuse. The methodology of assessing CAM might also be unfamiliar to primary care trusts. It might also be difficult to record accurately exactly how homeopathy, for example, treats. It is always different for individual patients, and that can be difficult to record. Sometimes, the treatments require a combination of remedies.

My next point is that homeopathy does not fit normal—that is, orthodox—methods of assessment. For example, the scale of prescribing is in reverse so that the weaker the dose, the more powerful or effective it is. That subject has always been hotly disputed by many doctors, but homeopathic treatments have been operating on the reverse scale of prescribing for 200 years. Some of the most powerful—the constitutional remedies—are so diluted that they can hardly be detected. There are similar problems with acupuncture and its acceptance, as some doctors and commissioners do not necessarily believe in meridians. The same issue occurs with herbs that are unknown in this country.”

Apart from the frankly loopy last paragraph (I find it impossible to believe that anyone could listen to his explanation of the “reverse scale of prescribing” and be convinced), my favourite part is his argument that the lack of evidence for alternative medicine might be used “as an excuse” for PCTs not to use it to treat patients. Unless I’m missing something, treatment decisions are taken on the basis of evidence that they work. Alternative medicine isn’t used to treat patients for the same reason that, say, cream cheese isn’t used to treat patients: there is no evidence that it is an effective clinical treatment.

Ben Goldacre, in his brilliant Bad Science blog, has long treated David Tredinnick as exemplary peddler of pseudoscience in public life, and, for anyone who’s interested, there is plenty more on him there. Personally, it makes me sad that the people of Bosworth have voted him in to Parliament on five occasions. Anyway, it is in this context that Tredinnick’s parliamentary expense claims, along with those of every other MP, have been published in full. Alongside the by-now-expected second home claim and £7,000 per year phone bill (no doubt essential for communicating with the good people of Bosworth), Tredinnick has made a rare unique claim: £210 for software from a new age astrology company and £300 on tuition sessions from the firm, Crucial Astro Tools, to learn to use it.

A quick visit to www.crucialastrotools.co.uk (and I highly recommend it for all your astrology needs), reveals that to spend £210 he must have bought the whole shop: from Solar Maps 3 (“complete tools for the locational astrologer”) to the £19 Galastro and £15 Astrological Mandalas (apparently, the world of astrology is even allowed to invent its own words!). Well, I hope he got good parliamentary use out of them – if £300-worth of tuition didn’t at least ensure that I’m inclined to demand my money back.

David Tredinnick is, unfortunately, not retiring at the next election; and, with a 5,319 majority even in the context of an overall Labour victory, it looks like the citizens of Bosworth will stand up and be counted once more. I look forward to many more years of spurious nonsense from this man’s good offices.

Now I didn’t vote Jury Team, and neither did anyone I know. In fact, most people I know had never even heard of Jury Team; and most of those that had heard of them had done so only because I’ve been asking about it. This is obviously a fundamental problem: that I can visit their website, read all about the candidates, proselytise about the concept of the party, and yet still not vote for them.

There are many things standing between Jury Team and widespread support, perhaps the two most serious being the lack of exposure and funding (compared to the other parties), and the lack of quality candidates for election (a major problem for all parties). I have no answers to the issue of funding or exposure; but the lines along which the party is run could – over time – attract high quality candidates; and, crucially, candidates who are in politics for the right reasons.

A MORI poll done a few days ago investigated people’s attitudes to our elected representatives in Parliament, and whether they are satisfactorily working to represent the views of those who elected them. The results are not surprising: less than 10% of people believe MPs are working for their constituents.

It is important to notice that this is not just in the wake of the expenses scandal, but a more-or-less constant figure over the last 15 years. While the expenses debacle suggests that MPs are working a little more for themselves, a little less for the party, it is clear that the popular perception is that MPs work for themselves or for their party, but not for their constituents.

The comparison with 1994 suggests that this has long been the case; in fact, there is evidence that even in 1944 around 70% of people believed MPs to be in it only for themselves or their party. Now, the majority of people surveyed will not be politically aware (an enormous problem in itself), and many may believe everything they read in the Daily Mail about “snouts in the trough” (an enormous problem, etc). But in this case, there is most definitely no smoke without fire. It has become clearer than ever in the past few weeks that a large number of MPs are working only for themselves or, at best, their party – when in fact their job is to represent their consituents.

The Jury Team position – that MPs who are elected on principles and not craven to a party message might be ‘better’ in these terms – deserves some thought. Of course, Jury Team could never be the party of Government, but it might act as a genuine alternative party for prospective candidates who would prefer not to have to swallow wholesale the policies of one of the major parties, and with it the attendent sniping at whoever ‘the opposition’ happens to be. I see the idea Jury Team have as allowing independents the benefit of the party apparatus (in terms of campaigning and raising support) without the need to repress your judgement in the name of party unity.

No doubt the party as it currently stands will be ground down through a series of deposit-forfeiting results at by-elections, and then eviscerated at the General Election by the first-past-the-post system. But the rise of Jury Team could mark the beginning of a new template for political independence. At its best, it could make being an Independent MP more effective and worthwhile, and allow Independents to fulfill their ideological function: to hold Government to account, not on the basis of party politics, but on the basis of principle.