Saturday, March 17, 2012
What the dickens!
Following the Christmas screening of same and my post of 9th January I am now pleased to report that I have actually finished reading my first Dickens novel for a very long time, maybe since I was a child. After something of a pause around February, knocked off the last 10% of 'Great Expectations' over the last few days. Much more attractive on the kindle than on the telly; while the hero might be a bit of a wally at times he is not evil and does not do many bad things. Nothing like as nasty as the telly saw fit to make him - and for some reason I do not presently care for portrayals of nastiness, finding it all rather depressing: I can just about cope with the cardboard cut out variety which populates ITV3, but as for the stuff of ITV1 drama, no. But back on the kindle, I have now downloaded a selection, so perhaps over the coming weeks I will consume some Dickens in earnest.
In parallel, prompted by a report that one of our police forces is proposing to contract out some what is presently done by non-civilians to contractors, had a think about why I like public provision.
The phrase back in the days of Clause 4 was commanding heights. One wanted the commanding heights of the economy, if not national life in general, to be in the hands of the nation, rather than in the hands of of capitalists, as successful businessmen were known in those days. One wanted those heights directed to the wealth of the nation rather than to the wealth of the capitalists. And I know from my own modest experience that capitalists are very good at extracting profits out of public service contracts. They really care about it and put their heart and soul into that aspect of what they do - and they look to have done very well indeed out of the PFI contracts of the Brown & Blair era.
On the other hand, we should not forget that trade unionists used to be pretty good at fighting for their corner too, often without much regard for the health of the business that was providing the corner to fight for. And that public sector operations can acquire a life of their own, without much regard for whatever it was they were set up for in the first place. The antics of the two public service outfits in the US which went in for building dams in a big way the middle years of the 20th century come back to mind (see October 10th and October 14th).
Another plank of the argument was natural monopolies. It does not make a lot of sense to have a lot of, for example, water companies competing to provide water in the same area. Awful lot of duplicated infrastructure and the ground underneath our roads and pavements might get rather crowded. And while one might argue that it does make a lot of sense to have a lot of, for example, schools companies competing to provide schools in the same areas, it is not very community full. I think there is a lot to be said for everybody going to the same neighbourhood school, everybody mixing it in together without regard to colour, race, income or anything else. We need the practise; there is plenty of segregation in later life but it would be good not to start out that way.
Which leads onto the plank that there is a raft of public services which should be provided in a reasonably uniform way across the country, free at the point of delivery (a feature which as well as being community full, reduces transaction costs). That this raft is big enough so that in the round, we all get a reasonable chunk of provision from what we put in. Things balance out. We might not use dustbins but we do use care workers.
And looking to law and order services there is clear conflict of interest. If I am in the business of providing prisons for profit, I will also be in the business of promoting the bang em all up line approach to justice. I often wonder whether our failure to modernise our laws about recreational drugs is a consequence of a version of this effect.
At a more techy level, performance measurement is very much the thing these days, being used both to drive performance in operations which have been left in public hands and those which have been contracted out. And something was needed with standards in public services being very mixed, as indeed they were in private services. But performance measurement is not yet a very mature art: far too much effort is poured into computing and meeting performance targets at the expense of into whatever it was that the measures were trying to measure. A related problem being the amount of effort which is poured into documenting the space between different parts of an operation, perhaps between the public and private providers. In the olden days you just went down to the stores and got a stapler. Now you go through some complicated rigmarole to request one from the provider of office services, probably not the same as the outfit for whom you work and a rigmarole which might easily cost more than the stapler. Hard to get the balance right here.
I think that this is enough for now. Leaving me in favour of public provision of core public services, more or less free at the point of delivery, with things like cars, iron and coal no longer being core and with perhaps some room for private service provision in the lower reaches. But I fear that collectively we are not prepared to pay the taxes needed to make this work.
PS: when you next have a moan about a form or leaflet from government, spare a thought for the terrors that come with lots of consumer durables, the things that come in dozens of languages at once and attempt to tell a lot of the story in a very small number of pictures.
In parallel, prompted by a report that one of our police forces is proposing to contract out some what is presently done by non-civilians to contractors, had a think about why I like public provision.
The phrase back in the days of Clause 4 was commanding heights. One wanted the commanding heights of the economy, if not national life in general, to be in the hands of the nation, rather than in the hands of of capitalists, as successful businessmen were known in those days. One wanted those heights directed to the wealth of the nation rather than to the wealth of the capitalists. And I know from my own modest experience that capitalists are very good at extracting profits out of public service contracts. They really care about it and put their heart and soul into that aspect of what they do - and they look to have done very well indeed out of the PFI contracts of the Brown & Blair era.
On the other hand, we should not forget that trade unionists used to be pretty good at fighting for their corner too, often without much regard for the health of the business that was providing the corner to fight for. And that public sector operations can acquire a life of their own, without much regard for whatever it was they were set up for in the first place. The antics of the two public service outfits in the US which went in for building dams in a big way the middle years of the 20th century come back to mind (see October 10th and October 14th).
Another plank of the argument was natural monopolies. It does not make a lot of sense to have a lot of, for example, water companies competing to provide water in the same area. Awful lot of duplicated infrastructure and the ground underneath our roads and pavements might get rather crowded. And while one might argue that it does make a lot of sense to have a lot of, for example, schools companies competing to provide schools in the same areas, it is not very community full. I think there is a lot to be said for everybody going to the same neighbourhood school, everybody mixing it in together without regard to colour, race, income or anything else. We need the practise; there is plenty of segregation in later life but it would be good not to start out that way.
Which leads onto the plank that there is a raft of public services which should be provided in a reasonably uniform way across the country, free at the point of delivery (a feature which as well as being community full, reduces transaction costs). That this raft is big enough so that in the round, we all get a reasonable chunk of provision from what we put in. Things balance out. We might not use dustbins but we do use care workers.
And looking to law and order services there is clear conflict of interest. If I am in the business of providing prisons for profit, I will also be in the business of promoting the bang em all up line approach to justice. I often wonder whether our failure to modernise our laws about recreational drugs is a consequence of a version of this effect.
At a more techy level, performance measurement is very much the thing these days, being used both to drive performance in operations which have been left in public hands and those which have been contracted out. And something was needed with standards in public services being very mixed, as indeed they were in private services. But performance measurement is not yet a very mature art: far too much effort is poured into computing and meeting performance targets at the expense of into whatever it was that the measures were trying to measure. A related problem being the amount of effort which is poured into documenting the space between different parts of an operation, perhaps between the public and private providers. In the olden days you just went down to the stores and got a stapler. Now you go through some complicated rigmarole to request one from the provider of office services, probably not the same as the outfit for whom you work and a rigmarole which might easily cost more than the stapler. Hard to get the balance right here.
I think that this is enough for now. Leaving me in favour of public provision of core public services, more or less free at the point of delivery, with things like cars, iron and coal no longer being core and with perhaps some room for private service provision in the lower reaches. But I fear that collectively we are not prepared to pay the taxes needed to make this work.
PS: when you next have a moan about a form or leaflet from government, spare a thought for the terrors that come with lots of consumer durables, the things that come in dozens of languages at once and attempt to tell a lot of the story in a very small number of pictures.
# posted by Jim @ 4:01 AM 
