Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Saw an interview with him, a while after he'd come off his motorbike in a race - and slid through a gravel trap. He had his helmet with him - and the abrasion of the gravel had removed most of the resin from it (I'm assuming it was carbon fibre) - and all that he had left was this sort of semi-rigid softish cloth-like thing that wouldn't protect you from being smacked with a wet salmon.

Re: Marx would be proud

JohnMurray,

Governments are not households. And they are not businesses.

You are correct about this, if nothing else. The household fallacy of governments isn't right, but then as you also say neither is government a business. So Labour's talk of borrowing to buy assets that balance off against the government debt is equally foolish. Nationalise stuff if there's an argument for it, but you have to actually pay the costs of doing so - i.e. it's got to be really worth it.

MMT though is sort of bollocks. It may be true that the government can create money and destroy it in tax - that can be one valid way of looking at the economy. However MMT only lets you print money and spend it if the economy isn't at or near full-output. i.e. Helicopter Money can work in depressions because it's not that inflationary because the economy has unusued capacity and so this just boosts the economy closer to where it should be if there wasn't insufficient demand due to the loss of confidence causing the recession.

But rather like it's dead easy to be a Keynseian in a recession (all that lovely spending you call for) - MMT is much less fun in boom time. That's when the ecomomy is running at (or above) full capacity - and that is when government has to tax more than it spends.. For Keynesians to build up the war chest (actually keep government debt low enough) for safe deficit spending in recession - for MMTers because printing money at full capacity is highly inflationary - and once you start down that road it can very easily become a runaway process. Weimar Germany printed money in the early 20s because it had worked fine(ish) during WWI. When they controlled the economy and it was running under capacity. But when they had a need for hard currency to pay off war debt, printing money was disastrous. Because that's the other problem with MMT - it might work in a closed economy with few imports and capital controls - but as soon as you try to pay foreigners for stuff with cash where the ink's still wet - they get awful sniffy and demand extra. Or worse hard currency.

Re: Erm

Anon,

All politics is about compromise. See my post above. When you hold out for everything you want, you often get nothing. In first-past-the-post systems you have big parties comprising groups of people with different views - who've made their compromises pre-election. So the voters know roughly what to expect in advance, but smaller single-issue groups of voters get much less influence.

In more proportional systems you get small parties, and much more chance for the electorate to vote their actual beliefs (without being forced into tactical voting) - but the outcome is way less predictable and comes down to the post election horse-trading.

In neither case does anyone get what they want without compromise. I voted for Brexit hoping for something like the Norway option, expecting that the more remain politicians would coalesce around that as the least-worst option. We nearly got a no-deal Brexit, which only about 10-15% of the electorate (and MPs) wanted - now it looks like we're on for a Canada free-trade deal style Brexit, which is a compromise I can live with, but many other soft-leavers would prefer remaining in the EU to.

So be careful trying to portray the people you disagree with as the "nasty" ones who won't compromise. In post-referendum polling about 65% didn't want Freedom of movement, similar numbers wanted Single Market access - and when put to the choice it was about 55-60% for staying in the Single Market. With only 60-odd hard leave MPs and 450-odd remain voting ones (out of 650) you'd have thought that a Parliament much more remain dominated than the population (but with 80% elected on "leave" manifestos in 2017), would have jumped at the chance of the Single Market compromise position. May and Corbyn are both unsuited to compromise though and were given little help to become so.

Re: Erm

Fred Dibnah,

May's deal strongly implied some sort of strong customs arrangement. It was what she was negotiating for and was the idea of the whole UK backstop - that if the EU wouldn't agree any deal that let NI leave the EU customs union then the whole UK should stay in some sort of arrangement - which also kept a lot of industry happy. And would involve a lot of continuing regulatory alignment between the UK and the EU. Basically as close to membership as May could get without accepting Freedom of Movement.

As far as I can see it, and everything May said and did from her speech at the 2016 party conference onwards was pretty much consistent with this, her two principles were dumping freedom of movement and being able to do independent trade deals. She was after the closest future arrangement she could get that allowed both of those - hence the Chequers deal, and the various shades of customs agreement she tried to get.

