Christmas looms so large in our minds that it distorts our sense of time. Rather than seeing one day ahead, of feasting and entertaining, Christmas appears like a prolonged season. Women (who in most households are responsible for provisioning, entertaining etc) stock up as if preparing for the siege of Malta. Siege-panic is also driven by the many examples in the media of well-stocked Christmas tables, surrounded by contented families enjoying the most expensive gifts. However, the urge to eat well and buy gifts is driven by more than imitative consumerism. Parents give gifts to bring happiness to their children, and, by seeing the pleasure these gifts evoke, to themselves. The desire for your children to be happy is a recognition that their lives will not always be so. But seeing their happiness pushes from our minds the pain we feel when we think of those we have loved (still love) that are no longer round the table, telling their usual jokes, laughing in the way we remember. There is another source of melancholy, derived from the passage of time. We remember previous Christmases, when we were younger and had the hopes and expectations of life we see in our children.
This mixture of emotions explains the persistence of Christmas songs that express regret and disillusion, like The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas. Another popular song, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas from the film Meet Me in St Louis, differs in being melancholy because the singer looks ahead pessimistically to future Christmases. This made the lyrics unacceptable for those who dislike emotional complexity, and new, more upbeat, ones were devised for Frank Sinatra to sing. This re-writing follows another pattern of Christmas - the hope that over-eating, alcohol and jolly songs will swamp any emotions we find painful. Spending becomes a way in which we can avoid understanding ourselves.
Tuesday 29 December 2009
Thursday 17 December 2009
The Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex
In a speech at the time he left office, President Eisenhower warned the USA about the power of the military-industrial complex. By this, he meant that US foreign and defence policy was increasingly driven by the needs of an informal coalition between the military and defence contractors. These groups came together because both benefited from an expansion of military expenditure, and were able to generate political support by exaggerating the external threats facing the USA. Since in Eisenhower’s time the main challengers to US dominance were communist states, this meant depicting any foreign leaders not aligned to the USA and any uprisings against foreign regimes as part of a single world ‘communist’ conspiracy. US foreign policy became driven by a kind of collective paranoia, with the USA involved in military interventions and murderous wars in an attempt to fight the incoming tide of this supposed conspiracy. Communism has declined, but the paranoia remains. Imaginary wars on drugs and ‘terror’ have involved real wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the frontier regions of Pakistan.
New technology is promoted with particular enthusiasm by the military-industrial complex, ostensibly because it offers the possibility of gaining an advantage over prospective enemies. But new technology is usually less reliable and more expensive than the equipment it replaces. The more unreliable the technology, the longer the contracts, which offers the prospect of greater profits since contracts for military equipment are awarded on a cost plus basis. And equipment failure and cost over-runs can always be explained to the public as an inevitable risk required for the effective defence of the state.
In British central government, domestic expenditure is far more important than spending on the military. Our own equivalent of the military-industrial complex therefore is built around on the vast sums spent on health and social care, public order, and transport. Public funding for these areas can be seen as a treacle pot from which members of the complex can feed, and there are three ways in which they can do so.
The first is through the privatisation of what were previously regarded as being government services. This has expanded vastly since a neo-Thatcherite government came to power in 1997, and has been rationalised as introducing competitiveness and the efficiencies of the private sector into public services. A key component of privatisation is the Public Finance Initiative (PFI), which involves public authorities paying contractors high fees to rent from them newly-built hospitals, schools and other public buildings (usually with additional payments for servicing the buildings). Besides PFI, there are contracts for transport, prisons, nursing and residential care, cleaning services in public buildings, employment services and so on. Needless to say, finance raised to pay for PFI and related schemes has involved large transfers of public funds to the banking sector.
The second way is through consultancy fees. These have expanded with the introduction of contractual relationships throughout government, usually following privatisation. One or more of the big four professional services firms (PWC, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) appear in every such transaction, and are even brought in by government to audit each others’ work, and report on each others’ failures. They have managed to sell a spurious technology of management expertise to politicians and the public, such that no major governmental decisions can be made without their engagement.
The third way is through major IT projects. These have involved the world’s most expensive database (the NHS Programme for IT) which will probably have a final cost of £20 billion, plus such projects as the database for identity cards (£12 to 18 billion), ContactPoint (the database recording all children, costing £1 billion), The Libra court management system (£341 million), and the C-NOMIS offender management system (£279 million). All of these systems have spectacular cost overruns, and have failed to deliver the benefits they initially promised. Very large parts of the NHS Programme for IT are hardly even used.
The complex can therefore be referred to as the ‘Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex’, or ‘PIC Complex’ for short. As with the military-industrial complex in the USA, the PIC Complex in Britain shapes government policy in its own favour. There is no public demand for identity cards, and security experts see them as having a negligible impact on public safety. The phenomenal cost of the scheme is seen as an argument against it. But the very cost of the scheme is the reason it exists - it will produce an endless stream of public funds from the treacle pot for IT companies, professional services firms, and the financial sector. Few if any experts in child care asked for a child database, but we have paid for one which will almost certainly not work, and will divert resources from services which do protect children. The diversion of resources from services which deal with people into IT schemes which enrich the PIC Complex has already happened with C-NOMIS.
