Layer 438 . . . Humour, Grim Reality, Hard Times, Resistance, Passivity, Complicity, Regime Change and Accountability

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An old mate of mine suggested that these blogs are lacking in a sense of humour, and I can't argue with that. This is hardly comedy central. In fact, THIS is Comedy Central -

http://www.comedycentral.com/

Alternatively, it's worth checking out Private Eye for humourous comment on politics and current affairs:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/

I like a good laugh myself, and the people at Comedy Central and Private Eye are the best in the business. Then there are the folks on The News Quiz - Sandi Toksvig, Jeremy Hardy, Andy Hamilton, Fred MacAulay, Francis Wheen, Sue Perkins, Phil Jupitus, et al. Unmissable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9yq

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/newsquiz/ 

Still bedding down is Channel 4's new current affairs '10 O'Clock Live' show on Thursdays, which features Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell. It's very amusing in parts.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/10-oclock-live

Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian is also a must-read.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker

Also Have I Got News For You.

In the interest of putting smiles on faces, Oxzen welcomes and will publish any contributions from readers in the way of witticisms, jokes, gags, japes and jests. No payment or reward, but credit and a name check will be given for any material submitted.

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There's a real art to being funny about what's going on in the world. For the most part the news is grim. The coalition is still saying there's no Plan B. They're still determined to slash public spending far faster than is even remotely necessary. This week there's constant dismay about the loss of public libraries, which Tories clearly don't give a shit about. They never use them. Never have and never will.

And talking of giving a shit - Manchester council has said it will reduce the number of its public toilets from 13 to ONE. Joke!!

This morning there was news about corruption going on in the privatisation of air/sea rescue services. It's even come to this - outsourcing and profit-making from public safety and rescue services.

Bastards like Toby Young and Michael Gove are still thrusting ahead with their plans to privatise schools and education, and completely mess up coherent public provision - and to do it all through the use of public money. Same applies to health and hospitals, where all manner of people and professional bodies are saying the government's proposals are going to be a disaster , but it won't make a jot of difference; private companies will be allowed into the 'market'  to cherry pick the most profitable bits, leaving the rest of the health service to deal with the hard stuff.

There's a revolution going on - a Chicago-School hard-line political convulsion - and there needs to be a coherent and organised response to it. None of this is necessary, none of it was voted for, it's not beneficial to the majority of us, it's not pleasant, and it's not funny. Piss-taking alone won't solve anything.

When people say "So what did you personally do to resist this reactionary evil?" it won't be enough to say I looked the other way, or I ignored it, or I made fun of it, or even - I wrote about it.

What's the next worse thing to having your country over-run by a bunch of fascists in jackboots? How about having it taken over and run by a bunch of hard-line neo-cons for the benefit of bankers, oligarchs, landowners and City fat cats? How about having more and more public assets stripped and sold off for the benefit of the already-rich?

What's the difference between a Mubarak and a bunch of his chums doing the bidding of Big Money, Multi-Nationals and Big Finance, to the detriment of 'ordinary' people, and David Cameron and his chums doing the bidding of Big Money, Big Business and Big Finance? Not a lot. Not that New Labour were any better. So what do we do about it?

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Why bother commenting on any of it, particularly for no obvious reward? I do ask myself this question sometimes.

Clearly the answer is that diarists, journal writers and bloggers write because they feel a strange compulsion to keep track of their mental, emotional and physical lives, and keep track of what's happening in the world. Primarily they do it for themselves, and it doesn't really matter whether anyone else reads it, or what anyone else thinks about it. Though feedback is much appreciated, especially when there are inaccuracies in the pieces.

There's also a desire to share with other people some of the interesting stuff that's available on the Internet, TV, radio, etc. I know I've had tremendous benefit from linking with what other bloggers and writers recommend by way of reading, videos, TV, and so on.

