Personal Blogs

As the election campaign kicks off for real today, David Cameron has told us that we face a choice between him and Ed Miliband as the next Prime Minister.

What an arrogant thing to say. There is no fundamental law of the universe that says that the Tories and their mates in the Labour party have a divine right to take it in turns to rule over us. The choice of the next Prime Minister is up to the British voters, not up to David Cameron.

I'm not sure which makes me angrier. That Cameron takes the electorate for granted like this, or that the electorate will happily go along with it, voting for Labour and the Tories in their millions.

Congratulations to Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC for a powerful report on how Premier Foods treats its small suppliers: effectively making them pay protection money if they want to carry on working with them. This is important stuff, and deserves to be widely known about.

None of this comes as a surprise to me. Until recently I used to have a small business of my own, which I'd run for 15 years. It went bust this summer. There are many reasons for that of course, and one of them is no doubt that I wasn't very good at running a business, but another is definitely the attitude to small businesses that I'd found from some of our larger customers. We didn't come across anything quite so blatant as the Premier Foods example, but we did nonetheless find many of our larger customers insisting that we reduce our prices substantially if we wanted to work with them.

We couldn't afford to reduce our prices as much as was being demanded, so we lost the business. Eventually, I lost the whole business. There goes my retirement plan. Mind you, at least I found another job fairly quickly. I'd sleep a lot easier at night if everyone who used to work for me had also been so lucky.

Some may argue that what Premier Foods is doing is simply competition at work, and it benefits the consumer. They may argue that the businesses that can't compete on these terms will be the less efficient ones, and the ones that survive will be the good ones, so everyone wins.

I really don't think it's as simple as that.

Competition is a healthy thing in principle, but the problem is that when suppliers are under such relentless price pressure, it's going to be the quality that suffers. We've already seen what happens when people prioritise price over quality in the food industry: you end up with horse meat in your lasagne. So the businesses that survive may be the efficient ones, or they may just be the really dodgy ones that are prepared to cut a few corners to keep their costs down.

My own business was not in the food industry: we were in clinical research. Parts of the clinical research industry are very highly regulated, and our business held up pretty well in those parts. Clients can't afford to cut corners on quality, as they would fall foul of the regulators if they did, so mainly they were willing to pay a fair price to get the job done properly.

However, there is one large part of clinical research, which used to be a big part of my business, which is largely unregulated, namely the publication of clinical trial results in the medical literature. We took a huge battering there as clients took their business to cheaper companies in places like India. No doubt the quality was dreadful, but if it's unregulated, who cares? This stuff matters: doctors rely on the medical literature to make decisions about how to treat patients, and if research has been badly reported, maybe those decisions won't be the best ones. I don't know of any direct evidence that that is actually happening yet, though it seems plausible. I do, however, know of evidence which shows that clinical research published in low income countries is more likely to be fraudulent.

I'm not suggesting that tighter regulation is necessarily the answer. There are good reasons why clinical research is highly regulated, but those reasons don't apply to every industry. Regulation brings its own costs and inefficiencies.

It has been suggested that big businesses charging small businesses an "investment" (aka protection money) to do business with them should be outlawed. I don't think that's workable. Big businesses will simply find another way to screw small businesses, for example by demanding ever larger discounts. Unless you want to go down the road of full-blown communism, there's nothing you can do about that with legislation.

So what can we do about it?

Situations like we see with Premier Foods can arise, I think, for 2 reasons. First, there is a huge imbalance in economic power between big businesses and small businesses. I'm not sure how that can be fixed, but it really needs to be. Exempting small businesses from many of the taxes that large businesses have to pay (national insurance, business rates, corporation tax etc) would be something that government could very easily do, and I expect it would help. Though I doubt it would be enough.

The second reason is that we as consumers have become too fixated on price. If we demand the cheapest goods, then prices will come down, but we will get crap. I'm quite sure there is nothing government can do about that. It is up to consumers to think a bit more about whether they really want the cheapest things they can buy.

In the meantime, we will see good small businesses go bust, as mine did. The ones that survive may do so because they are more efficient, but I suspect that in many cases they will be the ones that are prepared to take a chance on passing off horse meat as beef, or whatever the equivalent of that is in other industries.

Is that really what we want?

Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, has just announced that there will be no referendum on Britain's EU membership if Labour win the 2015 election.

On the face of it, this seems surprising. I'm not aware of any good opinion poll data to back this up, but my impression is that while many voters probably don't care very much about EU membership, of those who have strong opinions on whether we should have a referendum, most think that we should have one.