My reading of the post referendum polling (unreliable because most people are very unsure about hypothetical polls so you get loads of "don't knows") is that most people wanted to get rid of freedom of movement. A large minority of remain voters included. I think it was about 60-65%. But similar numbers also wanted to keep Single Market access. When polled about choosing one or t'other there was a decent majority for keeping FoM and staying in the Single Market. So even though May didn't see that, had there been a big move from remainer types to coalesce round that as a compromise, more moderate leavers like Johnson and Gove (and large chunks of the Conservative party) would be happy - as would quite a lot of moderate remainers (i.e. most of the rest of Tories and quite a lot of Labour).

The problem was that with Brexit faltering a large number of politicians on the remain side decided to go all out for the win, and having a second bite of the referendum cherry. This destroyed May's premiership - and her deal was so shit that it polarised opinion still further. Rather than Brexiteers mostly saying, "oh well it's too hard" a bunch decided that if no acceptable terms for leaving were on offer - then we should go the whole hog and hard no-deal Brexit. Hence a tiny group of MPs (the ERG and the "Spartans"), with fewer than 60-70 people would have been the only ones getting what they wanted. And make no mistake, no-deal Brexit was looking increasingly likely - by miscalculation rather than design - but we couldn't keep going on extending the deadline - yet not even voting the hold a second referendum so that was always going to take 9 months to organise, which was too long for an extension.

Whereas if enough soft Brexit and remain MPs had voted for full Single Market access in the indicative votes - then May might have gone off and negotiated that. Which would be much easier to do.

People went for the high risk winner-takes-all approach. On both sides obviously, as that was clearly what Johnson was going for with his divisive tactics as PM - and May's deal could have got through with the ERG hard-Brexiteer types too. But I think that's why this Parliament deserved to be put out of our misery.

Personally I don't think remaining in the EU is a viable option, after voting to leave it. Not unless there's massive changes, which there's no appetite for. The Brexit Party wouldn't go away, and some future Conservative government in 5-10 years time could just win and take us out, citing the unfulfilled referendum result. There's a good chance of another major Eurozone crisis in the next recession, or the one after - the structural problems of the Euro have barely been touched. And there'd be an awful lot of betrayed Brexit voters complaining about every minor foible of the EU. Hard Brexit will entrench a small (ish) group of very unhappy remain voters too - though I suspect there's fewer of them, at least a third of voters have wanted to leave the EU since the 70s (though I think numbers dipped in the mid-80s) - Single Market membership with some policies to address the issues created by freedom of movement could have been a nice sweet spot that upset everyone the least.

Johnson's deal will be a less close relationship (a direct consequence of the choices made by remain campaigners) - Labour winning would be highly unpredictable. They want us to join the Customs Union but have co-decision or veto over EU trade policy - something Norway, Switzerland and Turkey haven't been allowed. I can't see them getting very much, then who knows how their second referendum would go, when they came back with May's deal again, with a slightly reformed backstop.

Re: Erm

If those MPs were so responsible, why did they fight tooth-and-nail in Parliament for do-or-die remain, and not attempt to vote for a sensible compromise that everyone could live with?

If there had been fewer people campaigning for a second referendum, and voting down everything else, they wouldn't have got what they wanted - but they might have got us to something like Single Market membership. Which I think is a compromise that most voters could live with.

But that died in the joys of voting for unreastic things like eternal delay to any decision and extensions of the Article 50 process with no even vague suggestion of why.

OK, I admit that neither main party's leadership helped. But May even went back to the House for indicative votes to see if people would compromise, and they didn't. This attempt to claim that one set of people are the "sensible / clever / honourable" ones and everyone who disagrees isn't - is one of the main things that's caused the polarisation in politics. And that's as much the fault of people like Ken Clarke (who I'm otherwise a big fan of) as it is Rees Mogg.