Take the situation in Egypt, for example. I now compulsively watch and listen to al-Jazeera to keep up with what's happening in Tahrir Square and throughout the country, and I like the fact that they have such a wide range of correspondents who report and comment on the situation both within the country and from as far afield as Washington and Australia. It's an additional bonus that citizen 'journalists' who have nothing to do with the major media organisations are also commenting on what's going on.

Who can forget the Baghdad Blogger and his ilk some years back?

It's a real pity that some folks don't have the time or the energy - or even the means - to share with others their thoughts on their lives and on the world from their own unique perspective. Does it really matter, though? Yes it does. Those who haven't discovered the benefits of personal writing really don't appreciate what they're missing. It's fine not to share it, but JFDI.

Waka waka.

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This morning my son patiently explained why the banks should all have been taken into State control at the point when the whole system went bust - after allowing the banks themselves to go bust. He pointed out that they could have been up and running again immediately with the salaries of employees paid from profits - once their massive debts had been written off. He was very clear about the need at that point for the government to guarantee the modest deposits of ordinary customers. As for the ill-gotten gains and the huge losses of the billionaires and squillionaires and hedge-funders who are the promoters of the rackets and the bubbles and of casino capitalism in general - who gives a shit? My son's adamant that we would all be a lot happier if we settled for having less money whilst insisting we have more time for personal pursuits and better relationships.

He really gets it.

Why doesn't everyone?

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Layer 319 . . . John McDonnell MP, the Labour Leadership, the Socialist Alternative, and IDS

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Let’s start this piece with a little quiz. Which politician said the following:

"The present benefits system is so complex and unfair that no one understands it. It leads at the bottom end to one of the most regressive tax and benefit withdrawal rates that it is possible to imagine. 

"We ask people to go to work for the first time and then tell them to pay back 70%, 80% and 90% back to the state. These are levels none of the wealthiest bankers are asked to pay – they are moaning at 50%.

"If you are unemployed, and you come from a family that is unemployed, all you can see when you think about work is risk. It is a real risk because for all the efforts you make the rewards are very minimal and in some cases none at all.

"Socially, everyone says: 'You are a bloody moron – why are you doing this? You don't have to do this.' So taking responsibility is a real risk for you."

Got it yet? Yes – it’s the former leader of the Tory Party, Iain Duncan Smith, who’s saying things that are completely bleeding obvious and yet no Labour party politician seems to have said them – ever. Certainly no member of the Labour government has said anything like this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/26/coalition-welfare-reforms-duncan-smith

IDS and his Centre for Social Justice got stuck into this issue sometime last year, and this latest quote is from the front page of the Guardian yesterday, which had a heading, “Duncan Smith starts welfare revolution”. Basically, what he’s now proposing to do, as the new minister for work and pensions, is allow people who are on unemployment benefits to keep those benefits until they are well established in a new job and until they are earning a decent amount, after which there will be a gradual withdrawal of benefits. Sounds sensible? More below.


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Another World Is Possible

In the meantime, this is part of an interview with John McDonnell, one of the declared candidates for the Labour leadership, by John Spence of TheVibe.co.uk

http://www.the-vibe.co.uk/2010/05/23/spenny/another-world-is-possible-an-interview-with-john-mcdonnell-mp/

JS: It’s clear from the interview that McDonnell is one of those old fashioned things – a principled politician. His time in parliament has been characterised by the unwavering articulation of those principles in word and deed, which has seen him branded as one of the ‘awkward squad’ by members of his own party.

It’s also clear that McDonnell is a politician who has not forgotten who he represents and who put him into the position he holds. What struck me most was that in the interview he seldom referred to himself with the terms ‘I’ or ‘me’; it was almost always ‘we’ or ‘us’. I don’t think this is an accident. As the interview shows, McDonnell is a staunch socialist, and thinks of himself in terms of his place amongst a groups of people and workers, not distanced from them.

JM: The reason I didn't vote for Gordon Brown was political. It wasn’t personal.