This policy would therefore appear to have a risk of losing votes, and little prospect of gaining any. This is odd.

One possible explanation is that Miliband genuinely believes that it would be wrong to have a referendum and is acting on principle. I think we can rule that one out pretty quickly. Miliband is a career politician, and wouldn't know a principle if it came up and slapped him in the face with a wet fish. No, surely the real reason must be more calculating than that.

Another possibility is that I'm wrong about voters' opinions of a referendum. That is certainly a possibility: as I said, I'm not aware of any hard data to back up my hunch. However, I really would be very surprised if there were significant numbers of voters out there who strongly believed that it would be wrong to have a referendum on EU membership.

So here's my theory about why Miliband made the announcement he did. On the whole, the business community don't like the idea of a referendum. It creates uncertainty, which is always bad for business. My guess is that Miliband is thinking mainly about Labour Party finances. While I haven't been keeping up hugely with how they're doing, I'm pretty sure they're not in a good state, and the recent change to the rules about getting income from trade union membership will certainly not help.

By coming up with policies that will be welcomed by the business community, I suspect Miliband calculates that it will make his life easier when he is asking big businesses for donations to party funds.

George Osborne has recently promised to end the something-for-nothing culture. He doesn't think it's right that people on unemployment benefits should continue to get them in the long term.

He's right about that, of course. It would be far better for everyone if no-one was unemployed in the long term.

So what does he plan to do about it?

Well, when people have been on unemployment benefit for 2 years, he is going to require one of three things from them if they want to keep their benefits. Either they have to do "community work", such as picking up litter, or attend a job centre every day, or undergo training.

Let's look at those in turn.

Making the unemployed do "community work" sounds appealing. It would indeed end a "something for nothing" culture. Maybe we'd all end up with tidier communities as a result. But I'm really not sure exactly what problem it's supposed to solve. Is it supposed to get the unemployed back into paid work? If so, I'd love to know what the evidence is that it will do that. It's really not self evident that giving an unemployed person less time to spend in job applications is going to help them to get a job. I suspect that the real aim of the policy is nothing other than to look tough on so-called "benefits scroungers".

And what about visiting the job centre every day? How does that help, exactly? How much is it going to cost to employ all the extra job centre staff that will be needed? This option sounds completely pointless, unless the point of the policy is merely to make life difficult for the unemployed.

Offering training probably does have merit. But why wait 2 years?

All in all, these policies sound like they are aimed purely as a dog-whistle to core Tory voters who like nothing more than feeling superior to "benefit scroungers", rather than aimed at achieving anything useful.

Unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment, is a terrible thing. But it seems to me that neither of the two main political parties is particularly motivated to do anything to reduce it. Labour have an obvious electoral advantage from having as many people dependent on benefits as possible. Everyone knows that the evil Tories love nothing more than cutting benefits, so anyone on benefits, especially if it's become a long-term thing, has a great incentive to vote Labour. I find it hard to believe that Labour strategists are not aware of that.

I am struggling to think of any positive advantage to the Tories from high rates of unemployment, but on the other hand, I suspect they have little active incentive to reduce it. The Tories, for all the rhetoric, are the party of the rich and privileged. Unemployment is something that happens to other people, in the minds of most Tories, so why should they care?

If any of the main political parties was remotely serious about reducing unemployment, there is a really obvious way to do it. None of the main political parties shows the slightest sign of being interested.

If we want to disincentivise something, we tax it. That's why we tax polluting or harmful activities, such as driving or smoking.

And yet we tax job creation. Employers' national insurance, currently levied at 13.8%, is nothing other than a tax on job creation. Scrap that particular tax, and I can guarantee that unemployment would plummet. The boost to the economy would be huge.

But sadly, neither of the main political parties is interested in boosting the economy as a whole: they are too busy looking after their own vested interests.

You may argue, of course, that scrapping employers' NI is simply not feasible because of the huge hole it would leave in government finances.

Well, yes, it would leave a huge hole, at least in the short run, though in the long run you might find that it's more than made up for by all the extra economic activity it would create. Now, personally, I would argue that the government should spend a lot less than they do, but even if you insist that spending be kept at current levels, then there is an easy way to plug that short-term hole.

