Private Finance Initiative – Or Why We’re All Broke
I’m trying to get back to posting at least something here every day… as my comic shop still has no League, and the Star Trek film doesn’t have much to say about it, you’re getting a politics post.
Before I start, as with many of my posts, this will be wrong in detail. I’m trying to give a broad overview here, so it’s full of sweeping generalisations. If you don’t want sweeping generalisations, don’t read my stuff, look at the wikipedia page for PFI instead…(that Wikipedia entry is being accused of bias at the moment, and I can see why, but it’s just because there really is only one side to this…)
Those of you who are, like me, fans of 1980s Thatcherite sitcom Yes, Minister, will remember one particularly funny episode. In it Sir Humphrey is trying desperately to keep the fact that he made a cock-up thirty years ago hidden, because it was such a momentous blunder that, were it found out who was responsible, he would face instant dismissal.
What he’d done was get a private firm to build an army barracks, so the initial expense would be less, agree to pay the costs over thirty years, then let the private firm own the buildings at the end of that time. A stupid decision, of course, but that satirical decision has for the last couple of decades been the basis of British economic policy, under the name of the Private Finance Initiative.
Now PFI is a boring name, and many people thus gloss over the details of this when it’s mentioned in newspapers, so perhaps a better name for it would be Greedy Boomers Stealing From Their Children. Certainly it would be a more accurate name.
What PFI essentially means is that if you want, say, a new hospital, the government makes an agreement with a private company to build and maintain it. The contract goes over thirty years or so, and then at the end of that time what happens depends on the contracts. The earlier ones, implemented 17 years ago, had clauses which say ownership reverts to the private company I believe, while later ones tend to more sensibly say the government owns them. But we can’t be sure, because the contracts are often ‘commercially sensitive’.
In itself, this isn’t too dreadful in principle, even though it adds a huge (30% or so) overhead to the cost… but principle and practice are two very different things. In practice the PFI is a fast-track to complete economic destruction. Here’s why:
The reason PFI is attractive to governments is that it doesn’t appear on the balance sheets – it’s not money ‘borrowed’, so doesn’t count towards the national debt, but you also don’t have to pay it all at once. It’s like being given a credit card that somehow doesn’t impact your credit rating, no matter how much you spend, so long as you make the minimum payments. This means the government can announce massive amounts of spending without putting tax rates up. I’m sure you can see some of the problems that can come from that.
But that’s not the only problem – PFI often becomes the only method by which funding happens for services, and this can be catastrophic. Take this entirely-hypothetical-and-nothing-to-do-with-any-organisations-I-used-to-work-for-honestly example:
Say you’re an NHS trust, and you have a unit with four twenty-bed wards, but it’s becoming run down – it’s forty years old or so, and it needs work doing. But you haven’t got enough money to do all the work – it’s serious business, after all, renovating hospital wards, and requires serious money. So you ask the central government for funding.
Now, you can’t use PFI for renovations, only for new builds. So the government say “No, we can’t give you money for that, but we can give you an entire new unit as part of a PFI scheme. Of course, you’ll still have to pay a few million up front, and make the rest of the payments on time, but you’ll get a new unit along with a service contract.
So the trust agree to get a totally new building, but they will have to give all their staff a pay freeze for a few years, not even giving them legally mandated raises, to raise the few million they have to pay themselves. And the new unit will have to be smaller than the old one, of course, because the PFI funds don’t stretch that far. But they go ahead because they’ve got no choice…
And two years later huge cracks are appearing in the walls, the lift doesn’t work, the air conditioning’s broken and staff are going off sick, never mind the patients. But you can’t do anything because the company that built it (usually one of the very big construction firms who are very litigious, so I won’t name any, but I’m sure most of you can think of one or two that fit the bill) are also the maintenance people, and they get the money regardless of quality of service.
