Nick Davies

Lord Baker is laughing . He is recalling the dark suspicions he aroused when he ran the department of education in the late 1980s. He dismissed them at the time as the whining of an establishment that couldn’t cope with change and he went ahead and rewrote the rulebook for Britain’s schools – standard assessment tasks, league tables, national curriculum, parental choice, local management of schools and, later, Ofsted.

The top man at Uganda ’s ministry of finance in Kampala keeps an old greetings card in his office. It shows an employee who has just been given a miserly pay rise and has gone to his boss to show him what he thinks of ‘trickle down’ economics. He is standing on the desk and peeing on the boss’s head.

There are not a lot of rebels in America. Most Americans don’t seem to realise this – they still think they’re living in the home of the free – but the truth is that the decisions of their daily life have become so commercialised, their self-image so puffed up with patriotism, their politics so encased in self-righteousness that this society, which is so keen to boast about its devotion to the individual, has become a cathedral to conformity. Nevertheless, a few survive.
Houston is a metaphor for all this. At first sight, it is the whole American nightmare embodied in concrete – 50 miles wide, littered with ghettos, ravaged by freeways, awash with drugs and crime and corruption – and yet, down on the ground, in the shadow of the arrogant skyscrapers with their hostile reflecting walls, there is yet life, creative, rebellious, human life. Which is where the Art Cars come in.

Travel: Cents and sensibility: Cuba : The last enclave of revolutionary socialism is struggling to survive, held together by optimism and a genius for improvisation. Nick Davies , with 18 months of a Cuban salary in his pocket, wonders if tourist gold is a cure or a fatal illness

ONE OF the biggest inquiries ever conducted into a complaint against police has confirmed Guardian reports of chaotic management and law-breaking in the relationship between London detectives and Jamaican Yardie gangsters who were working as police informers.

The crime game has nothing to do with policing in the way in which the public normally understand it. It has little to do with reality at all. It is a devious means of pretending to win the war against crime, which happens to be fatally flawed by the fact that it allows criminals to escape unpunished and the victims of crime to be cheated of justice.

BRITAIN’S biggest nursing agency is hiring out nurses to hospitals despite complaints that they are incompetent or even mentally unstable.