I can’t support people who have voted for things like the Iraq War, for privatisation, for cuts in welfare and benefits, for the implementation of the renewal of Trident. I can’t support candidates like that because I think it undermines our credibility, and what we’ve got to do is keep a clear distance from those people who have brought about a Tory government (sic) because of their support for these policies.

JS: Turning now to the [general] election; what’s your assessment of the election result, firstly, in terms of the Labour Party?

JM: The Labour result was better than expected, because what we saw was an element of class solidarity where people went to the ballot boxes and decided they wanted to keep the Tories out.

So it was clear that there was a positive Labour vote on the basis of opposing the Tories, but it wasn’t by any means, certainly in my constituency, and based on discussions I’ve had with others across the country, it certainly wasn’t an endorsement of New Labour policies. It was one of solidarity against the Tories and, in places like Dagenham, against the fascists with… regret… about what New Labour has done to the Labour Party.

Now, if you look at what happened in the election itself, it was exactly what we predicted: the coalition of people that we put together, as we always do when Labour is elected, was systematically alienated by New Labour policies – public sector workers alienated by privatisation; trade unionists alienated by a lack of trade union rights and the failure to address the issues of their wages and conditions and the security of their work; students alienated by tuition fees; pensioners alienated by a failure to address pensioner poverty and a refusal to restore the link between pensions and earnings; peace campaigners alienated by the Iraq War and Afghanistan; people who came to us because they saw us as the party of honesty against Tory sleaze alienated by expenses.

So you can see how every element of our coalition was alienated in some form, and that’s what brought about the breakdown in trust, and people no longer recognised the Labour Party as the party they knew and had trusted over the years. New Labour destroyed that bond between working class people and the Party itself, and it was only anti-Toryism that got us those voters out at the end of the day.

The issue for us now is how we re-establish that trust, and I think what people were saying on the doorstep is they want Labour back. We’ve got to re-establish the ‘Labour Party’ because New Labour has destroyed trust in us.

JS: What is your assessment of the Coalition Government in its early days?

JM: I don’t think people should underestimate the ruthlessness of this government. They will seek to solve this crisis on the backs of working class people; they’ll cut services and be ruthless about it, they’ll come from pay cuts, they’ll come from pension cuts and they’ll come from people’s basic services. I think we’ll see a growth in inequality in the same way that we did in the 1980s, and we’ll also see a growth in poverty and deprivation amongst working people whilst others make themselves richer and more prosperous. The discussion we’ve got to have now is about how we organise the resistance against that.

There will be things done by this government, the part of the Lib Dem agenda, that the rest of us [on the Labour left] have been calling for anyway – the scrapping of ID cards, restoring elements of the right to protest, things like that, but that shouldn’t mask or cloud the class nature of this government. The class nature is about the restoration of the casino economy, restoring profitability to the City in particular on the backs of working people through cuts in public services, wages, pensions and the rest.

JS: Given the policy agenda articulated in the Labour manifesto ahead of the election, can the Labour Party in its current guise actually be an effective opposition to the new government?

JM: The problem at the moment is that New Labour is implicated in bringing about the economic crisis that we now face – the deregulation of the City, the continuation of the policies of Thatcherism from the 80s and 90s, into New Labour and through to 2010.

They’re completely implicated in it and, actually, have completely adopted the ideas and ideology of Thatcherism. They believe in ‘the market’, they believe in privatisation as the best option for the delivery of services, and as a result of that it’s very difficult to see how [the candidates closely attached to new Labour] could have some Damascene conversion to socialism or even weaker forms of social democracy, and I think that’s what is going to hobble them, particularly if we get a new leader like one of the Milibands, or Ed Balls or Andy Burnham. If they come from the New Labour stable then ideologically they’ve adapted themselves to neoliberal policies anyway.

The struggle will be, yes, within the Labour Party from the rank and file, but I think also the struggle will be from within the communities themselves, with trade unions and other social groups coming together to resist what this government seeks to do. Eventually, I think the PLP will catch up with what’s happening in wider society.

