The delicious irony of good intentions causing awful results

It's a golden age for unintended consequences. Everywhere we look the good impulses of large-hearted, high-minded people are undermined by the actions they've insisted on. One classic example comes from America where the placement of birds on the Endangered Species List is the single greatest cause of their disappearance. When word reaches authorities that an endangered bird has been discovered on a farm, they go out and protect its habitat – by fencing off the area and prohibiting anyone, including the farmer, from disturbing the area. Farmers who find a rare bird on their land will, naturally enough, do everything they can to kill it before anyone finds out about it.

It's a golden age for unintended consequences. Everywhere we look the good impulses of large-hearted, high-minded people are undermined by the actions they've insisted on. One classic example comes from America where the placement of birds on the Endangered Species List is the single greatest cause of their disappearance. When word reaches authorities that an endangered bird has been discovered on a farm, they go out and protect its habitat – by fencing off the area and prohibiting anyone, including the farmer, from disturbing the area. Farmers who find a rare bird on their land will, naturally enough, do everything they can to kill it before anyone finds out about it.

In the same sort of unintended way, building more roads creates more traffic; global warming may be preventing the next ice age; legal protection of tenants makes it harder to find accommodation to rent; meeting targets to reduce cancer deaths increases deaths from heart attacks; earning more money increases your debts; and as the title of a slimmer's guide says, dieting makes you fat Yesterday's paper reported on the danger that certain trees pose. For years, green activists have been telling us to save the Earth by planting trees.

"Do it!" one screamed out at the public meeting, aflame with moral purpose.

Partly as a result of that memory, I took to planting trees myself – oaks, willows and poplars without number (ah, when I was a landowner).

It was lethal. These three trees were named as terrible polluters, shocking producers of ozone. These secret assassins are responsible for asthma attacks. Ozone from the oak plantations in the Sierra Nevada mountains is killing indigenous pine forests downwind. I can't tell you how much that cheered me up.

Turning the page of the Sunday paper we came to the unintended consequence of government policy represented by the top-up debate. Soon enough, the children of middle- income earners will be charged substantial sums to go to university, and this will undoubtedly prevent many plumbers' and firefighters' offspring from applying. How has this come about? Why, from the Government's determination to get more people going to university. When 5 or 10 per cent of the population go to university it doesn't matter much how tertiary education is funded. Only when you set out on the egalitarian crusade to get 50 per cent going to university will higher education be reserved for the rich.

Turn the page again. The euro, which was going to bind the nations of Europe together, has already crippled Europe's biggest economy and laid the preconditions for a fascist revival. Pessimists can discern comparisons between modern Germany and their pre-Nazi past. Yes, yes, the effect of monetary policy on the German psyche is well established. After the ERM debacle, we in Britain know all about the effect of a too-high interest rate on an economy in recession, and now Germany does too.

But what of the elaborate Growth and Stability pact they insisted on? Has it produced growth or stability? Or unintentionally, stagnation, unemployment and a massive budget deficit, which will get worse when they have to pay a euro-sized fine of billions?

Unintended consequences are a constant rebuke to our control fantasies. "You can't change human nature," our cynical old parents used to say. "True," we responded annoyingly, "but you can change human behaviour. It's why we have laws." Yes, we can change behaviour, but not necessarily for the better.

Two great human characteristics – the exuberant complexity of our relations and our stubborn attachment to our private ways – help to defeat great minds and power maniacs. Calamity and catastrophe are a small price to pay.

Why Tony Blair is a beta parliamentarian

Tony Blair's victory as The Spectator's Parliamentarian of the Year was the result, so sources say, of a flying wedge of opinion consisting of The Guardian's Michael White and Channel 4's Elinor Goodman. It was an ingenious proposal of theirs, but it's a tribute to the power of their personalities that their choice survived the judging process.

There are aspects to Tony Blair in the House that really are pretty beta. Two years ago he worked out how to cope with William Hague. But he hasn't had to work out how to deal with Mr Thing. He does just as much as he has to; as a result, we can't tell whether he's really any good or not.

He has developed a series of formulas to base his answers on. They number among them: "That is precisely why", "Much done, much to do", "Our public servants do a superb job and don't deserve to be undermined by criticism", and "That is merely pathetic opportunism". They are quite maddening, if you have to listen to them.

When the formulas fail to provide him with a platform, he merely denies the substance of a perfectly good question. Thus, the Whispering One quotes from a National Statistics Office report, saying: "Is the Prime Minister concerned that more than a third of ambulance trusts are not well prepared for chemical, biological, or radioactive incidents?" The Prime Minister answers: "We should make it very clear that what Sir John Bourn from the National Statistics Office said was that there had been immense improvements ..." This mindless contra-assertion isn't alpha stuff, not for Parliamentarian of the Year.

Not that anyone asked me. I would have proposed Speaker Martin, the poor fellow that the sketch writers have run ragged. Awful people, really, show-offs, no respect.

He is a bit of a dormouse, Mr Speaker, it's true, and his beginnings were pretty dire – but he has done more this year to change the flavour of proceedings in the House than anyone else.

A committee had suggested he should foster more incisive, tightly focused questions. "I intend to do exactly that," he told the House last week. "I expect questions to be sharp and to the point: no long preambles; one member, one question; and ministerial answers no longer than a single printed paragraph of modest length in Hansard." It was as a result of an early ruling by the Speaker that Tony Blair dropped his big rhetorical device at the end of every question time – to misrepresent Conservative policy week after week, and jeer at them for proposing it.

There was one afternoon when Michael Martin stood up, took a deep breath and told him that Conservative policy was none of his business. The Prime Minister was there, in effect, to answer questions, not to ask them. That took some doing, I'd say, to take on the Parliamentarian of the Year on the floor of the House and to beat him. He subsequently shut up several lesser ministers, including the Chancellor. No, that's not as easy as it sounds. And presumably he lobbied the Procedure Committee to come up with its recommendation in order to give his ruling precedent. So it's a bit of a victory, combining several qualities we hadn't really expected in Michael Martin.

"I intend to enforce those ground rules," he told MPs. "In doing that, I may have to interrupt members in all parts of the House when they are in full flow." I only hope he does. Even prior to their getting into full flow. Even prior to their getting up.

Boom boom! Who's laughing?

Readers of this column may remember a parallel I draw every now and again between Britain's recent economic success and New Zealand's in the early 90s. In those days, in that plucky little country so far away, a brutal cap on public spending created glorious surpluses. But the government suffered in the polls and decided to spend surpluses amounting to 6.4 per cent of GDP on making the voters happy. Does this sound familiar so far? Public-sector inflation drove up interest rates, the economy slowed, tax receipts fell, the surpluses disappeared, the dollar slumped, the housing market crashed and the country went into economic retirement.

The parallel continues, does it not? This week, the Chancellor will reveal, after applying 6.4 per cent of GDP to Britain's public services, he has a black hole in the public accounts requiring borrowing of maybe as much as £20bn. Interest rates will rise, as they do. The housing market will crash.

Buy-to-let properties won't cover their outgoings and when they are forced on to a falling market the spiral will steepen. As houses halve in value, consumer spending will collapse; the world recession will add to suffering here.

The only thing that can save us, as far as I can see, is a short, sharp, successful war in Iraq bringing the price of oil down to $15 a barrel. Otherwise, panic is the only appropriate reaction. Boom boom! Bust bust!