Re: Just so much wind

The ERG are about 30 people. And Johnson isn't one of them. He actually voted for May's deal, as the least worst option at the time. Then despite it being supposedly "impossible" went off and negotiated a new one (minus the worst bits) - and has now said (and written into that agreement) that he wants a free trade agreement with the EU.

Apart from his views on the EU, I think he's much more of a Cameroon than any of them. Whereas the ERG are more Thatcherite-than-thou and certainly more Thatcherite than Thatcher ever was.

Re: Marx would be proud

BinkyTheMagicPaperclip,

Labour are planning to nationalise companies without fully compensating shareholders, raise corporation taxes, print money to fund green spending, vastly increase borrowing and only increase taxes a bit. OK the last is clearly a lie - even they can't be so stupid as to think that you can get much money taxing the top 5%. Even gnoring the fact that dropping the top tax rate from 50% to 45% increased government revenue...

Oh, and I forgot, sieze 10% of the shares of every corporation with more than 250 employees to "give" the shares to the employees. Though they won't actually get the more than a few hundred quid of the dividends, as they'll go as taxes.

I was assuming that Labour would be slightly more cautious, as they were last election. But it looks like the Left are cutting loose and going the full 1983 at the moment.

Those are economically disastrous policies that will knacker the economy and drive loads of businesses out of the country. There'll be no more money for the NHS, because the country won't have it.

Voting Labour is a very poor idea indeed.

Oh and you might want some proof on the Tories being Islamaphobic. It's not them that are being investigated by the Equalities Commission (only Labour and the BNP have been so far) - and there aren't lots of muslim Tories quitting in disgust at their party - unlike the jewish MPs and members who've left Labour. I'm sure there are some nasty old racists in the Conservative Party, as there are in the country at large - but I've not seen the evidence that this is much more than whataboutery yet - although I'm not impressed they haven't done more to sort it out.

I'm not a fan of Johnson. But despite his "free and easy" / lazy way of talking about politics - he's not the lightweight he's accused of being. He was a shit foreign secretary, but a better mayor of London. However despite being told it wasn't possible and he wouldn't try - he managed to get an acceptable agreement out of the EU negotiation team, something May failed to do, and in my view that deserves credit.

Whereas I think Corbyn genuinely is a political lightweight - and is just as bad as Johnson at shooting from the hip. His language is more measured, but he can't stick to a political message and changes policy on the hoof in interviews, because he's either too lazy, thick or dishonest to stick the policy agreements he makes with his shadow cabinet team. Plus the tolerating anti-semites and terrorists, so long as they conform to his worldview. And he'll share a platform with the Hamas leadership, but refused to with David Cameron to campaign in the EU referendum. In my view he's got a broken moral compass. I don't think he's unpatriotic, so much as reflexively "anti-Western" in his opinions - so Isreal's sin is being US-backed rather than jewish. So my opinion of him is that he's a bit thick - rather than being particularly nasty - but that's not exactly a recommendation to be PM.

Re: Marx would be proud

Yes but where it becomes the magic money tree is that they simply print new bonds to pay back the old.

No, that's what all governments do. Paying off debt is actually incredibly rare. Only Nigel Lawson and Gordon Brown have ever done it as Chancellors - and then it was only for a couple of years.

However, so long as the government borrows less in a year than the economy grows, the debt to GDP ratio falls. Which is the measure that matters - as it's the year's output that has to pay for the taxes to fund the interest on bonds.

Particularly as government bonds aren't linked to inflation (didn't used to be anyway - some now are). So a combination of economic growth and inflation makes old debt look less and less important. As long as a government can cover the interest, isn't borrowing too much and the economy keeps growing, government debt looks after itself and slowly drops.

The problem is if you break the market's confidence in your government bond market. Because then you can't borrow anymore and have to resort to printing the stuff or QE - depending on how dire the situation is. QE is inflationary through a falling currency (but at least reversible), printing is permanent and if done too much will lead to hyper-inflation. Again QE done to counter a depression (as in 2008/9) is fine - it generates market confidence as the government saves the day. QE done to vastly increase spending does the opposite. It destroys confidence further and leads to comparisons with Venezuala.