Meanwhile, while patients are having rain dripped on them from leaky roofs, the government boasts about how much money it’s spent on the NHS. This is why no matter how much money the government claim to be pumping into things, services constantly get worse – the money isn’t going anywhere where it could be useful, but just to enrich already bloated businesses.
And then to make matters worse, the government ‘has to’ keep those companies afloat so they can continue to provide their ‘service’ (because the hospitals belong to the company until they’re paid for), so now, because of the recession, the government is paying billions in bailout money to keep those companies going so it can keep paying them money for providing an expensive, substandard service.
And all this is just because ever since Thatcher got in, just over thirty years ago, the most spoiled, narcissistic, greedy generation ever to have been born in human history has insisted on having the best possible services for itself without paying. Whether this means pulling the ladder up after them for charging for services they don’t need (like saddling the younger generations with debts for attending universities that they attended for free), or just racking up mountains of government debt and postponing paying it off until they are retired or dead, political culture for my entire lifetime has been based on the idea of getting anyone born after about 1956 or so to pay for the rest of their life for whatever their elders want.
We need, urgently, to get rid of the idea that you can have good services and not pay for them – if nothing else because actually being honest about the payments is vastly cheaper and more efficient in the medium-to-long term. Government projects should only be paid for either by direct taxation or by money borrowed and added to the national debt in a proper, above-board manner. Anything else is inviting the kind of financial catastrophe we’re going through now…
Westminster, So Much To Answer For…
So now, we in Manchester are apparently going to be the first people ‘allowed’ to apply to pay £60 for ID cards. Lucky, lucky, lucky us. Is this like that time when we were allowed to be the first people to not have the right to speak to a duty solicitor? I know that was an entirely popular, well-thought-out move too…
Even ignoring all the many, many arguments against an ID database, and the fact that there isn’t a single good argument for one, the idea of starting a national project with a regional rollout makes no sense, as the cards will be effectively useless even were one to take their supposed uses seriously. And the idea that people in Manchester are going to have sixty quid spare to give to the government in return for a useless piece of plastic, at a time when we’re in the worst recession in most people’s lifetimes, is frankly ludicrous. I could theoretically see a few of the “I’ve got nothing to hide!” brigade signing up for this were it free – but those are generally the kind of people who most object to spending a single penny of their own money anyway.
I’ve not been active enough in No2ID so far – I’ve only helped out a couple of times at the monthly events they have, although I’ve started being more active recently – but I’ll be down at St Anne’s Square on Saturday afternoon (details here) and I expect any readers of this blog within a ten-mile radius of Manchester City Centre to be there as well, or I’ll want to know why.
Manchester is to this Labour government as Scotland was to the Tories in the eighties – a place they don’t care about, where they can try out all their most unworkable, unpopular, vote-losing policies. The reasons are opposite, but really the same – the Tories knew no-one in Scotland was going to vote for them anyway, while Labour think they can’t lose Manchester because it’s their ‘core vote’ and they won’t vote for anyone else.
Let’s prove them wrong…
ETA Alix has a good post on this too…
The British Police Are The Best In The World, I Don’t Believe None Of These Stories I’ve Heard…
I try to be shocked. I really do. I try to really feel how terrible it is, but this kind of thing has happened too often.
Last week, a man died during the G20 protests. The story put out in the media at the time was a clearcut one. Man gets stressed by an out of control angry mob and has a heart attack. Police try to help him, but the mob are so out of control that they throw bricks at the police, stopping them from doing their job, and the man dies as a result.
A few hours later, the story had changed somewhat. The crowd near the police were in fact helpful – a few people at the back who didn’t know what was going on threw a couple of empty plastic bottles at the police, but that’s all. I wasn’t surprised. That sounded about right, given the way the media and police usually misportray protestors.
Now, according to the Observer, the truth appears to be out. Ian Tomlinson was a 47-year-old man on the way home from work, completely uninvolved. The police were “out of control“. Mr Tomlinson was battered around the head and thrown about by armoured riot police. Protestors, seeing he was hurt, *tried to help him*.
