Cambridge University to introduce written admissions tests

Prospective students will have to complete assessment as part of their application ‘to prove potential to succeed’

Cambridge University is to introduce the tests in autumn 2017. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA


Press Association

Tuesday 2 February 2016 10.48 GMT


Potential Cambridge students will have to sit written tests as part of their application in future, the university has announced.

In a change to its admission system, the prestigious institution confirmed it was introducing written assessments, tailored to each subject, which will be taken by candidates either before or at their interview.

The move will affect students applying for courses starting in autumn 2017 – when in a major overhaul of the exams system sixth-formers will sit the first batch of new GCSEs and A-levels in some subjects.

In a letter to UK schools and colleges, Dr Sam Lucy, the university’s director of admission, said the change would provide “valuable additional evidence of our applicants’ academic abilities, knowledge base and potential to succeed in the Cambridge course for which they have applied”.

“This move is a result of responding to teacher and student feedback, a desire to harmonise and simplify our existing use of written assessments and a need to develop new ways to maintain the effectiveness and fairness of our admissions system during ongoing qualification reform,” Lucy added.

Cambridge University has been outspoken about a key plank of the government’s exams reforms – the decision to hive off AS-levels from A-levels to form a standalone qualification.

It has argued that for admission to its courses, AS-levels are the best predictor of how well a student will perform in every subject except maths.

In November 2014, it wrote to all schools and colleges urging teachers to continue to offer the qualification.

From summer 2017, sixth-formers will be sitting new A-level exams in some subjects, and existing A-levels in others.

In addition, while some schools and colleges will opt to keep one-year AS-levels and teach them alongside A-levels, others are set to drop the qualification to focus on the two-year qualifications.

One year on, Syriza has sold its soul for power .

Costas Lapavitsas in The Guardian


Alexis Tsipras has embraced wholesale the austerity he once decried

 

‘Above all, Tsipras and his circle were personally committed to the euro. Confronted with the catastrophic results of his strategy, he surrendered abjectly to the lenders.’ Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP


Today marks a year since a radical left government was elected in Greece; its dynamic young prime minster, Alexis Tsipras, promising a decisive blow against austerity. Yanis Varoufakis, his unconventional finance minister, arrived in London soon after and caused a media sensation. Here was a government that disregarded stuffy bourgeois conventions and was spoiling for a fight. Expectations were high.

A year on, the Syriza party is faithfully implementing the austerity policies that it once decried. It has been purged of its left wing and Tsipras has jettisoned his radicalism to stay in power at all costs. Greece is despondent.

Why did it end like this? An urban myth propagated in some media circles suggests that the radicals were stopped by a coup engineered by conservative politicians and EU officials, determined to eliminate any risk of contagion. Syriza was overcome by the monsters of neoliberalism and privilege. Still, it fought the good fight, perhaps even sowed the seeds of rebellion.

The reality is very different. A year ago the Syriza leadership was convinced that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of generalised financial and political unrest. The risks to the eurozone were, they presumed, greater than the risks to Greece. If Syriza negotiated hard, it would be offered an “honourable compromise” relaxing austerity and lightening the national debt. The mastermind of this strategy was Varoufakis, but it was avidly adopted by Tsipras and most of Syriza’s leadership.

Well-meaning critics repeatedly pointed out that the euro had a rigid set of institutions with their own internal logic that would simply reject demands to abandon austerity and write off debt. Moreover, the European Central Bank stood ready to restrict the provision of liquidity to the Greek banks, throttling the economy – and the Syriza government with it. Greece could not negotiate effectively without an alternative plan, including the possibility of exiting the monetary union, since creating its own liquidity was the only way to avoid the headlock of the ECB. That would be far from easy, of course, but at least it would have offered the option of standing up to the catastrophic bailout strategies of the lenders. Unfortunately, the Syriza leadership would have none of it.