Re: Paranoid, moi?

England's water got privatised, because that was where most of the money needed to be spent. Along with Wales's, but then it got into power and hotels and leisure and then got bought and sold it's water arm back to the government for £1 (and some lovely debt) and is now a not for profit. Scotland and NI are under different legal regimes - which is why their Water Regs are slightly different - and everything happened differently.

We had a referendum on the alternative vote system - and it lost. And yes I'm aware it's not PR, but it's a start. Then the Lib Dems - whose policy is electoral reform and more coalition governments - got slaughtered at the next election for being in a coalition government.

And quite frankly I think for most non-voters it's an excuse. Nobody wants to say, I can't be arsed to think about the issues and walk the half mile from my house to a polling station. So if asked, they say that "they're all the same" or "they're only out for themselves" or some other self-justificatory bullshit.

Find someone to vote for, then maybe they'll grow their support and others will join you. Or stand yourself. Or vote for the least worst, which at least gets you closer to where you want to be. And at least drags the losing parties closer to your position, as they try to recover from losing.

Politics is like the Rolling Stones said. You can't always get what you want.

Davenumbers,

So are you saying that we're not allowed to vote to leave the EU then? Because leaving is impossible? In which case we're no longer a democracy and what's the point?

Now to criticise the referendum campaign is perfectly fair. Leave were all sunny and optimistic - and of course being split on what they wanted weren't offering a standard policy. Whereas remain were incredibly depressing, failed to put much of the positive case for the EU and used such apocalyptic levels of threats of doom to the economy that it approaches falsehood. For example, we're 3-4% of GDP poorer since voting for Brexit - according to lots of reports - and yet our economy has grown faster than Germany (and the Eurozone average) in that time. Which makes no sense - because we've been repeatedly told that we're of only peripheral importance to their economy - and our loss of jobs would be their gain.

The referendum shouldn't have been allowed point is the one I have zero patience with. We could have solved it by a general election, but it's a cross party issue - as the last election proved - and this one might as well.

LucreLout,

I didn't say that Labour wouldn't lose seats going more remain. What I said is that most decent polling analysis I've seen suggests they lose more seats going leave than they do remain. Because the loss of seats up North is overstated - because so many of their supporters did vote Remain.

As you say, Corbyn's strategy has been the deeply cynical one of trying to have no policy on the biggest issue in British politics in a generation - and try to ride that ambiguity to Downing Street.

However I also believe that there's a deeper cynicism at play. As the Guardian published bits from a report shown to the Shadow Cabinet about not going full remain with an exaggerated loss of Northern seats that most polling people I'd read didn't believe the polls agreed with. Corbyn's team are possibly leavers - trying to delay their own party from backing remain until it was too late - despite members being 90% remain and despite his pledge that he believed in bringing back internal party democracy. Or they didn't really care that much about it, but wanted leave to happen on Tory watch, hoping for a disaster so they could have a landslide and bring in "proper socialism" red in tooth and claw.

That's broadly my opinion - a sort of a combination of the two. That a clique of the hard left, quite a few of them revolutionary socialists who want to overthrow capitalism care more about that than anything else, and have successfully captured a major party to do it. Corbyn is of the fluffier Bennite persuasion, but as Tony Benn said, "there should be no enemies on the left". i.e. allying with communists is OK, because at least they're not evil Tories. So even as a generally Conservative voter, I feel quite sorry for ordinary Labour Party members - because they've been put in a really difficult situation, and they lose all chance of getting the policies they want on Brexit (which they deeply care about) - because they let their party be taken over.

DavCrav,

That's true, but then we don't have a dictator. And you could always vote Monster Raving Looney as a placeholder until a better party comes along. But you've already often got the choice of the big two plus Green, Lib Dem, UKIP, BNP, Brexit, TUSC or some other flavour of socialist - plus various other choices in Scotland and Wales. If you can't find one of those to go for, then perhaps there's no pleasing you.