I tried, I really did, to feel shocked and upset by this, but I just felt numb when I should have felt outraged. Because this has been coming for a long time, and there will be more of it. There has always been an element within the police force that is attracted to the job because they like the sense of power and want to abuse it (in fact one of the best arguments for the *existence* of a police force is precisely that it can sometimes allow such people to channel their energies in a more productive direction – see Aleister Crowley’s remark “I am not an anarchist in *your* sense of the word – imagine a policeman let loose upon society!”, one of the few things the great old faker ever said that I agree with). Anyone with any memory of this kind of event over the last thirty years can name dozens of cases, from Blair Peach to Jean de Menezes, where the official report has differed wildly from the truth, and where enough misinformation has been created that police who are at the very least guilty of manslaughter have been let off with reprimands.
And the police have been spoiling for a fight. They’ve been talking in the papers about how they’re expecting a ‘Summer of Rage’ in 2009, and we all know that that sort of thing is liable to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you combine that with the worst economic crisis in eighty years, you’ve got a powderkeg waiting to go up.
And the police can afford to be arrogant – for the last fifteen years governments of both main parties have been putting in place the elements of a police state. I could make ten posts of this length just listing the various draconian laws that have been brought, removing the right to silence, the right to protest and so on, but just to take two examples – any photos that were taken of Ian Tomlinson’s murderers, to be used as evidence against them, are illegal, because it’s now illegal to take photos of the police due to ‘privacy concerns’. Meanwhile, as of tomorrow, the government will be requiring your ISP to keep records of every email you send, every website you visit, every file you download, for up to a year. You now have less legal right to privacy when organising your finances or viewing pornography or talking to your friends than the police do when beating a man to death for getting in their way while walking home.
And both major parties are like this. People believe they have no alternative but to protest, because they can’t vote for anyone who’ll fix the problem, but protesting is illegal and the police are spoiling for a fight. This is not going to end well. I’ve recently started listening again to Power In The Darkness by the Tom Robinson Band. Thirty years on, its pub rock sounds dated as hell, but the feeling of the record is as fresh as if it were recorded yesterday. We could be headed into a period when fascism becomes a real possibility, either by the continued populist right-wing drifting of both major parties, or because of the rise of the Bastard Nazi Party in response to people’s disaffection.
We need, desperately, to find a real electoral alternative to the current repression, and while I believe the Liberal Democrats to be the best option open, the unfortunate fact is that we can’t win the next election. But what Chris Huhne refers to as ‘the Parliamentary Liberal Party’ can. We need to campaign more (and I need to get far more active in things like No2ID myself – I don’t do anything like enough, and I’m going to try to do more) to bring about real changes after the next election.
I think the best way to do this is to rally round the Lib Dems’ Freedom Bill, but ensure it’s not seen as a purely partisan effort. It doesn’t go anything like far enough, but it’s a good start. We need to ensure that, no matter what party gets into power next election, this bill or something like it will get in. This is *important*, possibly the most important thing that could be achieved in the next Parliament (I believe other issues, such as the environment, are actually even more important, but no-one in government is going to do anything while there’s the current weird consensus in power, and this is one of the few ways I can see of putting a crack in that).
I honestly believe that the best thing you can do in the next election is to ask the candidates for the two main parties in your constituency if they will support the Freedom Bill if it is put before Parliament. The Lib Dems will, and I know a handful of Labour candidates will, because I’ve spoken to one or two decent Labour people (usually of the Compass type) who would support it. Possibly some Tories as well – but I’ve never trusted them. That is, however, purely personal bigotry. There may be such a thing as a trustworthy Tory, it’s entirely possible.
If one of them will support the bill and the other won’t, throw all your support behind the candidate that will, campaign for them, flyer your area, get out the vote – and tell them why you’re doing so. If both will, then be happy but put pressure on them when they get into Parliament – email them every week if necessary. If neither will, then if possible try to get one of them deselected and stand in their place. If you can’t do that, stand as an independent if necessary to make sure there is a candidate who *will* support those measures.