The disastrous nature of the Syriza strategy became clear as early as 20 February 2015. European politicians forced the new Greek government to agree to target budget surpluses, implement “reforms”, meet all debt obligations fully and desist from using existing bailout funds for any purpose other than supporting banks. The EU calmly turned off the liquidity tap at the European Central Bank, and refused to give a penny of additional financial support until Greece complied.

Conditions in the country became increasingly desperate as the government soaked up liquidity reserves, the banks went dry, and the economy barely ticked over. By June Greece was forced to impose capital controls and to declare a bank holiday. Syriza attempted one last throw of the dice in July, when Tsipras called a referendum on a new, harsh bailout. Amazingly, and with considerable bravery, 62% of Greeks voted to reject. Tsipras had campaigned for a rejection but when the result came in he realised that in practice, it meant exiting the euro, for which his government had made no serious preparations. To be sure there were back-of-the-envelope “plans” for a parallel currency, or a parallel banking system, but such amateurish ideas were of no use at one minute to midnight. Furthermore, the Greek people had not been prepared and Syriza as a political party barely functioned on the ground. Above all, Tsipras and his circle were personally committed to the euro. Confronted with the catastrophic results of his strategy, he surrendered abjectly to the lenders.

Since then he has adopted a harsh policy of budget surpluses, raised taxes and sold off Greek banks to speculative funds, privatised airports and ports, and is about to slash pensions. The new bailout has condemned a Greece mired in recession to long-term decline as growth prospects are poor, the educated youth is emigrating and national debt weighs heavily.

Syriza is the first example of a government of the left that has not simply failed to deliver on its promises but also adopted the programme of the opposition, wholesale. Its failure has strengthened the perception across Europe that austerity is the only way and nothing can ever change. The implications are severe for several countries, including Spain, where Podemos is knocking on the door of power.

Syriza failed not because austerity is invincible, nor because radical change is impossible, but because, disastrously, it was unwilling and unprepared to put up a direct challenge to the euro. Radical change and the abandonment of austerity in Europe require direct confrontation with the monetary union itself. For smaller countries this means preparing to exit, for core countries it means accepting decisive changes to dysfunctional monetary arrangements. This is the task ahead for the European left and the only positive lesson from the Syriza debacle.

Written your child’s personal statement yet? Get a move on...

It is now so difficult to isolate a child’s contribution, why not go straight to the source – start testing the parents?

 

Co-authorship seems to be the order of the day. Photograph: PhotoAlto / Alamy/Alamy


Catherine Bennett in The Guardian

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the importance attached to personal statements, written to a formula, and not by the candidates alone, as part of applications to British universities. The longer it persists, the more farcical, unfair – and excruciating for students – this requirement becomes.

Every year, experts on the process refine their advice and share disdainful lists of cliches that should never be used to start a personal statement, such as: “For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated” (used 196 times in 2013), or: “Nursing is a profession I have always looked upon with” (178 times), thereby adding to the self-consciousness of students required to appeal, in around 700 fresh and original – yet thoughtful and relevant – words, to admissions tutors, some of whom admit they never glance at these exercises in supplication.

And why, anyway, the horror of cliches? They are not, most of these 600,000 or so young applicants, applying for BAs in Being Martin Amis, in a world where originality of expression is the key to worldly success. You need only read one of George Osborne’s op-ed contributions, or cast your mind back to the Labour leadership hustings, to appreciate that 17-year-olds are being held to far higher standards than middle-aged politicians.

If Osborne can begin a piece: “Britain is firmly on the road to recovery, thanks to the hard graft of working people”, and Cameron blither: “I’m so passionate”, and Corbyn believe that “Jeff wants to know” constitutes a compelling barb, why shouldn’t an aspiring nurse begin a personal statement with: “Nursing is a profession I have always looked upon with...”? It can only mean, in the nurse’s case, that in the event of a tiebreak between two equally qualified candidates, a more dashingly phrased as opposed to unvarnished expression of intent would be taken to indicate superior potential. How much British politics has to learn.

