pumpkinstrokemarrow

The first concerns the thundering in the media commented on yesterday. My point being not to whack in a whole lot of new supervisors in a bout of policy making by Sun headline. When I get around to looking at the words which follow the thundering, I find that there has, as it happens, been a complete failure of supervision; by managers and senior managers in the caring company concerned, by ComCare (not called OffCare for some reason) and by the commissioning local authorities. All these layers of supervisors, but we still don't get it right. But I stick with my point that the answer is not to add another layer. Reform or replace a layer or two perhaps, but don't add another one. And that the real answer is to do something about the quality of the work, not about the quality of the supervision.

The second concerns the people for whom every little counts. It seems that a certain Tesco was chucking a great deal of food into the bin because a freezer had broken down. Food which was perfectly OK but which could no longer be sold. Sundry low lifes got to hear about this and decided that they might as well retrieve and eat the stuff. Possibly sell it on in the boozer. Tesco has seen fit to take one of these low lifes to court. Now it may well be that the low lifes have indeed broken the law by rifling the bins at the back of Tescos, but it does seem very mean (and a poor use of our badly overstretched criminal justice system) to take them to court. The loss of business occasioned by free food getting into the system and the loss of good name which might be occasioned by damaged food with their name on it getting into the system, not sufficient justification.

We were then amused to read that the shortly to be retired bribery laws, but presently the law of the land and used to contain the activities of the likes of BAE, were invented over 100 years ago to deter eager tradespeople from bribing one's maid or housekeeper for orders for kippers or soap. Or even claret. I wonder.

Lastly, we were absolutely horrified to learn that an important soap celebrity, who cannot of course be named, had been struck with a slipper by a drunken boyfriend.

At this point I move onto the rather superior NYRB - rather superior to its London analogue the LRB. Bigger circulation and bigger budget? - where I read about the solution the the financial crisis. As far as I can make out this solution is a variation on the Keynes theme, but a solution which recognises that public debt has now got so high that governments need to have a care before incurring any more. So how to stimulate demand? Answer: have a government backed bank which provides funds for large, useful projects. Wind farms, dams, nuclear power stations. Hospitals and schools. With the trick being not to fund the things in entirety, merely to back the bonds which do fund them. The things would be run by the private sector for a good profit, which is why people, not to mention those forces for evil, the hedge funds, will buy the bonds. The contribution of government is to provide some seed corn and some backing for some nice long term projects. This way you get to generate a lot of demand for a fairly modest amount of new government debt.

Which all rather smells of PFI. The wheeze whereby we get public spending off the national accounts, at the price of paying rather a lot for public, not to say national, services going forward. Dreadful thinks I. But then I think again. The public at large wants a lot more service than it is prepared to pay for in the form of tax. The public at large wants a lot more than it can actually afford. Has been consuming a lot more than it has been earning for many years. Part of this is now expressed as a whopping hole in public finances. So the way forward is to make people pay for public services at the point of consumption. When they are actually dying they won't mind dipping deep into their pockets. And what better way to pay at the point of consumption than to privatise the services? The private sector knows all about paying at the point of consumption.

A solution which is apt to be rather inefficient, not very egalitarian and apt to make a small number of people a great deal of money. But is that where we have got to?

I close with a puzzle for readers. What is there in this post to make Mr. Google think that I need the services of an asbestos removal company? See http://www.westfieldgroupukltd.co.uk/.