We need to ensure that no matter what party happens to be in Government, we get a majority for the Parliamentary Liberal Party in 2010. Because otherwise we may well see a majority for the National Socialist Party in 2014…
Linkblogging for 01/03/09
A few links for you:
At Lib Dem Voice they’re wondering if the Fuhrerprinzip is now the basis for governing Britain. For all the fuss being made about the obscene amount of money that Fred Goodwin is getting in his pension, the fact is that it’s his money paid into his pension scheme, and that this is how our current economic system works. If you don’t like the fact that a retired usurer gets more in a year than my wife would get in sixty years working full-time in her job as a nursing assistant (and, as you can imagine, I don’t like that fact one bit) then try to change the system rather than singling out scapegoats.
As some of you may know, scans_daily, a livejournal community based around posting scans of comics, was recently closed for copyright violation after the comic writer Peter David complained. Chris Bird has the best take on this. Speaking of comics, I’ve recently got a sense of ennui about comics – there’s plenty I’m reading that’s pretty good, but nothing that’s grabbing me and insisting I write about it. I’m sure that’ll change when Seaguy 2 comes along, or Morrison’s return to Batman but in the meantime do any of you (Mindless Ones? ) have any suggestions for exciting four-colour adventure with enough in it for me to sink my teeth into writing about? In the meantime, I’ll post some more on Cerebus and some other old ‘art comics’, but the genre stuff is more my forte…
Bloggingthemail here eviscerates a column from Amanda Platell in the Mail saying fat people shouldn’t be treated on the NHS. As a fat person, I think Mail columnists shouldn’t be treated by public *or* private doctors, for the good of the species, but thankfully I do not have a column with several million readers from which to propound this view. Ms Platell, alas, does…
Bryan Hibbs has seen the Watchmen film, and from the review it’s clear that this was *exactly* the film I expected them to make, except that the new ending is even stupider than I thought it would be. Seriously, if you go to see this film, you’re an idiot. It couldn’t possibly be good.
The Mindless Ones present… Teal Kryptonite!
And continuing the theme from last post, the best roundup of the Convention On Modern Liberty I’ve seen is Alix’s liveblog.
Linkblogging for 22/02/09
A few quick links here…
Found via Douglas Wolk on Twitter – WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog have 11 CDs worth of rockabilly, garage rock and exotica, as chosen by Lux and Ivy of the Cramps, for download. Everything from Ersel Hickey to Jack Nitzsche to the Stooges to Jan & Arnie. I’m fairly up on this kind of music, but even I’d only heard of half the stuff there. Well worth getting hold of (but remember, kids, home taping is killing music…)
A great article on how the new Dalek War boxset was colourised – using BBC BASIC!
The Mindless Ones have moved on from pants, and are now discussing Spider-Man socks
It’s not often I have much in common with jet pilots, but for once I do – they’re refusing to take part in the next step of the stealth rollout of ID cards. Notice how yet again Manchester is the first place to suffer under a Labour regulation, yet we keep electing the bastards…
And in case I haven’t mentioned it, though I’m sure I have, we have a government that colludes in slicing men’s genitals with scalpels (and of course the US government actually *did* it, rather than just helping with the coverup). Even had this been the only thing that had been done wrong, it would still make the British government accessories to war crimes after the fact. If anyone reading this actually voted for this gang of torturers and murderers, how do you continue to live with yourselves? There are things that can be a matter of respectful disagreement between people of goodwill – you can argue for tougher or more lenient sentencing in prisons, higher or lower rates of income tax and so on and mean well. But *slashing at a bloke’s cock with a scalpel*?
Linkblogging for 31/01/09
Apologies for the lack of posts recently – I’ve been helping out with the local council byelection (we gained votes from both Labour and the Tories, even though the Tories did their hardest campaigning in years in this ward) and I’ve also had some extremely bad stuff going on in my personal life, which I don’t want to talk about here.