JS: Turning now to policy related areas, how will your 2010 campaign differ from the 2007 campaign?

JM: It has moved on. 2007 was pre-major credit crunch. I was arguing the case then in the book that we did ‘Another World Is Possible’ that we needed to come to terms with the world as it then was, which was facing the impact of globalisation, how it had created a new world, new forms of exploitation, the opening up of the welfare state in this country to privatisation and profiteering, how it had undermined old securities in terms of state provision of housing , trade union rights, and how it had allowed the plundering of our environment for profit.

So I was trying to explain, at that stage, what globalisation meant, and how we needed to understand the world before we could organise in a way to combat the impact of globalisation in this country and in others across the world.

That was the intellectual debate we were having in 2007. The credit crunch then hit almost as predicted, in terms of a classic crisis of capitalism. What we are now into doing is sharing that understanding of how the capitalist system has gone into crisis again, but more importantly there is a sense of urgency now about what the implications are of that for working people. I think now it’s about motivating people to recognise they’ve got to stand up and fight back, that there will be a movement of resistance and they’ve got to join it.

JS: What are the other key planks of your policy platform?

JM: What I’m trying to say is, let’s understand the world as it now is, let’s understand why this crisis came about, and let’s have a look at those policies, therefore, that we now need to put in place.

 The most important question that people face now is, “Who is going to pay for this economic crisis?” The government has quite clearly made its decision that working people are going to pay for it.

Our argument is, no, it doesn’t have to be like that, there is an alternative, and the alternative is basically that we start planning and controlling our economy. It means basically that instead of tackling the deficit by cutting services, you tackle it by introducing a fair taxation system where the corporate sector is paying its way, we tackle avoidance and evasion of taxes, we introduce a transition tax, it was called a Tobin tax, we now call it the Robin Hood Tax, and in that way we introduce a system whereby we tackle the deficit straight away, but we increasingly use mechanisms for regulation and public ownership that give us control of our economy in the long term.

At the same time, we do recognise that if people are going to have the opportunity to resist they need the tools to do that, so what we’re campaigning for basic civil liberties and the restoration of trade union rights that can arm people with the arguments with which they can control their lives in the long term.

It’s also about trying to explain to people that there are very simple solutions to our problems. We’re the fifth richest country in the world yet we have a housing crisis with homelessness doubling under New Labour. The question is “How do we tackle it?” and the way we tackle it is by building council houses again in the way we haven’t done in the last 13 years.

We pour money into public services, but see more and more of it laundered out for private profit. The simple solution is that we end privatisation.

We want our children to have the best education possible, but they’re deterred from that, because instead of having free education we’re now charging them for their education. How do you overcome that? You scrap tuition fees.

If you want to tackle pensioner poverty, with two million pensioners in poverty at the moment, you increase the state pension and you restore the link with earnings. It’s the same with child poverty, you simply increase child benefits to the level which cover the cost of rearing a child.

If you want to ensure that families can lift themselves out of poverty, you increase the Minimum Wage to a ‘Living Wage’.

All of these are simple solutions, and they’re all premised on the redistribution of wealth which in turn is based upon primary control of our economy.

JS: The main audience of ‘The Vibe’ will have grown up under the Thatcher government, like me, or the Major and New Labour governments. How would you go about rationalising your policy agenda to that age group, specifically?

JM: The whole point of every political discussion at the moment should be about breaking through the mystification of the economic crisis. We can control the future of our lives. We can control the future of our economy. We can control what happens within our workplaces and our local communities, and the solution is through democratic control of our lives and our economy.

What the Tories have done, and what New Labour have done also, is that… the Tories have told us there is no alternative, while New Labour have told us there is only one alternative, and that alternative is to allow the markets to run free and allow privatisation to happen with limited government intervention at best.