As for the specific case the OP raised of the referendum - then it was a pure binary choice. If you're happy (enough) with EU membership, vote remain - if not vote leave. It's a pure binary choice. Obviously there could be various flavours of leave, but if you think the risk of getting one of those you don't like is too high, then again, you vote remain.

If you don't vote - then you get whatever the winning side voted for.

Dave,

If non-voters can't be arsed to participate, then they've got nothing to complain about.

Because if you're a non-voter you can vote your conscience and not worry about tactical voting, because you already don't mind who wins. That way minor parties have a chance of becoming mainstream - which tactical voting in first-past-the-post elections makes much harder.

Society works because large groups of people cooperate. That means sometimes you have obligations. Voting is a pretty basic part of democracy, and democracy is the worst system in the world, except for all the others.

Re: Paranoid, moi?

Anon,

You didn't bother to read my next sentence then...

Re: Forget the rational arguments, it's election time!

Dave,

My citation being that he was mates with Benn. And was on his campaign to be leader and deputy leader. And doesn't seem to have changed his politics much since.

The difference is that Benn was rather more intelligent.

"still most leavers are either Conservative voters or traditional non-voters."

Wishful thinking. Completely untrue, by all the evidence. Next you'll be telling us poor people were too stupid to know what they were voting for.

Dave,

My evidence is that Labour voters have consistently polled for remain in the mid 60% range. Which is most, by any definition.

Whereas Tory voters are more than 70% leave.

I'm not saying that Labour won't lose seats by becoming a remainer party. But not as many as it looks like they're going to lose this election by not being. Although in the last week polls have moved and Labour are up around 30% - mostly at the expense of the Lib Dems. But then the Conservatives are now polling around 40% - having nicked a smilar number of voters from the Brexit party.

I think turnout will be key. Will anti-Corbyn Labour voters turn out because they're even more anti-Johnson?

The difference this time is that Corbyn is down from 2017's -20% net approval ratings to worse than -40%. i.e. about 20% approve of him and 60% disapprove. With 20% don't know.

Johnson is about net evens. 40% for and against. Trump polls better than Corbyn - there's an awful thought...

I made no comment about deluded leavers. I made a non-partisan comment about the polling. As disclosure I decided to vote leave the day the ECB illegally shut down the Greek banking system in order to force their government into total capitulation rather than negotiate a reasonable deal - which the Troika and Eurogroup had refused to even negotiate about for 9 months beforehand. Even though the IMF debt sustainability report was published a week later, proving that the Greeks were right and the Troika knew their policies had failed in the worst economic fuckup in modern peacetime economic history. Before that I was a reluctant remainer - and that's how I'd probably have voted. All the same tactics were used in the Brexit withdrawal negotiations, and so I feel I was proved right - though my preferred settlement would have been something like the Norway option.

Labour voters are something like 65% remain voters.

70% of constituencies with Labour MPs voted Leave.

Yes. But those constituencies also have other voters in them. Hence a minority of Labour voters (35%) added to the smaller number of Tories and others can beat the rest of the Labour vote. Plus the 10% ish of voters that came out for the referendum that didn't normally vote.

Also remember that Europe isn't everything. About 10% of the voters the Lib Dems lost between 2010 and 2015 went to UKIP! So they were previously voting for the most pro-EU party out there. Presumably because they were "anti-politics" voters, surprised when the Lib Dems went into actual government.

One of Corbyn's problems is that the Labour working class voter might see him as a tad unpatriotic. And maybe switch. After all Thatcher did pretty well with working class voters, it's how she got such big majorities.

In 2017 a lot of voters didn't like either party - but voted tactically anyway. Can Labour get back to 40% again this election? I doubt it.

Re: Forget the rational arguments, it's election time!

I don't think that's true. In this case, Boris Johnson is not quite the loony right-winger that he's always been portrayed as. He's socially on the Cameroon wing of the party, and I think economically too - but he's always been considered more on the right because of the Europe issue. So obviously he's promising more spending, because he's planning so spend more. Which was clear from what he said when he first became PM. Whether they really think they can sustain that if the economy goes South is another matter - but then they also think that they want to avoid the economy going South by spending more.