There are vast amounts of inherited wealth in the UK. The government could make a huge amount of money in extra taxation by massively increasing inheritance taxes, and closing all the loopholes that so many rich people (for example, George Osborne himself, who has inherited his own millions through a tax-dodging tax-efficient trust fund) use to avoid paying inheritance tax.

After all, we don't want people to get the idea that they can just inherit money, do we? Aren't we all agreed that the "something for nothing" culture is a bad thing?

We've heard a lot in the last few days about David Miranda's detention at Heathrow Airport. There are some things we know about this, but a whole lot more that we don't know.

What seems clear is that Miranda was in transit through Heathrow when he was detained by some kind of security services (though who was involved remains a little unclear: border officials? police? MI6?) for just a few minutes short of the 9 hour maximum allowed by law, and then released without charge.

What is also clear is that the Home Secretary, Teresa May, knew about the detention before it happened. That tells us that this was a deliberate and targetted action, and not border officials just happening to stop someone because he looked a bit dodgy.

After that, however, it all gets a bit murky.

Why was Miranda detained for questionning? If it was for any reason other than establishing whether he was involved in terrorism, then it was unlawful. The Police claim that establishing links with terrorism was indeed the reason. However, it seems implausible that anyone seriously thought that Miranda was about to start blowing things up or flying planes into buildings. Presumably the "terrorist" connection was that he was suspected of carrying data that would be useful to a terrorist.

Well, it seems (though I don't think we can be sure) that they found he was carrying data, given that they confiscated a whole load of his electronic equipment. So why didn't they arrest him on terrorism charges?

To me, that really doesn't stack up.

Then there is also the question of who made the decision to detain Miranda in the first place. Given that the Home Secretary was briefed in advance, I think we can rule out the possibility that it was just some junior front-line border officer acting on his own initiative. The Home Secretary denies that it was a government decision and insists it was an operational decision for the police.

Do we believe that? Hard to say. And if it was a decision from the police, how far up the chain of command did the decision go? Was the Met Commissioner involved?

These are important questions which I have not yet seen anyone in the media attempt to answer.

The story also goes that Miranda was carrying sensitive documents as part of the Guardian's investigation into the role of security services. This seems a little odd. If you have sensitive documents, would you put them on removable media that could easily be stolen (or even consifiscated by security services) or would you send it by secure FTP using a 512-bit encryption method? I know which I'd do. Why did the Guardian choose the other?

Perhaps you could argue that secure FTP connections can be intercepted. Well, maybe they can, especially if you have resources of the security services. But I think even they would struggle to break a properly implemented 512-bit encryption scheme. And even if they do break it, so what? It was their data in the first place. I'm pretty sure they know what's there.

So sending sensitive documents in person seems a little odd.

In response to recent events, the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger wrote about how the UK government had tried to persuade him not to publish any more information on the NSA leaks. He also claims that security officials from GCHQ oversaw the destruction of some hard disks containing the leaked material.

Apparently this happened about a month ago. So why wait all that time to report it? I have yet to see a convincing explanation of that.

And I'm sorry, Alan, but the story about destroying the hard drives really doesn't ring true. What on earth was the point of this? Are we really supposed to believe that officials from GCHQ with responsibility for computer data are so utterly clueless about how computers work that they are completely unfamiliar with the concept of backups?

The story just does not make sense. I'm not saying that Rusbridger made the whole thing up (though I can't rule that out), but it seems that at the very least some spin has intervened in the story or some important details have been left out.

Rusbridger is clearly right about one thing. Investigative journalism is under threat, though perhaps not for the reasons he thinks. If we had good investigative journalists, they would be asking all these questions, and maybe even answering some of them. It seems to me that the spirit of investigative journalism is simply not in fashion any more.

There's clearly much about the Miranda story that we don't know. Good investigative journalism might tell us what that is. But I'm not holding my breath.

We have recently discovered that the jury system, much beloved of the legal establishment, doesn't always work very well.

The jury in the Vicky Pryce case showed, by their questions to the judge, that they didn't really understand what they were doing. Well, I say "the jury", but in reality, I suspect it was just one or two members of the jury. Reading between the lines, I would guess that most of the jury understood perfectly well what they were doing, but one or two rogue jurors had other ideas, and weren't going to listen to what their more sensible colleagues were telling them. The questions to the judge were phrased in such as way that I suspect the sensible members of the jury were just making sure that the judge would explain to the rogue members what they had been trying to explain all along.

We've all heard about this because it's a high profile case that was all over the news long before the jury ever had to start considering anything. But I wonder whether juries frequently misunderstand things in all the everyday cases that never make it onto the news?