How can this be allowed to happen? One reason is that the concentration of power in English government gives great leverage to the PIC Complex. Its members only need to convince a small number of senior politicians and civil servants to secure multi-million pound contracts. This saves all the bother of selling products to lots of local councils, hospitals schools etc, let alone having to convince the public who ultimately pay for them. This is a symbiotic relationship - privatisation and large centralised databases weaken rival local centres of power and hence maintain this leverage. Convincing small numbers of senior politicians and civil servants has proved easy because some are for sale. This is not traditional corruption in which a contractor pays money and then gets what they want, but a new time-displaced version in which the politician favours a contractor and is subsequently rewarded with a seat on the board, consultancies etc. I would not of course allege such a thing about Patricia Hewitt MP, the former Secretary of State for Health, who is currently earning £12,500/month from BT Group (a major contractor for the NHS Programme for IT), and £4,600/month from Alliance Boots (which is a major pharmaceutical distributor to the NHS and a contractor for privatised primary care services). October was a good month, when she also earned £15,000 from Cinven, which owns a chain of private hospitals which contract with the NHS.
Academics are also subsidiary players in the PIC Complex, providing essential legitimation services, using suitably high-minded and abstract terms like ‘contestability’ and ‘choice’. But more of that in a later posting.
New technology is promoted with particular enthusiasm by the military-industrial complex, ostensibly because it offers the possibility of gaining an advantage over prospective enemies. But new technology is usually less reliable and more expensive than the equipment it replaces. The more unreliable the technology, the longer the contracts, which offers the prospect of greater profits since contracts for military equipment are awarded on a cost plus basis. And equipment failure and cost over-runs can always be explained to the public as an inevitable risk required for the effective defence of the state.
In British central government, domestic expenditure is far more important than spending on the military. Our own equivalent of the military-industrial complex therefore is built around on the vast sums spent on health and social care, public order, and transport. Public funding for these areas can be seen as a treacle pot from which members of the complex can feed, and there are three ways in which they can do so.
The first is through the privatisation of what were previously regarded as being government services. This has expanded vastly since a neo-Thatcherite government came to power in 1997, and has been rationalised as introducing competitiveness and the efficiencies of the private sector into public services. A key component of privatisation is the Public Finance Initiative (PFI), which involves public authorities paying contractors high fees to rent from them newly-built hospitals, schools and other public buildings (usually with additional payments for servicing the buildings). Besides PFI, there are contracts for transport, prisons, nursing and residential care, cleaning services in public buildings, employment services and so on. Needless to say, finance raised to pay for PFI and related schemes has involved large transfers of public funds to the banking sector.
The second way is through consultancy fees. These have expanded with the introduction of contractual relationships throughout government, usually following privatisation. One or more of the big four professional services firms (PWC, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) appear in every such transaction, and are even brought in by government to audit each others’ work, and report on each others’ failures. They have managed to sell a spurious technology of management expertise to politicians and the public, such that no major governmental decisions can be made without their engagement.
The third way is through major IT projects. These have involved the world’s most expensive database (the NHS Programme for IT) which will probably have a final cost of £20 billion, plus such projects as the database for identity cards (£12 to 18 billion), ContactPoint (the database recording all children, costing £1 billion), The Libra court management system (£341 million), and the C-NOMIS offender management system (£279 million). All of these systems have spectacular cost overruns, and have failed to deliver the benefits they initially promised. Very large parts of the NHS Programme for IT are hardly even used.
The complex can therefore be referred to as the ‘Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex’, or ‘PIC Complex’ for short. As with the military-industrial complex in the USA, the PIC Complex in Britain shapes government policy in its own favour. There is no public demand for identity cards, and security experts see them as having a negligible impact on public safety. The phenomenal cost of the scheme is seen as an argument against it. But the very cost of the scheme is the reason it exists - it will produce an endless stream of public funds from the treacle pot for IT companies, professional services firms, and the financial sector. Few if any experts in child care asked for a child database, but we have paid for one which will almost certainly not work, and will divert resources from services which do protect children. The diversion of resources from services which deal with people into IT schemes which enrich the PIC Complex has already happened with C-NOMIS.
How can this be allowed to happen? One reason is that the concentration of power in English government gives great leverage to the PIC Complex. Its members only need to convince a small number of senior politicians and civil servants to secure multi-million pound contracts. This saves all the bother of selling products to lots of local councils, hospitals schools etc, let alone having to convince the public who ultimately pay for them. This is a symbiotic relationship - privatisation and large centralised databases weaken rival local centres of power and hence maintain this leverage. Convincing small numbers of senior politicians and civil servants has proved easy because some are for sale. This is not traditional corruption in which a contractor pays money and then gets what they want, but a new time-displaced version in which the politician favours a contractor and is subsequently rewarded with a seat on the board, consultancies etc. I would not of course allege such a thing about Patricia Hewitt MP, the former Secretary of State for Health, who is currently earning £12,500/month from BT Group (a major contractor for the NHS Programme for IT), and £4,600/month from Alliance Boots (which is a major pharmaceutical distributor to the NHS and a contractor for privatised primary care services). October was a good month, when she also earned £15,000 from Cinven, which owns a chain of private hospitals which contract with the NHS.