Now, to add to the pressure on our future accountants and chemists to demonstrate tenacity without tedium, vivacity without froth, research suggests that much of the advice given by schools to young statement writers is wrong.

Arriving just after the final deadline for this year’s Ucas submissions, a report for the Sutton Trust, written by Dr Steven Jones of Manchester University, may well cause consternation among candidates who have just put, for example, a declaration of commitment, carefully stripped of cliches, before proof of intellectual curiosity.

It was not unexpected, perhaps, that support with personal statements, routine in independent schools, should help students from comprehensives make more successful applications to highly selective universities. But Jones also discovered that some existing guidance may be counterproductive. “Admissions tutors,” he writes, “tend to value focused and sustained analysis of a specific topic of interest or case study rather than broad statements about a subject or attempts to make the statement more ‘personal’.”

He shows how one candidate’s expression of enthusiasm (“I am particularly interested in Victorian literature”), and explanation – “the social constraints and etiquette of the time are vividly portrayed, yet the novels of this period remain timeless” – was considered “bland” by an admissions tutor. “There is a much stronger way to put this tension.”

No doubt. Then again, the hapless candidate, who has, we note, commendably avoided the now deprecated word “passion”, is only aiming to please. It could be that the author is capable of stronger phraseology, on the febrile, emotionally explosive content of Victorian literature, but reluctant to go over the top, since she is applying for five different courses, in places offering conflicting advice on personal statements. Perhaps this application’s authors have been studying the university website, which holds up as exemplary the hardly less tepid: “Computing is a thought-provoking subject, covering a range of disciplines and has permeated every aspect of modern life.”

The writers might be focusing, instead, on transferable and relevant skills: “Your child can also mention how their current qualifications have broadened their knowledge,” the University of Bath tells parents. Except that qualifications speak for themselves. So don’t bother. Don’t mention sport. Try to be interesting, instead. OK, do mention sport. It’s character-building. Ditto the Duke of Edinburgh award, which has no conceivable connection with your passion for, sorry, interest in, medieval history. “This is your opportunity to sell yourself,” is Ucas’s charming summary of this exercise, one which appears to have few, if any, parallels outside the UK. So grab attention. But don’t be glib. Or a prat. “We want you to be different, but not TOO different,” one tutor told Which?, a whimsical preoccupation, perhaps, when English teenagers are ranked the world’s worst for literacy and not much better at maths.

But what is uniform, in all this advice, is the assumption that the statement is co-authored. The mothers who ask you: “Have you done yours yet?”, who urge early submission, to beat the crowds, and who go on websites to share about “personal statement hell”, are doing no more than comply with Ucas expectations, as they follow through on years of help with homework, securing work experience, renting violins. “Do ask people that you trust, like your teacher/adviser or parent/carer to read through what you have written and give you feedback,” Ucas says, advice that is unlikely to help tutors with the true state of applicant literacy.

Having never, mercifully, been invited to collaborate on a personal statement, I can’t be sure how tempting it is to tinker, redraft, maybe reword the thing, in line with Ucas hints and its stern warnings on plagiarism. Very, probably, when your child is effectively competing with adults, including dedicated coaches in independent schools, brilliant stay-at-home mothers and others willing to pay £150 for a shop-bought item, from, say, Oxbridge Personal Statements. Liberal instructions to parents – “Your child’s personal statement needs to create a strong impression” – confirm that its editing is, indeed, your duty.

While coursework is being phased out in GCSEs and A-levels, for reasons having to do with the lamentable shortage, in many homes, of parents qualified to write 3,000 words on Macbeth, personal statements continue to make parental competence, finances and cultural capital a factor in applications to universities whose graduates will dominate the professions. So long as inequality of access remains a theme in higher education, the survival of the personal statement, in its cheat-friendly, whole-family format, must vitiate all corrective projects.