The legal establishment will tell you that the jury system is one of the things that makes British justice great. And I must admit I do like the way that it ensures that individual judges don't get too much power. There is something reassuring about being judged by a group of your peers.

But this has made me wonder whether we are really going about selecting juries in the right way. I am worried about 2 aspects of the way in which juries are selected: that they are conscripted, and that no consideration is given to whether the individuals picked are reasonable people who are capable of understanding what happens in court.

It strikes me as very odd indeed that we use conscription for juries in what is supposed to be a free society. The Royal Navy gave up conscription in 1814. They sensibly realised that sailors who were serving voluntarily were likely to be better motivated than ones who were only there because they had been compelled to be there by force. After almost 200 years, I would have hoped that the legal system would have cottoned on to that rather obvious fact. I can't help thinking that volunteer jurors would be less likely than conscripts to spend the trial listening to their mp3 players, for example.

I have no doubt that a great many people would volunteer for jury service, particularly if jurors were paid a fair rate for their time.

And shouldn't we have at least some sort of minimum qualification to be on a jury? Obviously it would be quite wrong to insist that jurors be legally qualified: that would defeat the point of being judged by ordinary people. I suspect the bar needs to be set quite low. Perhaps you'd need at least a couple of A levels to be eligible? Perhaps you could take a short test to check how well you understand the sort of things that are presented in court? I don't know what the best way would be: that sort of thing would be best decided by appropriate research.

It's very rare to hear any of the legal establishment criticise the jury system. It seems to be something of a sacred cow, and it's regarded as "just not done" for those within the legal profession to dissent.

But I can't help thinking that if the 12 jurors in the Vicky Pryce case were all there of their own free will and had demonstrated that they met some kind of minimum standard of suitability for jury service, we wouldn't now be facing the bill for an expensive retrial.

Recently, a lof of people have been warning David Cameron not to take the UK out of the European Union. This morning Michael Heseltine is in the news for this warning, but we've also had similar warnings from political leaders in the US and in Europe.

This puzzles me greatly.

Such warnings would only make any sense in a context which there was a realistic possibility that the UK might withdraw from the EU. I really cannot see why anyone would think that a realistic possibility.

Oh sure, there are some shield-munching Tory backbenchers who want us to withdraw from the EU, but that's nothing new. The same thing was true more than 20 years ago.

But I'm not aware of any evidence that the Tory leadership has any appetite for taking us out of the EU. Now, if Labour and the LibDems were united in wanting us to withdraw from the EU, then the desire on the Tory back benches might just about be able to topple the will of the government on this issue, but they're not. Labour and the LibDems are united with the Tory leadership in being firmly in favour of keeping us within the EU.

Let's face it, EU membership is good for politicians. Whatever the rights and wrongs of EU membership for the UK as a whole (and that's an argument I really don't want to get into today), the EU creates a whole bunch of extra power structures for politicians. Why would any politician want to give up power, especially the sort of power that comes with huge budgets?

I'm aware that there have been mutterings about holding a referendum on EU membership at some stage in the future. But surely no-one thinks that's actually likely to happen? If Cameron fails to hold a referendum on Europe after giving a "cast iron guarantee" that he would, why would anyone think there was any chance that he would do so after some far more vague promises?

So all these warnings about "don't withdraw from Europe" are deeply puzzling. People might as well be warning Cameron "don't nuke Finland", for all the connection these warnings have with reality.

My guess is that this is somehow part of Cameron's PR strategy. Rumour has it that Cameron will be making an important speech on Europe on 22 January. I wouldn't like to predict what he's going to say in that speech, but I will predict 2 things. First, if he promises a referendum on whether the UK stays in the EU, he will not deliver on that promise. Second, whatever he says will sound better in the context of all these warnings about not leaving the EU than it would have sounded had those warnings not been given.

All the recent revelations about Jimmy Savile are the latest in a long line of events where things seem to have gone badly wrong.

Remember the MPs' expenses scandal of 2009? Greedy MPs were claiming all sorts of things on expenses to which they were not entitled. A vanishingly small number were prosecuted, far more simply paid back the money. As if a normal person could obtain money by fraud, offer to pay it back when caught, and that would be the end of it. Many other MPs even got to keep their ill gotten gains.

That problem hasn't gone away, of course, they're at it again.

Much has also been made this year of the revelations that journalists at Rupert Murdoch's newspapers were hacking phones on an industrial scale.