As for Corbyn, he's a Bennite. He was on Tony Benn's deputy leadership campaign in 1981 (or was it 80?). He went into the last election on Miliband's manifesto, maybe because there wasn't time, or maybe so as not to frighten the horses.

But in this election the left have taken almost complete control of the Labour Party structure. I'm pretty certain that this election is going to be about what he believes. He's been a Brexiteer since the 1970s, and so he may be lying about that to stop the entire set of MPs from defecting - but it's not like any of these other views should be a surprise. His main advisors used to be members of the Communist Party! In the 1980s when there was no excuse for it - and all the horrors of communism were known.

Re: Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land

Dave(numbers),

That used to be true. Amazon have always run for future growth and made tiny profits. But as of last year they're now starting to crank the profits out - so their corporation taxes are going to have to go up, or they'll have to start fiddling the system like Google and Apple. Although that's probably changing as the US have lowered their corp tax rates - the only sensible policy I can think of that Trump came up with.

Re: Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land

Our pensions will pay, as they currently own the shares - and will get compensated at reduced rates with an asset that would soon crash in value. All the gilts they're planning to issue will massively push up interest rates - so we'll have those higher costs to deal with too. And of course, taxes will have to rise to cover the interest on all the bonds Labour are planning to issue. I think our current interest payments are about £30-40bn. So basically the entire defence budget goes on servicing the national debt. For context it was well under £10bn in 2007.

Re: LOL's

Duncan Large,

How have the railways been ruined by private companies? Passenger numbers are at an all time high.

I'm not saying I'd have privatised them, and if I had, not like it was done. But I'm also old enough to remember British Rail.

Water was the industry that got privatised because it had been ruined by government. And after 50 years of chronic underinvestment the infrastructure was totally fucked and it was dumping raw sewage from outfall pipes next to popular bathing beaches.

I'd not use such over-wrought language about much of the other privatisation/nationalisation decisions. If Labour want to renationalise rail, I'm fine with that. I doubt it'll make a huge difference. But those of us old enough to remember the original British Telecom don't rember it as all sunlit uplands. Although I did get a Buzby badge out of them...

Re: Well I personally think it is a good idea....

Uncle Slack,

France is way more socialist than the UK. You're forgetting President Hollande by the way, who was from the Socialist Party. Sadly for them, they can't forget him - they got 7% in the last national election.

You forget that a French right winger is to the left of most UK centrists. Britain has been politically to the right of most European countries for a long time - though Europe in general has moved a bit rightward since Thatcher's time.

It's a bit like the USA, where most democrats would traditionally have fit happily in the Conservative Party and been too right wing for Labour. Though the Democrats have moved a bit left in the last decade and the Republicans have gone way off to the right.

Re: Infrastrucutre

Locky,

And yet the UK have some of the cheapest water and energy in Western Europe. So it's not like national infrastructure can't be run by private companies. I don't know about phone/broadband prices - except fromwhen I lived in Belgium, where they were twice as much as Blighty. And Belgacom's service was worse than BT. And that's despite Belgian average wages at the time being about 2/3rds UK levels.

Re: Marx would be proud

LucreLout,

Issuing bonds isn't quite the same as printing money. Because they have to be paid back. So you're replacing one asset with another. Unless they invent special bonds with no interest or maturity - in which case they're not even printing money they're just expropriating private property. Also that asset will be matched to a hopefully profitable company - who can cover the interest. So you can argue that although government debt has gone up, so have the government's assets.

In practise I'm sure this will fall apart. Firstly because government debt doesn't work the same way as private debt - and the measure everyone uses is the debt to GDP ratio and not the governments assets. Because it's the economy that has to cover the interest payments to keep the show on the road. So in practise the price of government bonds will fall, which means that the interest rate will go up. And then how do you service this huge new debt?