What we have got to reassert for this generation is that it doesn’t have to be like this! What we should be doing now is saying “We should control our lives, and to control our lives we have to control our economy.” To do that we have to band together and use the democratic mechanisms available to us, and if we do that we can control our future.

For three decades now there has been a defeatism inculcated in people. What we have to do is break through that and say, “We’re not putting up with this anymore! We don’t believe the lies. We don’t believe it’s complicated.” There are simple solutions, but they will only come about if we assert control.

JS: Your support for traditional labour elements such as trade unions and public sector workers has been unstinting in the face of wider political, media and private sector hostility. To put it bluntly, what do you think makes you right and them wrong?

JM: Let’s go back to the economic crisis. You can look at this from any part of the cycle you like, but let’s start at the beginning.

If you suppress trade union rights, that allows employers to suppress wages. If at the same time you stop building council houses and you rely solely upon the private market and you create a shortage of houses then that means house prices are going to go up.

If you’re a worker whose wages have been suppressed by privatisation, outsourcing or a lack of trade union rights the one thing you need is a roof over your head. If there is a shortage of housing because no council houses are being built and house prices are going up you have to borrow to buy a property. If at the same time the government deregulates the City and they can lend to you and charge you whatever they want, you’re forced to borrow at en extortionate rate, leading to the build up of a debt bubble which is unsustainable, and then a credit crunch occurs.

That is reality of what happened. It stems from the undermining of trade union rights and the balance of forces between labour and capital being deliberately skewed in the favour of capital. There is a clear analysis there of why the credit crunch occurred, and now we’re having to pay for it, and what we’re being told to do is replicate the same circumstances, – suppress trade union rights, cut wages and public services so the casino economy can spin again.

I think that when the process of how we’ve arrived at this point is explained to people, and people understand what is happening as it reflected in their real lives than I think people will get angry, and they want to vent that anger. Our job politically is to mobilise that anger and use it to make political change.

JS: Do you think you’ll get the space and airtime in the mainstream media to articulate those points?

JM: No. A few years ago someone described me as being like a cult movie – you’ve sort of heard about it, but you’ve never seen it. It’s because most of the mainstream media aren’t interested in any detailed political discussion; it’s all 24-hour, short, sharp, media hits.

Even newspapers like the Guardian, which are supposed to be more liberal and open-minded, are not interested in a proper discussion of radical policies or fundamental analyses of society, so they’re as glib as most of the others as well.

So what we’ve got to do is create our own media. Part of that is using whatever we can in terms of new technology, of course, but also going back to traditional mechanisms like word of mouth, talking at large meetings, small groups, demonstrations, picket lines, climate camps… using the mechanisms that social movements are using all the way across the world to provide an alternative media to enable people, not just to receive information because it’s not about talking down to people, but to get involved in the dialogue and the debate.

JS: Last question; If you were successful in the final ballot, what would be your first action as leader of the Labour Party?

JM: I’d go out to people and tell them we’re now going to produce our own Bill of Rights which would restore trade union freedom, which would restore local democracy, and which would give people social rights – the right to a decent home, the right to a decent health service, the right to a decent education all of which would be enforceable and also the right to have a say, not only in your local community but also when you go to work as well.

I think the whole basis of having a real Labour government is about establishing freedom and that Bill of Rights would establish people’s freedom to control their own lives.

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Re David Cameron, this piece in the MailOnline is actually worth reading.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218964/David-Cameron-cool-says-Rasta-cafe-owner-befriended-Tory-leader-Oxford.html


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Iain Duncan Smith, again

These quotes are from his interview with the Guardian:

IDS: I will tackle root causes of poverty
Former Tory leader outlines plan to help the worst off

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/26/iain-duncan-smith-interview-welfare

A dangerous political force has been let loose in Whitehall: a politician with no personal ambition whose only aim is to preside over the wholesale reform of his patch.

He [will] press ahead with his new task as work and pensions secretary. This is to reform what he regards as Britain's bloated and inefficient welfare system, which he believes discourages many of the 5 million people who rely on state support from working.

