For a true inheritance-squirm, do try the episode of Who Do You Think You Are where David Tennant, proudly flouting his victim-of-the-Highland-Clearance family, discovers his grandfather was a renowned Orangeman, pivot in a gerrymandering exercise. Fortunately, family honour was restored when it was found he had advocated better pay for nurses. Phew.

And he still refuses to engage with the issues I raised or he doesn’t understand them, I’m not which it is. The issue, again, is about claiming ‘ancestry’ as a significant factor, whether it’s hereditary Peers, North Korean “communists” or labour activists. If it is not an issue, why did he Tweet about it in the first place? Anyway, as far as I’m concerned the issue is now closed.

Having fallen for the “opening up to competition is a good thing” line all those years ago I fully expected us to now be in a position where we were spoilt for choice.

I live in a big town 20 miles outside London and in a 5 year old “new build”, with the only service being available to us is broadband which struggles to reach 2mb and we are only 1.5 miles from the exchange.

Whilst BT Infinity is expected this year, there are various stories suggesting it won’t make it to our estate as its not yet “been adopted”.

Very frustrating and not great for the UK if we continue to lag behind our economic rivals.

“One cannot fail to be struck by the persistence of the legal model in public affairs even where they are not concerned with law and order. It is as though we still wished to be ruled by a king sitting in his court, hearing the supplications of his subjects and granting then redress or favour. Development of a scientific approach to decision-making has had little impact”.

Thus I’ve always been fascinated to see how interesting innovations never survive once they start to threaten party political hegemony and patronage. Bob Hope’s great one-liner also sticks in the mind, “It doesn’t matter who you vote for the Government always gets in”! But the really serious and abiding example of this challenge at the center of our own constitutionality is well illustrated by the way we consistently manage to avoid any systematic link between public audit (what has happened) and budgetary control (what is proposed to happen).

A classic example is how those who wanted to reform Gladstone’s Exchequer and Audit Department (leading to the creation of the National Audit Office) originally wanted to see public audit directly informing the parliamentary supply procedure. One has only to look at Dr Leslie Normanton’s Evidence before the Select Committee on Procedure (First Report 1977-78). He explained how this was good practice elsewhere – as in Germany where the state audit body is fully consulted by their Finance Minister at their budget’s preliminary stages and later by the Bundestag’s Budget Committee. But while this is now established good practice in so many countries – it was avoided – and it is still avoided – here in the UK.

Thus, initially, it was a central issue with the 1994 Treasury Resource Accounting Green Paper. Indeed the then C&AG claimed that this “public expenditure planning” and proposed “Parliamentary Supply process” heralded the UK’s most important reform “since Gladstone’s reforms of the mid-19th century” (HC 123 Session 1994-95). And that had to mean parliamentary validation of supply! But following my own Evidence to the Treasury Committee (HC 378 June 1999) the Treasury called me in to explain that the (then) Chancellor was not very interesting in parliamentary innovations; that David Davis and his Committee of Public Accounts might be allowed to consider some statistical aspects of measurement but any overall parliamentary validation was not on the cards. And after much huffing and puffing Parliament was squared!

So given the central constitutional importance of this issue one of the main questions now – or at any rate very soon! – is whether the Treasury is going to incorporate an adequate process of parliamentary validation within their current Alignment Project? And for those who think this is just a totally rhetorical question, then Colin’s questions about future Coalition governments may be especially relevant. After all the House of Commons did begin to exert greater influence over governments in the limited period following the Reform Act of 1832 when the political parties were all relatively weak. As Professor John Griffith used to point out, parliament then enjoyed greater influence – but that unfortunately Bagehot and others took that very exceptional period as typical when constructing their erratic theories of the UK constitution “on what they saw or what they thought they saw”! Time to get it right?!

It would be interesting to see a list of the research outputs from Manchester Business School and other business schools clearly published on their websites. That way the taxpayer would be able to read the knowledge produced by their experts.