Sim-O

From Stephen Law…

Suppose I am very very rich, and very very selfish. The NHS annoys me intensely. It costs lots in tax revenue to run, and being very rich, I pay proportionately more of my income on it, and of course far more in terms of hard cash, then almost anyone else. I also resent the fact that my business empire is unable to cash in on providing the services that people would buy from my private businesses if the NHS was not there.

BUT, the public loves the NHS, even many Tories are fond of it, and to propose scrapping it would provoke howls of outrage. Plus there’s no evidence I can marshal that the public would get a better service if it were provided by the private sector – rather the opposite in fact.

What would I do? Here’s what I would do.

First, I’d ensure a team of expert PR run the Tory party – people adept at twisting facts, spinning, and indeed telling bare face lies and getting away with it. And I’d have my private health companies etc. fund them generously.

Next, once elected, I’d get them to introduce phase one: the introduction of a market system in which GP’s buy services from NHS hospitals, or anyone else, based on variable price, etc. This can still be called “NHS” because it’s still free at the point of use. This would all be justified by lies about how the evidence shows it’s more efficient, etc.

Read the rest.

So. It’s Valentines Day or whatever the official title is. Did you get you partner anything?

You did? Well done you. You’re either under the thumb of capitalism or your other half.

You either don’t tell your loved one you love them often enough or you need someone else to tell you when to tell the love of your life how you feel.

Have a good day, won’t you?

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

Following on from a previous post today on the subject of nationalisation/privatisation, 21st Century Fix…

[L]et’s change the focus please from public versus private to that of identifying and changing the cultures of the self-serving to customer-serving – wherever they may find themselves.

Stephen Law on the dirty word ‘nationalisation’…

…for some industries, that “competition” [that privatisation brings] looks largely notional. In the case of the railways and power companies, for example. And we all know that the government puts much more into running the railways now than it did when it was nationalized. And it had to step in when Railtrack went bust. The service remains an expensive disaster for consumers. So much for efficiency. etc.

When this ongoing disaster is pointed out, private ownership is defended on the grounds that the privatizations was mishandled, or done in the wrong sort of way, or the companies run badly, whatever. When publicly run industries don’t fare well, on the other hand, well that’s just because they are publicly, run, isn’t it, rather than run in the wrong sort of way? That must be true, mustn’t it? Because as we all know, “private good, public bad”.

My question is, why has it become the case that even to raise the suggestion that, say, the railways should renationalized is now unthinkable for most people? Why, when people consider how the problems might be fixed, does that option never even get considered? Is it really because the arguments and evidence for private ownership are so very good? (if so, why are so many other successful railways either state run or primarily state owned?)

Unspeak on the phrase ‘austerity measures’…

Take austerity measures, of the sort that “must” be imposed on countries by their own or other governments. Austerity implies a severe self-discipline of the kind that is laudable, virtuous in its serious asceticism. But who exactly is being austere in this picture? The Financial Times lexicon entry for “austerity measure” is, perhaps pointedly, ambivalent:

An official action taken by a government in order to reduce the amount of money that it spends or the amount that people spend.

Of course, these things are not unrelated, but a government that increases tax rates as part of its “austerity” programme is in the first instance asking people to spend more money – on it. I could be considerably more austere, in the sense of saving money, by refusing to pay my tax bill as well as not buying quite so many crisps. Naturally, though, we can see why a government proposing austerity measures would not want to call them “Give Us More Of Your Money And We’ll Spend It On Fewer Of The Things That You Want Measures”, or, I don’t know, wallet-fucking measures.

For those that don’t know, a ‘backorder’ is when you order something from a company and they don’t have it in stock, they get it in and send it when they have it.

To me that sounds an eminently sensible way to carry on. The customer gets what they want and the company keeps a sale.

Why then, am I encountering more and more companies that ‘don’t do backorders’? I thought in this climate of trying to get money out of people, keeping customer loyalty by not giving them a reason to go elsewhere, ‘doing’ backorders would be a must.

Strange, huh?

Good news for the crumblies, then. The default retirement age (DRA) is to be scrapped.

This is A Good Thing, especially as the age at which the state pension can be claimed is going to be raised to 66, which could’ve left some people without an income for a year.