“I am here because I want this to be the most reforming government on benefits for a generation. I think we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity."

David Cameron brought Duncan Smith back into the frontline after he rehabilitated himself following his unhappy experience as leader by becoming one of the Tories' most influential thinkers in decades on social breakdown. As leader, the former Scots Guards officer was introduced to searing levels of poverty, and the cycle that is often impossible to escape, when he visited the Easterhouse estate on the eastern outskirts of Glasgow. His experience prompted Duncan Smith to establish the Centre for Social Justice, which produced a lengthy report on Breakdown Britain

These ideas will be informing his work as work and pensions secretary and also as chairman of the first cabinet committee dedicated to promoting social justice by tackling the root causes of poverty.

Thatcherite Tories, who believe the welfare budget is ripe for cuts, may be disappointed by Duncan Smith's language.

"The purpose of my life here is to improve the quality of life of the worst off in society." he says. "If somebody tells me I have to do something different then I won't be here any longer. Tattooed across my heart is that I didn't come here in any shape or form simply as a cheeseparer. What I have come to do is look root and branch at how we deliver welfare which is aimed at groups at the bottom end of society who need help and support, either because they can't work or because they can but they are unable to get back to work, or because they are disabled."

The CSJ report proposes the merger of eight benefits into just two, the withdrawal of benefits much more slowly for low earners, and the removal of rules that stop people claiming out-of-work benefits entirely if they do only a few hours' work a week.

Duncan Smith will chair a cabinet committee on social justice, saying it is ironic that it has taken the Conservative party to set up such a committee.

Ironic indeed.
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Layer 207 . . . Free Speech, Privatisation, Annual Elections and Parallel Universes.

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Some things the Guardian gets wrong, but there's a very great deal which it, and its writers,  get absolutely right.

George Monbiot, for example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/19/eady-libel-tourism-free-speech 

How our senior libel judge stamps on free speech – all over the world

This is a very important focus on this country's appalling libel laws, and how they serve mainly the interests of the rich and powerful. Starting with the Guardian's clash last week with Trafigura and its solicitors' attempts to prevent publication of information that ought to be in the public realm -

“Trafigura's super-injunction is weird for lots of reasons. But the strangest fact is this: it has nothing to do with the Honourable Mr Justice Eady. The company's lawyers injuncted the Guardian, injuncted their injunction, and tried to injunct reports of parliament's proceedings. And they did all this without enlisting the help of the hanging judge of the Queen's Bench Division, the legal censor who appears to be fighting a one-man battle against freedom of speech. That's quite an achievement.

But even as the Trafigura case was being discussed in parliament, the court of appeal was handing down yet another damning ruling on Sir David Eady's judgments.

Eady [appears]to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing.

In another case

"The law lords decided that Eady was "hostile to the spirit" of the public interest defence and that he had "rigidly applied the old law" in a way that was "quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading". In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady's approach to that of the Communist party censors in the Soviet Union.

But perhaps the gravest judgments against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws, and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgments, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.

Monbiot then goes on to say

Eady's clerk tells me that the judge doesn't want to comment, but I expect he would answer that he was merely applying the law. And, though his interpretation is draconian, the sad truth is that he would be right. Long before Eady's reign of terror began, gangsters such as Robert Maxwell were using the defamation laws to sue the backside off anyone who tried to investigate their crooked affairs. Such are the perversities of this law that the English courts can be used by criminals to prevent exposure of their crimes. With average costs 140 times higher than those of other European countries, libel proceedings here can be defended only by people . . . who have a lot of money and a lot of guts. Until the law is changed, men like Mr Justice Eady will continue to hold free speech to ransom.

Perhaps the real target of this column should have been Straw, whose determination to preserve this bookburners' law means that all of us are forced to share his terror of upsetting the rich and powerful. Through 12 years in power, a government of frightened little men has done nothing to reform the democratic world's most illiberal laws, which permit an old-fashioned judge to punish us for holding power to account.