Whatever happens to the Sutton Trust’s recommendations, that personal statements be demystified, perhaps reformed, its findings on admissions tutor preferences guarantee one thing: formal analytical passages, modelled on Dr Jones’s examples, will be all the rage in next year’s statements.

In fact, since adults are likely to supervise this development, it would save precious student time, time perhaps better devoted to numeracy and literacy, if the universities invited parents to submit the resulting creations to Ucas under their own names, with the child merely confirming it is the adult’s own, unaided work.

China accuses George Soros of 'declaring war' on yuan

Billionaire investor ‘trying to create panic for profit’, says scathing editorial, after he predicted the Chinese economy is headed for a hard landing

 

George Soros said China had left it to late to move from an export to a consumer-led economy. Photograph: Pascal Lauener/Reuters


Agence France-Presse in Beijing

Wednesday 27 January 2016 06.04 GMT

Chinese state media has stepped up a salvo of biting commentaries against George Soros and other currency traders as the yuan comes under pressure, with the billionaire investor accused of “declaring war” on the unit.

At the annual World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Soros told Bloomberg TV that the world’s second-largest economy – where growth has already slowed to a 25-year low according to official figures – was heading for more troubles.

“A hard landing is practically unavoidable,” he said.

Global markets turmoil echoes 2008 financial crisis, warns George Soros



Soros – whose enormous trades are still blamed in some countries for contributing to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 – pointed to deflation and excessive debt as reasons for China’s slowdown.

The normally stable yuan, whose value is closely controlled by Beijing, has come under pressure in recent weeks and months in overseas markets and from capital outflows. Authorities have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to defend it.

China’s official Xinhua news agency on Wednesday said that Soros had predicted economic troubles for China “several times in the past”.

“Either the short-sellers haven’t done their homework or … they are intentionally trying to create panic to snap profits,” it said.

An English-language op-ed in the nationalistic Global Times newspaper blamed “westerners” for not “accepting responsibility for the mess” in the world economy.

The comments came after the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist party, published a front-page article Tuesday titled “Declaring war on China’s currency? Ha ha” that was widely shared on Chinese social media.

Soros “publicly ‘declared war’ on China”, the paper said, citing the 85-year-old as saying that he had taken positions against Asian currencies.

But some readers questioned whether the official rhetoric could fuel Chinese investors’ fears.

“They say a lot of loud slogans, but do official media even know that Chinese investors are in hell?” said one poster on social media network Weibo.

“I’m afraid that Chinese investors will die in a stampede before Soros even shows his hand.”

In the 1990s Soros led speculators in bets against the Bank of England, which unsuccessfully sought to defend the pound’s exchange rate peg.

“The Chinese left it too long” to change their growth model from dependence on exports to a consumer-led one, Soros said, even though Beijing had “greater latitude” than others to manage such a transition because of its currency reserves, which stand at over US$3tn.

Back from the enemy country

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

RARELY are Pakistanis allowed to cross their eastern border. We are told that’s so because on the other side is the enemy. Visa restrictions ensure that only the slightest trickle of people flows in either direction. Hence ordinary academics like me rarely get to interact with their Indian counterparts. But an invitation to speak at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, and the fortuitous grant of a four-city non-police reporting visa, led to my 11-day 12-lecture marathon at Indian universities, colleges, and various public places. This unusual situation leads me here to share sundry observations.

At first blush, it seemed I hadn’t travelled far at all. My first public colloquium was delivered in Urdu at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) in Hyderabad. With most females in burqa, and most young men bearing beards, MANUU is more conservative in appearance than any Urdu university (there are several) on the Pakistani side.

Established in 1998, it seeks to “promote and develop the Urdu language and to impart education and training in vocational and technical subjects”. Relative to its Pakistani counterparts, it is better endowed in terms of land, infrastructure and resources.