And then we had the LIBOR scandal, in which traders at Barclays Bank were fiddling data on interest rates to make money fraudulently.

What do all these things have in common, apart from being scandals?

It seems to me that all of these scandals were, at their heart, caused by exactly the same phenomenon: a group of people in positions of power, who were not in any meaningful way accountable for their actions, and who believed (often correctly) that their power was such that they could do whatever they liked and get away with it.

There will doubtless be an inquiry into how the BBC and others allowed Savile to get away with his crimes for so long. Just like there have been inquiries into other scandals.

However, none of this will change the fundamental problem: that society creates power structures in which those at the top have so much power they can do pretty much what they like, no matter how antisocial or criminal it is.

If we leave it to our political leaders — some of the most powerful and unaccountable people out there — to fix this problem, then I'm afraid we are going to be very disappointed.

The Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, has recently announced a new Grand Plan to Fix All Society's Ills. This particular GPFASI is called "predistribution". The idea is that rather than tackling inequalities by redistribution (ie taxing the rich and giving money to the poor), Miliband will fix society so that the rich are less rich and the poor are less poor in the first place, so no redistribution is needed.

It has struck me how much this has in common with David Cameron's pet GPFASI, namely the "Big Society". The idea of the Big Society is that we all come together and help each other out, so the various mechanisms that the state has for helping people out will no longer be needed.

What do these two GPFASIs have in common? Well, for a start, they are both great dog-whistle policies designed to appeal to their traditional voters: for Labour, the idea of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and for the Tories, the idea of scrapping state mechanisms of looking after the vulnerable.

They are also both, on the face of it, splendidly desirable ideas. It really would be good if there were less inequality in society to start with so that government redistributive policies were unnecessary. It would also be really good if everyone in society was nice to each other and looked after each other, so there was no need for the state to get involved.

But the main thing they have in common is that they are both ridiculously idealistic and impractical. Both are couched in vague aspirational terms. Neither has the slightest hint of any specific policies that have a snowball in hell's chance of working in the real world.

There's a wonderful scene in The Life of Brian in which the People's Front of Judea sit around endlessly discussing the need to take action, rather than actually taking any. If you haven't seen it for a while and your memory needs refreshing, here it is.

This is exactly how our political leaders are dealing with the recent revelations of rampant corruption within the banking sector. It is clear that action is required. But instead, our political leaders are sitting around talking about it.

So what action is required? It's pretty simple really. There is excellent prima facie evidence that fraud has happened on a massive scale, and those responsible need to be prosecuted.

When I say those responsible, I mean not only the traders who were actually perpetrating the fraud, but also the entire board of directors of Barclays, and indeed any other banks found to have been joining in. Traders would not be breaking the rules on this kind of scale if the directors of the company had set a culture of honesty, rather than one of greed.

I am not a lawyer, so I'm not sure which specific offences may have been committed, but it seems obvious that if the allegations we've heard in the media have any basis whatsoever, then any half decent prosecutor ought to be able make a pretty good case under either the Fraud Act 2006, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, or (particularly in the case of the directors) the Companies Act 2006.

Prosecutions, with meaningful penalties (ie imprisonment) for those found guilty, would send an important message that this kind of thing is not acceptable. Directors of other banks would act pretty sharpish to clean up their corporate cultures if they thought that they could be held personally liable for any wrongdoing that happened on their watch. Fining the bank just doesn't cut it: what that actually means is that ordinary people saving for their pensions are the ones who get hurt, as I've written before. I honestly believe that going after the directors in this way would solve a lot of problems.

But that doesn't seem to be what our politicians are doing about it. On the one side, the People's Front of Judea Conservative Party are arguing that there needs to be an inquiry led by a senior politician. But the Judean People's Front Labour Party disagree, and insist that the ludicrous and transparent ploy to kick this issue into the long grass inquiry must be led by a judge. This kind of petty squabbling suits the political parties nicely, as they love to be seen to disagree, to keep up the narrative that there is somehow an important difference between them.

In reality, however, both political parties are united against the common enemy, the Romans ordinary British people. Setting up inquiries, or even better, arguing about how to set up an inquiry, is simply a way of avoiding taking any action.

Let's face it, politicians and bankers have a lot in common. It's not that long since MPs were perpetrating fraud on a massive scale in the form of claiming expenses to which they were not entitled. With the exception of a token number of politicians that you could count on the fingers of one hand who did actually get prosecuted, they got away with it. We already have a couple of token resignations from the board of directors at Barclays, but the bankers will probably get away with it too.

