BlackBerry is in the news as the “weaponised” encrypted communications system of choice for politicised riot organisers, there is talk that the police and MI5 have called in GCHQ boffins to crack the encrytion on the BlackBerry RIM data network.  On the other side over in Downing Street they also use BlackBerrys. After the last government was blighted by missing laptops, data and even “honey trapped“ phones, Downing Street think they have come up with a solution to protect the BlackBerrys of top aides.

Everyone has to carry around not only their government communications network issued BlackBerry phone, but a BlackBerry Smart Card Reader too, with another SIM card in it. If the two are separated by more than ten metres or so, the Blackberry stops working. So if a pickpocket stole the BlackBerry, it would be useless. Carrying two units in your pockets is of course a little cumbersome and inconvenient. Unfortunately from a security point of view, the wonks and spinners have taken to just sello-taping the two of them back to back…

Unison boss Dave Prentis isn’t exactly famed for honesty about his salary:

So imagine Guido’s surprise when it appeared Prentis got litigious on the Mail on Sunday:

“Last Sunday we said that Dave Prentis, the Unison general secretary, had secured a 31 per cent increase to his pension contributions from the union. This was incorrect. In fact as a member of the Unison staff pension scheme, Mr Prentis is paying the increase himself under the union’s ‘salary sacrifice’ scheme. We apologise to Mr Prentis for our mistake and for any distress caused.”

The Mail were close, but not quite there. The question they should have been asking is why should someone who is a member of a very generous union final salary scheme choose to sacrifice yet more money to pay into the scheme?

Well a good place to start in the hunt for an answer is Unison’s own Annual Report. Specifically page 16. You won’t be surprised to see that comrade Prentis is one of those unfortunate fat-cats who earn between £100,000 and £112,950. Someone on that money is subject to Gordon’s personal allowance tapering. This means his marginal rate of tax was 60%.

Rather than pay this rate of tax though, Prentis has engaged in some personal tax avoidance and paid the money into his pension, ensuring the state couldn’t get its hands on it. By doing so he has effectively got a 60% tax relief on those payments. Because the Unison financial year doesn’t match the fiscal year, its not possible to say exactly what Mr Prentis’s pay in 2010/2011 was, but Guido understands that it was not more than £99,999…

Only a fool would go out of his way to pay more tax and many up and down the country use this same technique to minimise their bill. However what if you scaremonger about this sort of behaviour for cheap political points? Five days ago Prentis said:

“The Government would be better advised to look at plugging tax loopholes for the rich and tackling tax evasion that costs us billions, rather than giving top earners a cash break.”

Did you have any particular “tax loopholes for the rich” in mind Dave?

A hypocritical, fat-cat union baron… Now Guido has seen everything…

In a well-managed, gentle appearance on the Conan show, Piers Morgan has surfaced to try to shut down speculation about his involvement in phone-hacking. But once again he has managed to get his story muddled just by opening his mouth:

“Paul McCartney is apparently now claiming someone hacked his phone, I suspect it was Heather Mills because in the divorce, if you study the divorce papers, Paul McCartney accused Heather then of hacking into his phones and passing information to the papers.”

Morgan has previously admitted having a tape of the couple’s voicemails and he used the content of it to spice up a piece that he wrote for the Daily Mail in 2006. Morgan has sworn blind to the public, and to his new employers at CNN, that he never knowingly published a story based on phone-hacking. So how did Morgan publish this story about Sir Paul McCartney, without knowing where the content had come from?

Give it a few minutes, but some popcorn worthy stuff from Newsnight last night:

There’s a rather warped transcript here.

While Ken shot himself in the left foot with his much derided linking of the riots to cuts, Boris has pointed his gun elsewhere – behind him rather than forwards though. Speaking on Today he knew exactly what he was doing when he said:

“If you ask me whether I think there is a case for cutting police budgets in the light of these event, then my answer to that would be no. I think that case was always pretty frail, and it has been substantially weakened… This is not a time to think about making substantial cuts in police numbers – I’m looking at the country as a whole.”

Given the Mayor didn’t have the greatest day yesterday, yet London was relatively quiet last night thanks to a surge in police numbers, you can see his logic. Though Guido wouldn’t have liked to been anywhere near Downing Street at about 08:20…

Michael Gove told Harriet Harman on Newsnight…

“…if there is anyone responsible for how these children were brought up, it is the Labour party”.

Yesterday Guido tweeted that he “Would bet that the majority of the homes of those looting youths are fatherless”. Andrew Neil chimed in pointing out that “Surveys suggest that in areas like Tottenham as many as 80% families have absent/no fathers. Similar to worst ghettoes in US… Pointing out most underclass families are fatherless [is] different from blaming single mothers”. The progressive twittersphere went spare, as if this observation was somehow controversial.  

It is self-evident that the welfare state has fundamentally undermined the family, enabling and actually encouraging fatherless families to become commonplace. This is a social disaster. Welfare incentives are powerful nudges in a negative direction. Downing Street wonks should understand that “nudge theory” works two ways, not always in a positive direction.

The scale of the problem is immense, in a generation since the sixties the percentage of births outside marriage has risen from 5% to 40%. Some of those are in co-habiting couples – which unfortunately are more fragile than traditional marriages – however the majority are brought up in fatherless households. A Civitas study found that children living without their biological fathers are more likely to get into trouble at school, to have adjustment problems and eventually go to jail. Iain Duncan Smith can’t solve deep social problems with welfare reform alone. Society needs to reverse decades of failed “progressive” thinking about the family and social norms. A culture which makes no value judgements about how we raise our children is creating tomorrow’s looters and rioters.