But there’s a still bigger difference: this university’s students are largely graduates of Indian madressahs while almost all university students in Pakistan come from secular schools. Thus, MANUU’s development of video “bridge courses” in Urdu must be considered as a significant effort to teach English and certain marketable skills to those with only religious training. I am not aware of any comparable programme in Pakistan. Shouldn’t we over here be asking how the surging output of Pakistani madressahs is to be handled? Why have we abandoned efforts to help those for whom secular schooling was never a choice? 

To my embarrassment, I was unable to fulfil my host’s request to recommend good introductory textbooks in Urdu from Pakistan. But how could I? Such books don’t exist and probably never will. Although I give science lectures as often in Urdu as English, the books I use are only in English. Somehow Pakistan never summoned the necessary vigour for transplanting modern ideas into Urdu. The impetus for this has been lost forever. Urdu, as the language of Islam in undivided India, once had enormous political significance. Education in Urdu was demanded by the Muslim League as a reason for wanting Pakistan!

A little down the road lies a different world. At the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) the best and brightest of India’s young, selected after cut-throat competition, are engaged in a furious race to the top. IIIT-H boasts that its fresh graduates have recently been snapped up with fantastic Rs1.5 crore (Indian) salaries by corporate entities such as Google and Facebook.

This face of modern India is equally visible at the various Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), whose numbers have exploded from four to 18. They are the showpieces of Indian higher education. I spoke at three — Bombay, Gandhinagar, and Delhi — and was not disappointed. But some Indian academics feel otherwise.

Engineering education at the IITs, says Prof Raghubir Sahran of IIT-GN, has remained “mainly mimetic of foreign models (like MIT) and captive to the demands of the market and corporate agendas”. My physicist friend, Prof Deshdeep Sahdev, agrees. He left IIT-K to start his own company that now competes with Hewlett Packard in making tunnelling electron microscopes and says IIT students are strongly drill-oriented, not innovative.

Still, even if the IITs are not top class, they are certainly good. Why has Pakistan failed in making its own version of the IITs? One essential condition is openness to the world of ideas. This mandates the physical presence of foreign visitors.

Indeed, on Indian campuses one sees a large number of foreigners — American, European, Japanese, and Chinese.

They come for short visits as well as long stays, enriching universities and research centres.

Not so in Pakistan where foreigners are a rarity, to be regarded with suspicion. For example, at the National Centre for Physics, which is nominally a part of Quaid-i-Azam University but is actually ‘owned’ by the Strategic Plans Division (the custodian of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons), academic visitors are so tightly restricted that they seek to flee their jails soon after arrival.

Those who came from Canada, Turkey and Iran to a recent conference at the NCP protested in writing and privately told us that they would never want to come back.

Tensions between secular and religious forces appear high in Modi’s India. Although an outsider cannot accurately judge the extent, I saw sparks fly when Nayantara Sahgal, the celebrated novelist who was the first of 35 Indian intellectuals to hand back their government awards, shared the stage with the governor of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. After she spoke on the threats to writers, the murder of three Indian rationalists, and the lynching of a Muslim man falsely accused of possessing beef, the enraged governor threw aside his prepared speech and excoriated her for siding with terrorists.

Hindutva ideology has put the ‘scientific temper’ of Nehruvian times under visible stress. My presentations on science and rationality sometimes resulted in a number of polite, but obviously unfriendly, comments from the audience.

Legitimate cultural pride over path-breaking achievements of ancient Hindu scholars is being seamlessly mixed with pseudoscience. Shockingly, an invited paper at the recent Indian Science Congress claimed that Lord Shiva was the world’s greatest environmentalist. Another delegate blew on a ‘conch’ shell for a full two minutes because it would exercise the rectal muscles of Congress delegates!

Pakistan and India may be moving along divergent paths of development but their commonalities are becoming more accentuated as well. Engaging with the other is vital — and certainly possible.

Although I sometimes took unpopular political positions at no point did I, as a Pakistani, experience hostility. The mature response of both governments to the Pathankot attack gives hope that Pakistan and India might yet learn to live with each other as normal neighbours. This in spite of the awful reality that terrorism is here to stay.