However doing QE and having the bonds directly bought from government by the Bank of England is directly printing money - and they also plan to do that.

Anon,

But you aren't allowed to sieze the assets of private investors and not pay them. So nationalising companies means paying for them.

LucreLout,

I'm not sure it's true that Labour's northern support are leave-voters. I mean there's more of them up up there, but in polling Labour voters are something like 65% remain voters. Remember that a lot of the leave vote came from people who previously didn't actually vote - and probably haven't for a while, as general election turnouts have dropped to around upper 60s from the mid 70s over the years.

So although there are a good number of Labour leavers, and they tend to be older and more Northern (and don't forget the Midlands and to a lesser extent Wales) - still most leavers are either Conservative voters or traditional non-voters.

Though it's also true that I think Labour held most of the top ten remain voting constituencies in England in 2015 - as well as most of the top ten leave ones.

I think their real problem is that the voters are still 65% remain, and the members are about 90% remain - but the leadership team are mostly leavers of the Bennite mould.

Though as you say, none of this privatisation can be legal if it reaches the ECJ, with Parliament setting the prices - which would make it pretty awkward to stay in the EU and have these policies.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

BT were awful before they were privatised. Yes they did some clever technology, but they were hideously expensive and hard to deal with. You could wait 3 months to get a new landline connected and in the early 80s even local calls cost something like 40p a minute! National rate was about 60p. I think an answerphone was something insane like £1,000 - and you had to buy BT's one as you weren't allowed to connect your own to their network. Not that it stopped everybody.

The Post Office have been well-run, and mostly profitable for ages - and probably didn't need to be. So it's not like it's impossible to run a nationalised company well. But there's a reason BT got the chop, and relatively early in Thatcher's tenure too.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

Anon,

Actually I can easily imagine the NHS being better semi-privatised. It's a sacred cow in British poliitics, so the NHS will continue to be on the edge of failure until Labour change their minds. The Tories won't be trusted to reform it well (despite the fact that Labour have claimed they're going to abolish the NHS in every election since 1950 - and there's been no sign of it happening yet). And Labour don't seem to want to reform it.

But I've lived in Belgium, and their system is not that much different to the rest of Western Europe. And a friend of mine ran a company in Belgium in the early 2000s that shipped NHS patients who'd been too long on waiting lists over for the operation. The Beligian (semi-privatised) system did things like heart bypass operations for a third of the cost of the NHS - and with lower hospital infection rates and better survival rates. A third of the cost then went to this company, who brought the patient over, put a relative up in a hotel (so they could have a visitior) and held their hands and filled out the paperwork / dealt with the language issues.

So in the Belgian system you had government owned hospitals, the universities owned teaching hospitals, their were church and charity owned ones plus fully private ones. You picked yours (probably on the advice of your GP) and then went and it was all covered by your insurance. There were big non-profit insurers, with policies paid for by employers or by government for those on benefits - and then you had a second top-up insurance scheme to cover things like bed-and-board (I seem to remember hospitals charged €20 a night for your food and bed linen) - which meant you got edible food.

The government set the cost of basic operations, if the hospital screwed up or gave you a post-op infection then they had to pay to treat it - but you could pay extra if you wanted a fancy-dan private hospital with hot and cold running call girls and fresh flowers every day.

And of course for all the talk of the NHS being this monolithic public system - the GPs are mostly private contractors or partnerships running their own companies. Personally I think it would be better as a mixed system, like most of the rest of Western Europe - though I think the insurance schemes they use may be more complex than just using taxation to fund it.

Re: Paranoid, moi?

I work in the water industry. And the reason it was privatised wasn't ideology. It was because we were in the EU. Basically with the British government in charge of both regulation and investment, they weren't going to pass laws to clean up the beaches that would then mean they had to spend money that they didn't have on water treatment.

But once that got agreed at EU level, there was no way out of it. So it was either raise taxes or borrow more money. It's been one of the better privatisations too. In that water bills haven't shot up, and lots of money got invested in boring sewage treatment. But also we got a nice regulator, who only let the companies put prices up, if they commit cash to the various investment periods on upgrading the system.