I will review Final Crisis 7 tomorrow, and if everything goes OK I should be back to blogging normally next week – I *hope*.
Anyway, linkage:
Alix at the People’s Republic Of Mortimer has some thought provoking comments on the line between localism and xenophobia, and also has a wonderful post about the use of jargon in Focus leaflets. I don’t know why that site isn’t in my sidebar yet… I must work on that at some point.
Everyone at the Savage Critics has reviewed FC7, pretty much, so I’ll just link to the site again rather than to individual reviews, as they’re all worth reading.
Mark Waid continues talking about how to write comics – this week part one of the proposal.
James at Quaequam Blog has more on the fascist Coroners and Justice Bill (I am not using fascist in the sense of “that’s so fascist!” here, but as literal truth. This law sets in place the final elements for a police state and also destroys the rule of law…)
Brad Hicks has a fascinating post on the WPA and why it has a bad reputation.
And David at Vibrational Match is finally showing us the larger theme he’s been working on in his series of connected posts…
The Coroners And Justice Bill
If you live in Britain, it is vitally important that you contact your MP, before Monday, and ensure that they are going to vote against the Coroners and Justice Bill. Put simply, this bill allows ministers of the crown to, at whim, do anything they like with any data that they hold on private citizens. It literally means that for any reason at all, any data held by anyone on you, for any reason, can be handed to anyone else. Don’t want your stalkerish ex knowing your new address? Don’t want spammers being able to buy every detail of your personal life? Tough.
Oh, and one nice clause in there also allows for the creation of arbitrary new laws based on the data searched. This may not be the *intent* of the clause (though they’ve tried a couple of times to get similar things through) but it’s what the wording actually says. A minister could say “Right, I am now going to make it an offence to have ever said ‘fuck’ on a blog”, and everyone who had done that would retroactively have commited a crime.
I am absolutely certain that the Lib Dems will oppose this (though it’s still worth contacting your MPs about it) but the rest of you make your feelings known.
‘Liberal’ Conspiracy has more…
“Equality Of Opportunity”
Another day, another report by Laurie Penny (on something to get my blood boiling. This time it’s a Fabian Society conference in which a Labour minister… a Labour minister! (sorry) , talking about ‘redistribution’, was actually talking about making people on benefits work for less than the minimum wage while paying Wal-Mart to take them.
I’ve given up being surprised by this stuff – though not yet given up being angry about it – I’ve come to accept that what was once a fine, principled party is now some weird combination of neoconservatism and Calvinism, full of people who believe that the poor deserve to be poor and must be punished for their effrontery in daring to continue to live. (Meanwhile, of course, over at ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy they’re arguing that socialists should continue to work within the Labour party. WIthout wanting to cause offence, these people do rather sound like victims of spousal abuse – but at least they’ve got past “But I know deep down he loves me” and got as far as “Yes, he’s a bastard, but where would I go if I left him?” which is probably progress of a sort I suppose…”)
Part of the problem here is that the idea of ‘equality’ has been replaced by ‘equality of opportunity’ in the rhetoric of all the major parties (yes, including the Lib Dems, though I do believe we’re better on this than the other parties), and ‘equality of opportunity’ is a fundamentally unfair concept.
Leaving aside the question of whether we can ever have equality of opportunity in one generation without equality of outcome in the previous one (and if it isn’t blatantly obvious to you that the child of a single parent on benefits on a council estate has fewer opportunities than the eldest son of the Duke of Buckinghamshire, then you have the perfect qualifications to be a Daily Mail columnist or Labour Cabinet Minister) there’s also the fact that not everyone can take advantage of opportunities.
I have been lucky enough to have more opportunities than many people in my life, by virtue of being white, male, able-bodied and brought up in a family which, while poor, valued education and literacy. I have also squandered most of those opportunities, because I am shiftless, lazy and ungrateful.