Want To Reduce Abortions? Don't Stigmatise Sex

 

The religious conservatives are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women.

GEORGE MONBIOT 

Here is the fact that everyone debating abortion should know. There is no association between its legality and its incidence. In other words, banning abortion does not stop the practice; it merely makes it more dangerous.

The abortion debate is presented as a conflict between the rights of embryos and the rights of women. Enhance one, both sides sometimes appear to agree, and you suppress the other. But once you grasp the fact that legalising women's reproductive rights does not raise the incidence of induced abortions, only one issue remains to be debated. Should they be legal and safe or illegal and dangerous? Hmmm, tough question.

There might be no causal relationship between reproductive choice and the incidence of abortion, but there is a strong correlation: an inverse one. As the Lancet's most recent survey of global rates and trends notes, "The abortion rate was lower … where more women live under liberal abortion laws."

Why? Because laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent in places where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain, and in which sex and childbirth outside marriage are anathematised. Young people have sex, whatever their elders say; they always have and always will. Those with the least information and the least access to birth control are the most likely to suffer unintended pregnancies. And what greater incentive could there be for terminating a pregnancy than a culture in which reproduction out of wedlock is a mortal sin?

How many more centuries of misery, mutilation and mortality are required before we understand that women — young or middle aged, within marriage or without — who do not want a child may go to almost any lengths to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? How much more evidence do we need that, in the absence of legal, safe procedures, such sophisticated surgical instruments as wire coathangers, knitting needles, bleach and turpentine will be deployed instead? How many more poisonings, punctured guts and burst wombs are required before we recognise that prohibition and moral suasion will not trounce women's need to own their lives?

The most recent meta-analysis of global trends, published in 2012, discovered that the abortion rate, after a sharp decline between 1995 and 2003, scarcely changed over the following five years. But the proportion that were unsafe (which, broadly speaking, means illegal), rose from 44% to 49%.

Most of this change was due to a sharp rise in unsafe abortions in West Asia (which includes the Middle East), where Islamic conservatism is resurgent. In the regions in which Christian doctrine exerts the strongest influence over legislation — west and middle Africa and central and south America — there was no rise. But that's only because the proportion of abortions that were illegal and unsafe already stood at 100%.

As for the overall induced abortion rate, the figures tell an interesting story. Western Europe has the world's lowest termination rate: 12 per year for every 1000 women of reproductive age. The more godly North America aborts 19 embryos for every 1000 women. In South America, where (when the figures were collected) the practice was banned everywhere, the rate was 32. In eastern Africa, where ferocious laws and powerful religious injunctions should — according to conservative theory — have stamped out the practice long ago, it was 38.

The weird outlier is eastern Europe, which has the world's highest abortion rate: 43 per 1000. Under communism, abortion was the only available form of medical birth control. The rate has fallen from 90 since 1995, as contraception has become easier to obtain, but there's still a long way to go.

Facts, who needs 'em? Across the red states of the US, legislators have been merrily passing laws that make abortion clinics impossible to run, while denying children effective sex education. In Texas, thanks to restrictive new statutes, over half the clinics have closed since 2013. But women are still obliged to visit three times before receiving treatment: in some cases this means travelling 1000 miles or more. Unsurprisingly, 7% of those seeking medical help have already attempted their own solutions.

The only reason why this has not caused an epidemic of abdominal trauma is the widespread availability, through unlicensed sales, of abortion drugs such as misoprostol and mifepristone. They're unsafe when used without professional advice, but not as unsafe as coathangers and household chemicals.

In June, the US Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the latest Texan assault on legal terminations, the statute known as HB2. If the state of Texas wins, this means, in effect,the end of Roe v Wade, the decision that deemed abortion a fundamental right in the United States.