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Polly Toynbee, meanwhile, says

Beware the zealots selling miracle cures of privatisation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/beware-zealots-selling-miracle-cures

"Harsher, deeper and faster, comes the call from the CBI, licking its lips as it eyes up public services cuts. Yesterday's report from the business lobby group urges an eye-watering extra £120bn to be cut two years earlier than the government proposes. Whatever remains of the public sector after all these cuts should, they say, be subject to outsourcing and privatisation with "wider use of co-funding" – the polite word for making people pay for services that are at present free.

Less for more is what happened when Tony Blair rushed out independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) to inject private sector values into NHS surgery. In 2003, Blair and Alan Milburn commissioned 36 centres with a few mobile and diagnostic units to add extra surgery beds for rapid-throughput, simple routine surgery, mostly on hips, knees and cataracts. Some more capacity was needed to speed up waiting times: old people were waiting up to eight months for cataract operations. Some consultants who kept long lists to promote their private practice needed a sharp prod.

But ISTCs were ideologically designed to part-privatise the NHS, with no level playing field for fair competition with existing hospitals. All were centrally commissioned by diktat without local consultation. The priority was "to increase private capacity" so even the most flourishing foundation hospitals were banned from bidding for the contracts. Some companies that won contracts, such as United Health, later employed key Blair health advisers. To prevent competition with the NHS, only foreign doctors were employed, many of them unfamiliar with British practice.

The contracts were disastrous from the start. They guaranteed higher prices per patient than the NHS tariff, though it should be cheaper to treat routine surgery patients in brand new units with no untidy emergency cases or old people with complex broken pelvises.

Ignoring local need meant many beds stayed empty – but the ISTCs were paid anyway. By the time many units opened, the NHS had already cut waiting lists to target levels, and there was no work to be done. When Gordon Brown came in he took one look and cancelled most of the second wave: Alan Johnson found one centre with bed occupancy under 10% and closed it at once, though cancelled contracts cost the NHS £37m. The Tories, egged on by private health companies, unfairly accused Brown of being the roadblock to Blairite "reforms" for ideological reasons. The truth is that the Department of Health finds ISTCs still cost 11% more per operation, and government sources say bed occupancy falls as low as 78%, far below the NHS which is well over 90%.

How is the quality? Officially, it's good, but a two-year study published last month in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery casts doubts: examining patients sent from Cardiff to the Weston-super-Mare ISTC, two-thirds of hip replacements showed evidence of poor technique, with 18% needing repair surgery. That is 20 times the normal NHS rate for revisions and each costs about £15,000. Leading orthopaedic surgeons report similar evidence, pointing out that ISTCs should perform better, since they are never sent complex cases.

Weak public managers are often even worse at drawing up private finance initiative, public-private partnership or even bog-standard procurement deals with the private sector. The danger is that canny companies will run rings round civil servants with neither the knowledge not the greedy motivation to squeeze out every penny's worth.

I have a small example: researching my book Hard Work, I took an agency job as a hospital night cleaner and it was plain that far too many hours had been assigned to a simple routine. The hospital manager who drew up the contract had long lost touch with cleaning and was clueless as to how long a job should take. There are worse examples, where hospital cleaning companies undercut each other and skimp on the job, with disastrous consequences. Either way, ward sisters have lost the power to manage cleaners to their own standards, as they used to in cleaner pre-contracting days.

There is no one-size-fits-all. The lesson of the ISTC debacle is that politicians who dash for eye-catching quick fixes, "modernising" and "reforming" with an ideological zeal for the private sector will come a cropper. Blair did it often with his "scars on my back" political distaste for the public sector; Brown's worst case was his botched PPP for the London tube, done to spite Ken Livingstone. Beware politicians of all complexions who defy complexity to opt for political, not pragmatic solutions.