MPs and bankers are both dishonest elites who consider themselves above the law. Is it surprising that when the chips are down, they look out for each other?

No doubt much has been written about today's Queen's Speech, and much will continue to be written, but I want to focus on just one sentence:

"My government will introduce legislation to establish an independent adjudicator to ensure supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers."

Just think about that for a minute. We need new legislation to ensure that supermarkets act lawfully.

Er, hold on a minute: shouldn't existing legislation, by definition, be enough to ensure that everyone, even supermarkets, acts lawfully?

Apparently not.

Something has gone horribly wrong here. Why should we need new laws in order to make sure people act within existing ones? Well, I think the problem is this. Despite promises by governments of all parties to cut red tape, what actually happens is that governments seldom do cut red tape, but just introduce new laws in a steady stream. We end up with such a complete mess of laws that they become unenforceable.

After all, laws don't enforce themselves. We have the police to enforce the important criminal laws, but the police don't have the resources even to do that. When my office was broken into a few years ago, the police said they'd give me a crime number for the insurance, but that's all they would do. They simply didn't have the resources to investigate. And that was despite the burglers having a key, which narrowed down the potential list of suspects considerably.

So seriously, what chance is there that the police are going to enforce the niceties of employment or competition law?

No, the fact is that each new set of laws requires a new enforcement body. And most enforcement bodies are also under-resourced. The Information Commissioner's Office is supposed to enforce the Data Protection Act, but doesn't.

Even when laws are enforced, as I've written before, they are often not enforced in a meaningful way.

So I suppose there is some kind of logic to the new legislation. Supermarkets are probably breaking the law left, right and centre, but without anyone with the specific job of enforcing the law, they will continue to do so. So we need new legislation to enforce existing legislation.

This is madness. It is a clear sign that we have way too much legislation. What we need is to stop introducing new, unenforceable laws, and scrap many of the existing ones, which, let's face it, were mainly designed to make money for lawyers rather than serve any useful purpose. When we have a meaningful number of laws that are actually necessary, I dare say their enforcement will become a whole lot easier and stop needing new laws.

I heard on the radio this morning that a "government-appointed panel of experts" is minded to allow fracking to continue on the UK.

The "experts" have clearly decided that the benefits of fracking justify the risks. This is an important decision to get right. Clearly there are both benefits and risks of fracking, and weighing them against each other needs to be done accurately.

If we overestimate the risks and ban fracking needlessly, then we are forgoing an economically valuable activity for no good reason. That's not a good thing. Conversely, if we underestimate the risks and allow fracking and it then causes some kind of environmental catastrophe, then that is also not a good thing.

I can't help thinking, however, that a "government-appointed panel of experts" is not the right way to go about it. How do we know they're experts? Can we really trust them to balance the risks and benefits accurately? And how much is the poor taxpayer paying for them anyway?

I would like to propose a much simpler solution to the problem, based on straightforward free market mechanisms.

Rather than the ludicrously complex and expensive system of regulation that we have at the moment, we should do away with it all and replace it with just one single regulation.

That regulation should be as follows: any company who wishes to do any fracking should be required to maintain an insurance policy with a reputable insurance company that would cover any conceivable risk from the fracking process. If an earthquake in the fracking area causes structural damage, then the insurance policy would pay for fixing it. If any groundwater is contaminated, then the insurance policy would pay for the clean-up. If any other bad things happen, not necessarily ones that anyone has thought of yet, then the insurance policy would pay for putting them right.

Insurance companies have considerable expertise in judging risk. Far more so, I suggest, than a "government-appointed panel of experts".

If the fracking company can't find any insurance company willing to take on the risk, then that would suggest that the risks are too uncertain, and it would be right, following the precautionary principle, to avoid fracking until the risks are better understood. If the premiums make fracking uneconomic, then it probably shouldn't go ahead, as that would suggest the risks outweigh the benefits. To use a technical term, requiring the costs of the risks to be borne by the fracking company in this way avoids the negative externalities of fracking, and so makes the economics of it more honest.

If, however, the fracking company can pay the insurance premiums and still make a profit from fracking, then I can't see any reason why it shouldn't go ahead.

Wouldn't that be a much better way of doing it than having government trying to micro-manage everything? And who knows, maybe you could apply the same principle to other activities, besides fracking, that also have a potential for environmental damage?