In Northern Ireland the new first minister, Arlene Foster, who took office on Monday, has vowed to ensure that the 1967 abortion act, which covers the rest of the United Kingdom, will not apply to her country. Women there will continue to buy pills (and run the risk of confiscation as the police rifle their post) or travel to England, at some expense and trauma. Never mind the finding of a High Court judge: "there is no evidence before this court that the law in Northern Ireland has resulted in any reduction in the number of abortions". It just warms the heart to see Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists setting aside their differences to ensure that women's bodies remain the property of the state.

Like them, I see human life as precious. Like them, I want to see a reduction in abortions. So I urge states to do the opposite of what they prescribe. If you want fewer induced abortions, you should support education that encourages children to talk about sex without embarrassment or secrecy; contraception that's freely available to everyone; an end to the stigma surrounding sex and birth before marriage.

The religious conservatives who oppose these measures have blood on their hands. They are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women. And they have the flaming cheek to talk about the sanctity of life.

Silence from big six energy firms is deafening

If this were a competitive market, our fuel bills would be £850 a year instead of £1,100

Patrick Collinson in The Guardian


 

UK consumers are not seeing their tariffs cut despite the fall in wholesale gas and oil prices. Photograph: Alamy


You cannot hope to bribe or twist the British journalist (goes the old quote from Humbert Wolfe) “But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.” Much the same could be said about Britain’s energy companies. You cannot call them a cartel. But seeing what they do without actively colluding, there’s no occasion to.

Almost every day the price of oil and gas falls on global markets. But this has been met with deafening inactivity from the big six energy giants. Their standard tariffs remains stubbornly high, bar tiny cuts by British Gas last year and e.on, this week.

If this were a competitive market, which reflected the 45% fall in wholesale prices seen over the last two years, the average dual-fuel consumer in Britain would be paying £850 or so a year, rather than the £1,100 charged to most customers on standard tariffs.

But it is not a competitive market. The energy giants know that around 70% of customers rarely switch, so they can be very effectively milked through the pricey standard tariff, which is, itself, set at peculiarly similar levels across the big providers. The advent of paperless billing probably helps the companies, too, with busy householders failing to spot that they are paying way over the odds.

The gap between the standard tariffs and the low-cost tariffs is now astounding – £1,100 a year vs £775 a year. Yes, the 30% of households who regularly switch can, and do, benefit. But why must we have a business model where seven out of 10 customers lose out, while three out of 10 gain?

The vast majority would rather have an honest tariff deal where their energy company passes on reductions in wholesale prices without having to go through the rigmarole of switching.

Instead, we have a regulatory set-up which believes that the problem is that not enough of us switch. It thinks that it will be solved by getting that 30% figure up to 50% or more. Unfortunately, too, many regulators have a mindset that is almost ideologically attuned to a belief in the efficacy of markets, and the benefits of competition. If competition is not working, then they think the answer is simply more competition.

What would benefit consumers in these natural monopoly markets would be less competition and more regulation. We now have decades of evidence of how privatised former monopolies behave, and what it tells us is that they are there to benefit shareholders and bonus-seeking management, rather than customers.

In March we will hear from the Competition and Markets Authority about the results of its investigation into the energy market. Maybe it will conclude that privatisation and competition have failed, but my guess is that it won’t. The clue is in the name of the authority.

• A final word about home insurance. Last week I said every insurer is in on the game, happy to rip-off loyal customers, particularly older ones. I received a letter from a 90-year-old householder in Richmond Upon Thames, who, for 20 years has bought home and contents cover from the Ecclesiastical Insurance company.

After seeing my coverage, he nervously checked his premiums, as he had been letting them go through on direct debit for years without scrutiny.

To his delight, he discovered that Ecclesiastical had, unprompted, been cutting his insurance premiums.

One company, at least, doesn’t think it should skin an elderly customer just because it can probably get away with it. We should perhaps praise the lord there is an insurer out there with a conscience.

Is Ecclesiastical the only “ethical” insurer, or are there any others who are not “in on the game”, asks our reader from Richmond. Let me know!