One of the main reasons for highlighting so much of this is that my own mother was one of the victims of those badly performed hip replacement operations.
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft this week writes a good column about the need for annual parliamentary elections -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/chartists-electoral-reform-annual-parliaments

Now more than ever, Britain needs the last Chartist reform

"The expenses scandal has prompted a panoply of ideas to fix politics. But the strongest of all is missing: annual elections

Although the expenses scandal has prompted various schemes for constitutional and electoral reform, here is one that has gone missing. And yet it was among the radical Chartists' demands for parliamentary reform more than 150 years ago, and is the simplest and potentially the most effective of all.

But repellent as the MPs' impenitence is, institutional reform of parliament is desirable in its own right – and should be achievable. Looking over our political history, it's striking how daring radical demands once seemed, and how almost all were met, and quite soon at that.

The People's Charter in 1838 demanded six reforms, only one of which has not been achieved to this day. Universal suffrage took less than 80 years to accomplish, and property qualifications for voting were finally ended . . . The secret ballot was introduced as early as 1872.

Successive reform acts slowly addressed the Chartists' demand for "equal representation", in the sense that all constituencies should have electorates of roughly equal size.

As to the fifth demand, payment of members began in 1912, and has had an unintended consequence, not to say a lamentable one: the emergence of a new class of permanent, if often mediocre, professional politicians. This was further encouraged by a system of expenses that, even when it wasn't flagrantly dishonest, rested on the assumption that politics was a full-time profession. That has now met its nemesis.

And the sixth demand? This was the one never achieved, rarely mentioned now, but simpler than any of the others: annual parliaments.

To those Victorian radicals it was axiomatic that the best way to make the government accountable to parliament was to make parliament accountable to the electorate – every year. The objections to this are themselves revealing. Too expensive? But elections don't need to involve enormous sums of money spent by parties, and we would be much better off without that. Governments would be less stable and weaker? Well, yes, that's the point. Electing parliament every year would keep our rulers on their toes. More than any other possible reform it answers the simplest call of all: power to the people."

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A very lucky universe

There's a fascinating column by John Gribbin on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN which has “suffered a series of mishaps preventing it from commencing its search for the elusive Higgs Boson particle”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/cern-higgs-boson-particle

As I understand it, Gribbin is saying that in a parallel universe this collider did actually work when it was switched on, and it immediately caused that particular universe to unravel and disappear. The reason we're still here and still trying to get the collider to work is because it refuses to work each time we press the switch, in our particular universe at least. However, several other parallel universes have probably already disappeared owing to the thing actually working (in them) each time we've tried to switch it on. Lucky us! All we have to do now is stop trying to make it work.

PhillipD comments -

As Niels Bohr once (more or less) said: 'If you don't get a headache thinking about this stuff, you don't understand it'.
Fortunately, I don't understand it so just maybe I'll sleep tonight :-) If I could really grasp this stuff I suspect it would drive me nuts!

AllyF says -

I read about multiverses, time-travel, particle transportation and all this stuff. I think hard about it.
Then I return to the conclusion that you're all making it up as you go along.
But good luck to you. It's more entertaining than sociology.

ThurrockHunt says -

Future ripples and multiverses my arse, it doesn't work because they've ballsed up the wiring. Same thing happened with our boiler.

DomC -

This is all very well but both Blue Peter and Tomorrows World promised me Jet powered rocket pants by now... where are they? That's what I'd like to know

ChanceyGardner -

Computer says No.

delphinia -

Schroedinger's blasted cat wakes me up at 3 am on alternate mornings.
Did you know he ( Schroedinger, not the cat) is buried in Alpbach, Austria, with a minging little plaque?

Butwhatif -
If 8 out of 10 of Shroedinger's cats prefer Whiskas, what about the other 10?

Haliborange -
Parallel universes?
You can buy one here for a quid.
http://www.youruniverse.co.uk/

Bristol Boy -

excellent artic .  .  .  .  .
.