Academics are also subsidiary players in the PIC Complex, providing essential legitimation services, using suitably high-minded and abstract terms like ‘contestability’ and ‘choice’. But more of that in a later posting.
Thursday 3 December 2009
Learning our incompetencies
All men at an early age believe they are talented at football. Some (like myself) realise their lack of talent in the first years of primary school. Others persist in years of hope until the final disappointing realisation that theirs will not after all be a life of Premiership fame, Ferraris, and beautiful but expensive girlfriends.
Learning our incompetences helps us avoid wasting time on activities where there are more talented rivals, and enables us to concentrate on what we can do effectively. However, there are some areas of life in which this learning usually fails to take place. Most people, against all the evidence, continue to believe they are ‘above average’ drivers and lovers. Many people also believe that, despite lack of training or any previous evidence of competence, that they can run a pub or a restaurant.
The results of this delusion can be found in every town. Here is an example. My wife is a member of a group of women (which she calls the ‘ladies’) who have worked together in the past, and celebrate each others’ birthdays by meeting for dinner. The restaurant is usually one chosen by the lady with the birthday. The most recent meal was at a new Indian restaurant in Worcestershire. The ladies met there at 8pm. The decor was pleasant, and there were poppadums and chutneys awaiting them at the table. But no waiter came to ask for their orders for drinks, and there was a long delay before any waiter came at all. When this did eventually happen, the ladies decided to skip a starter and ordered main courses. Nothing happened for a very long time. The group at the next table decided that they too had waited for far too long, and decided to leave. The waiter pursued them into the street and told them the food was ready. The food then came for the ladies. It was lukewarm, indicating that it had been cooked some time ago and then forgotten.
No waiter came to ask them if they wanted to order a dessert, so the ladies decided that they would move directly to coffee. A coffee pot arrived, but no cups. The ladies found some in the restaurant and served themselves. They then seized a waiter, who produced three bills. These included one for £27 worth of lager, which they certainly had not drunk. There followed a process of negotiation to reduce the bills. The toilets were in the basement, but when reaching them, the ladies found they were closed, and they were redirected to the disabled toilet at the top of the building (!) By the time they were due to leave it was 11-30pm, and the front door of the restaurant was locked.
The sad thing is that the ladies could have gone to the Spice Cuisine in St John’s in Worcester and paid rather less for an excellent meal, cooked rapidly and served efficiently. But then, the people who run and work in the Spice Cuisine have discovered an area of life in which they are supremely competent. The staff at the other restaurant could try being footballers.
Learning our incompetences helps us avoid wasting time on activities where there are more talented rivals, and enables us to concentrate on what we can do effectively. However, there are some areas of life in which this learning usually fails to take place. Most people, against all the evidence, continue to believe they are ‘above average’ drivers and lovers. Many people also believe that, despite lack of training or any previous evidence of competence, that they can run a pub or a restaurant.
The results of this delusion can be found in every town. Here is an example. My wife is a member of a group of women (which she calls the ‘ladies’) who have worked together in the past, and celebrate each others’ birthdays by meeting for dinner. The restaurant is usually one chosen by the lady with the birthday. The most recent meal was at a new Indian restaurant in Worcestershire. The ladies met there at 8pm. The decor was pleasant, and there were poppadums and chutneys awaiting them at the table. But no waiter came to ask for their orders for drinks, and there was a long delay before any waiter came at all. When this did eventually happen, the ladies decided to skip a starter and ordered main courses. Nothing happened for a very long time. The group at the next table decided that they too had waited for far too long, and decided to leave. The waiter pursued them into the street and told them the food was ready. The food then came for the ladies. It was lukewarm, indicating that it had been cooked some time ago and then forgotten.
No waiter came to ask them if they wanted to order a dessert, so the ladies decided that they would move directly to coffee. A coffee pot arrived, but no cups. The ladies found some in the restaurant and served themselves. They then seized a waiter, who produced three bills. These included one for £27 worth of lager, which they certainly had not drunk. There followed a process of negotiation to reduce the bills. The toilets were in the basement, but when reaching them, the ladies found they were closed, and they were redirected to the disabled toilet at the top of the building (!) By the time they were due to leave it was 11-30pm, and the front door of the restaurant was locked.
The sad thing is that the ladies could have gone to the Spice Cuisine in St John’s in Worcester and paid rather less for an excellent meal, cooked rapidly and served efficiently. But then, the people who run and work in the Spice Cuisine have discovered an area of life in which they are supremely competent. The staff at the other restaurant could try being footballers.
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