Sim-O

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)

WTF?

Not sure what to make of this…

The world of philanthropy got a huge financial boost today as more than 30 American billionaires pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes to charitable causes, signing up to a campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

As the article states, Buffett alone is worth $47 billion.

What, though, has prompted this? Have they finally realised that their children will have a secure future without having to worry about a thing with a fraction of that? Did these guys get out a calculator and realise that they could never spend it all?

Of course, not to put a dampener on the gesture, the pledge isn’t binding, but well, it’s a start. Maybe the next step is to make people realise they don’t need to amass these large fortunes in the first place.

I tell you what though, if Warren Buffett can persuade these guys to give away half their fortunes, maybe David Cameron should have word with him to get some of our rich people to help out with his Big Society plans.

What sort of tag line is that…?

Living Our Values & Ethics

I’m guessing it’s supposed to be all corporate responsibility but it’s a bit rubbish. After all, who doesn’t live according to their values and ethics?

It doesn’t even give you a clue as to what those ethics and values are, although it’s probably a big list that doesn’t fit on a shipping bag.

It’ll be about recycling and paying a fair price to their suppliers. You know, the things that are all the rage at the moment, that they didn’t give a shit about a few years ago and, like most companies, wouldn’t care again if they thought the public didn’t.

If you’re not ‘living your ethics and values’ you’re either lying or living a lie.

The Guardian…

A government efficiency drive aimed at slashing spending in town halls and boosting productivity in the health service is likely to deliver billions of pounds of new business for private companies, the Guardian has learned.

Outsourcing firms are preparing for a bonanza of local authority contracts to provide everything from bin men to back office bureaucrats and have reported a doubling in the number of deals on offer this year. Private health companies are also expecting to earn billions of pounds from the planned overhaul of the NHS in which GPs would take over responsibility for spending £70bn.

Executives at Capita, the UK’s largest outsourcing firm, said the number of opportunities for local authority contracts has already doubled this year and they see the healthcare market as “vast and potentially lucrative”.

Richard Marchant, head of local government strategic partnerships at Capita, an FTSE-100 company which already works for councils in Harrow, Swindon, Southampton and Sheffield, said: “A major problem for the public sector is, we feel, a significant opportunity for us. Opportunities are at their highest level in two to three years. This year we have probably seen a 100% increase in opportunities [compared with 2009] and I suspect we will see another 50% increase in the following year.”

The private companies are rubbing their hands together, then. The money to pay for these services still has to come from somewhere, and at the end of the day it’s us. Me and you. The taxpayer. We either pay it as a tax or direct to the supplying company. Or more likely, in taxes that then get paid to a private company that’ll provide an inferior service that’ll seem cheaper to begin with but will sooner or later cost a fuck load more than expected. PFI anyone? (New Labour may have enjoyed all the off the balance sheet perks of the scam, but they were a Tory idea.)

First off, and I’ve probably said it before, why can’t a local government provide services as cheaply as a private contractor seemingly can? I understand economies of scale and all that jazz, which local governments and councils should able to achieve if they get their shit together work together as some sort of buying union. But just as local governments don’t generally have the buying power of these big companies that take on the contract, they also don’t have the shareholders to look after either.

A lot of these companies that provide public services after privatisation or are contracted out are foreign, too*. This means not only are profits being given out that could instead have meant the service could be provided cheaper or more of it even, but the profits are going abroad and helping to keep another nations economy in the black.

What is needed is for councils to get together and sort their shit out rather than at the first sign of trouble start flogging stuff off and handing out the contracts.

*I am prepared to be shot down in flames at this statement, but even if ‘a lot of’ is a little er, generous, the point remains.

The Guardian…

The CBI today demanded that the public sector bear the brunt of Britain’s deficit reduction as it urged the government to spare the better-off from radical changes to capital gains tax

Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. What a surprise, the ‘better off’ don’t want to help pay off the massive debt that has been run up because of the crafty well paid shits that bet everyones houses on schemes that no one understood.

The CBIs’ director-general, Richard Lambert, …

set out a three-point plan for making savings in the public sector: controlling workforce costs through curbs on pay and hiring; eliminating waste and duplication through sharing back-office functions, outsourcing and more efficient procurement; re-engineering public service delivery, including treating more patients at home.

Fair enough. It is always good to try and find better, cheaper ways of doing things, but he also wants the top rate of income tax to come back down to 40% and to leave capital gains tax alone. This, he says, is because “mobile talent” will bugger off and it won’t increase the tax take much.

Capital gains take is stupidly low, for an income for doing fuck all, and if all these cunts rich enough to get an accountant to funnel their income through various channels and offshore companies, that are nothing more than an vessel to reduce their tax bill, actually paid their taxes, then there wouldn’t be a need for a 50% tax band.

So once again, a rich cunt, on behalf of other rich cunts doesn’t want to pay for the sheer stupidity and greed of other rich cunts that has screwed everybody. Makes you heart fucking bleed, doesn’t it?