So you could nationalise it again. I think that's silly, but it's possible, they're profitable companies and they have to be treated as public utilities anyway - so they're always going to be highly regulated. Even now they can't cut people's water off if they don't pay their bills for example. . But once you do that, prices won't change much - because they're still going to have to keep doing loads of investment to fix the infrastructure that was so poorly invested in after WWII. But if government is feeling poor, they will stilla have the same struggles to find that investment - with the cries of "fund our schools 'n' hospitals" ringing in their ears.

This also leads to worse regulation, as a department that can't get an increase in funding through the Treasury is unlikely to propose tougher regulation. Which is why the current system is actually the sweet spot (in my opinion obviously), because government now have the incentive to do their job and regulate properly - and the private companies then have to raise the funding to comply with that, or they get fined and not allowed to raise their prices. If government takes it back over, it's going to be hungry for cash to pay for all its social programs, so bills won't drop (I bet they go up faster - it's such an easy stealth tax) - and then future regulation will be hostage to the financial position of government.

And that's before I make the more party-political point that a Chancellor who's publicly admitted to being a Marxist is unlikely to manage the economy well - and so leave his government flush with cash for investment...

The thing that made the orginal RAZR ergonically great is probably lost to the yoof of today. What it did was to mimic a landline handset, in that it could be really long (by folding) and so reached all the way from ear to mouth. So the speaker was by your ear, and the mic by your gob. Rather than the horrible short mobiles of the time that had omni-directional mics out past your cheek, so all the people you were talking to could hear was the street noise around you. I can remember having to cover the end of my phone when talking to people in the 90s.

I think better mics, and some noise reducing computery goodness, have vastly improved this. So now it's mostly when you're talking to someone in high wind that you get unacceptable amounts of noise.

Plus fewer people have landlines at home, and those that do mostly have DECT handsets that are also too short to reach your mouth properly. So it's only office phones that are the old traditional shape.

I still think the RAZR form factor was perfect, but I wonder if as many people would agree now - as did then? It's still my favourite phone, despite the software being pants, and the built-in WAP hotkey (that couldn't be disabled) right next to the key for picking up calls - so you had to pay quite a few accidental WAP data downloads. Typically the only time I tried to use WAP in anger, to find an address for a lady on the train in London, it didn't work...

But that was also about the sleekness of the design, and that shiny metal keyboard. I'm not sure it works as well with this thickness - and the fact that you're shoving a screen against your cheek - which no matter how long I've owned a smartphone - I still haven't got used to. And still, when I pull the phone away from my cheek a little in-call, it often hangs it up when I put it back again, as it's activated the screen again.

I want the old RAZR back, but with the ability to do email and satnav, and checking basic things like bus times online - then throwing WiFi to a tablet for anything more. But then what's the point of a number pad on Android? So I think that's probably partly nostalgia. And the fact that my sight is so poor, that any long browsing is much better on a tablet, whereas people with normal sight are probably just as happy with a 6" screen.

Re: Why Sky?

"Why not call it a rock?"

"Look. You obviously have no concept of modern marketing..."

Re: "spaces won with 51 per cent of the vote"

Luddism in my case. I learned to type on a typewriter. A massive old Imperial thing, where you had to bash your little finger down by about an inch to get the A key to work.

The thing is, I learned by rote. juja[space]juja[space] for a whole line. Then move on to the next combination of home key and soemthing with the other hand then spacebar. Tab to get to the right place to put in my address on the top right of a letter, and always hitting spacebar twice after a full stop at the end of a sentence. And I still do it now.

I can format a letter properly, and have created templates for documents that get used a lot. But if I'm bashing something out quickly on the keyboard, I can have hit tab repeatedly and typed in an address - faster than taking my hands off the keyboard and reaching for the mouse to press the right buttons to align the text.

I'm sure this is because I wasn't taught how to use word processors, otherwise I'd know all the shortcut keys and that would probably be as quick as doing it the old fashioned way.