Some people aren’t happy about it though. Step forward the Institute of Directors.

The Directors reckon it will reduce flexibility for employers and want the plans clarified. As usual, ‘flexibility’ short hand for ‘ability to sack people’.

Why should this bother employers? The ability to sack people is there for employers already. There are procedures that have to be followed. Criteria filled. If someone ticks all the boxes then an employer has no comeback for sacking someone. Age, per se, should not come into it.

There is an arguement floating about that this change in the law is going to screw young people coming into the job market. Old, employed people equals young people with no jobs to get into.

First of all, why should someone move over, just give up or be forced to give up their job because someone else wants or needs it? A young person may need to get a job to get experience and skills and start moving up the corporate ladder (I seem to remember reading that the longer a ‘youth’ takes to get from education to employment the worse off they are with regards to their potential earnings, career progression and stuff like that). An older person has bills to pay, a pension to finish topping up, and other commitments. One persons need is no greater than anothers. No one has an automatic right to a job.

Secondly, the jobs that the older people would be leaving are not necessarily the same type that the young person would be taking. There would be something of a skills/knowledge gap.

There was also something in the news, and I can’t find it now about maybe increasing the period that an employer can dismiss a new employee for no reason from one year to two. Once again, all in the name of ‘flexibilty’.

Flexibility may be what the corporations want, and some would argue need, but what employees need is at least a bit of security. If an employer doesn’t know if someone is unsuitable for the position after a year then they probably shouldn’t be in a position offer employment in the first place.

It would be nice to have these directors think about the people they employ as people now and again, not just another resource they buy in like the stationary.

Alex Gabriel at Political Promise has a sort-of-rant about the trains. I’m not sure how accurate the figures are Alex uses but they sound about right…

If Arriva run the train you need and you’d rather travel with Virgin, tough. Unlike buying most other things, we don’t get to choose the superior brand. The companies aren’t really competing, either, because we have to travel with whichever one has trains at the right time. They might as well have the monopoly that the Conservatives promised they’d take from British Rail, because there’s no real choice of service involved: we board the train irrespective of how good or bad it is, or else we can’t make our journey.

The same applies to public transport in general. Fields, lakes and mountains surround my hometown, and when last I checked it cost £10 for the twenty minute journey to the next town. Long distance bus companies which compete for better prices will take you from Manchester to London for half that, but local companies – like rail firms – can be as exploitative as they like because people who use them have no choice.

They’re not accountable, efficient or cheap, but don’t the train companies at least strengthen the economy with their profits? Well, no. Salford University published a paper which found that in 2002-3, taxpayers paid subsidies of £1.34bn to prop up the rail industry. That’s right – we’re actually paying them to rip us off, and they wouldn’t be profitable if we didn’t.

When British Rail existed, it received £1.07bn of the same subsidies, so ironically train travel is more tax-funded now than then. National Rail even gets £20bn a year from general taxation to keep it going. The Thatcherites said not to fund unprofitable industries with public money, but that’s exactly the situation we’re in – except with all privatisation’s downsides and none of its benefits.

Sometimes there is no market and trying to create one just doesn’t work.

A gang of top business leaders have sent a letter to the Telegraph endorsing George Osbornes proposed cuts (and I paraphrase here)…

Go on Georgie Boy. Do it. Be a man and make those cuts. You know it makes sense.

I’m not confident enough in my economic learnings to say they are talking bollox, but…

The private sector should be more than capable of generating additional jobs to replace those lost in the public sector, and the redeployment of people to more productive activities will improve economic performance, so generating more employment opportunities.

… sounds awfully like a call for privatisation.

Now, privatisation is all well good, but when a public service is privatised there are never as many jobs filled by the incoming private company, with wages for the workers usually being at a lower level, too.

It’s not that hard to create jobs where a gap has been create by withdrawing a service that had only on supplier, is it?

The trick for the business leaders, which would really help us out (apart from not using convoluted ways to artificially reduce their tax burden) would be to create jobs without getting their mate the Chancellor kicking people out of jobs in the first place.

Can I be the first to wish everyone a very merry Christmas, courtesy of Tesco Abingdon.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)