However, I have been able to make the most of *some* of these opportunities, and so have gone on to now be in a job which I enjoy, which I don’t find too difficult, and which pays me very well (I get almost exactly the national average wage at the moment – about £900 per year below the median). I have only been able to make the most of those opportunities, though, because I have certain attributes (a certain facile intelligence that allows me to get a glib understanding of any subject quickly, a fast typing speed, a basic understanding of UNIX-like operating systems and an overwhelming pedantry about language) that are valued in this economy far more than they should be. Not everybody has those attributes, and nor should they – the image of a world full of bearded men saying “You mean GNU/Linux” and going through immense verbal contortions to avoid splitting an infinitive even when they know that there’s no linguistic basis for that prohibition is one that makes me shudder.
My wife currently works as a nursing assistant on a psychiatric ward (a job I did myself for a couple of years). Her job is more physically and mentally demanding than mine, and involves dealing with people with severe mental illnesses, many of whom are also violent criminals (some sex offenders), occasionally defending oneself from physical attack, and often cleaning up various bodily fluids and emissions, while the most stressful thing about my job is that I have to use an rpm-based rather than .deb based distro on my work laptop, and sometimes there’s a bit of a queue at the coffee machine. Yet she gets paid around half of what I do.
Worse, there are people out there who are simply not capable of any kind of skilled work, no matter what opportunities they’re given. There are people out there who are too stupid, or too clumsy, or too disorganised to *ever* hold down a job at much above the level of McDonald’s till operator. No matter what opportunities are open, they will not be able to take them. This does not, however, make them bad people, or less deserving than those of us who work in nice warm offices with free coffee.
I’ve lived on poverty-level incomes before (the six months during which I was trying to support two people on one person’s benefits was particularly ‘fun’) and wouldn’t wish the stress this causes on my worst enemy. Having to hide from bailiffs until your giro arrives, having lunch be a packet of custard creme biscuits because you’ve only got 15p left, getting fined twenty quid because you can’t afford a two pound tram fare and get caught hopping the tram, and then having to pay £400 court costs because you couldn’t afford the original £20 fine – these are all things that happen on a regular basis to more people than most of you will realise. And these things, by definition, tend to happen to the people in our society least able to cope with them.
What we need is not equality of opportunity alone, but a state that ensures that those who can’t take those opportunities have at least enough income to live a relatively comfortable life, able to feed, clothe, house and entertain themselves and take an active role in the community. Not a government that wants to force people to work for Wal-Mart for three pounds an hour and will pay Wal-Mart for allowing them to do so…
Bastards
Well, that law allowing bailiffs to use ‘reasonable force’ just killed a 78 year old man. I can’t really add much to what Laurie has to say at Penny Red.
We are getting very close to the point where this government can be described as fascist without that being hyperbole. Those of you who have voted for Labour, shame on you.
Linkblogging for 17/01/09
I’m still far busier than I expected this week, so I’m still behind on my email correspondence – apologies to those who’ve emailed me recently.
Anyway, in lieu of a longer post, here’s some links:
Debi writes about Thomas Hariot – the most pioneering scientist you’ve never heard of.
Bobsy shows us his pants.
Over on Lib Dem Voice they’re talking about what the ‘liberal attitude to immigration’ should be. Some of the comments there make sense, but some are horribly, nastily racist. Let them know what you think…
People buying tube tickets will soon be automatically giving their consent to be searched by transport police. Well, that’s one more reason for me to avoid That London…
An interesting post about the Einstein/Bohr dialogue about quantum physics.
Cerebus: A Diablog continue their reading of the greatest comic series in history.
Andy Partridge discussing how Jack Kirby influenced one of his songs. (Surprising, because Partridge has always struck me as more of a DC person, and here he’s talking about Ant-Man. Still, it’s another example of XTC and comics, two of my favourite things, overlapping).
Free comic stories by Rick Veitch and Mark Evanier and Tom Yeates and some others.
And pillock has an excellent post on From Hell.
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