Hornby price increases

Sorry missed the original reference to losing data. Was thinking more on the lines of the exam marking fiasco. Seems the outside contracter made a complete and utter hash of it yet the contract was terminated by mutual agreement

Cheers, Simon

I don't think there was one...

...hmm, I think I might have miss understood your point, yes HMG can sack outside contractors easier than if they were employed by the civil service but (and this was my point), and it's a big 'but', the opposite side of the coin is that data - of what sort - is more difficult to monitor.

Remember, the only people who keep telling us, commerce and HMG, that contracting out is better than in-house data processing are the contractors looking for work and an easy 'buck'...

And what makes you think corporations sack anyone other than the drones at the bottom? Once you reach a certain level, you are "fired upstairs" or "promoted sideways", both time-honoured methods of dumping deadwood onto other poor saps. 'Nother problem is that corporations waste a helluva lot of money with no public oversight and usually not even awareness. There's just increased prices to the consumers, to make up for money-wasting mistakes.

Bureaucracies are all alike, It matters not where the money to support them comes from. The differentiation between public and private money is a chimera. There's only one wallet.

And Maggie Thatcher had it wrong: consolidating small local governments into larger administrative bodies does not increase efficiency - it just makes the senior bureaucracies even larger, and gives them more power, because they have larger junior bodies to oversee. In fact Maggie, like a number of other right-wing, "common sense" dingbats in other "developed" countries was hoodwinked by the senior bureaucracy, for whom "efficiency in government" meant a golden opportunity for creating ever bigger personal empires.

Bah! (I'm feeling more curmudgeonly than usual tonight. Try a dose of curmudgeonitis. Feels good, don't it? ;-))

A minor point but it was actually the Edward Heath administration which created the regional super authorities and the smaller local ones weren't abolished, they just ceased to be as relevant. What Thatcher did was take away from those regional and local authorities the right to make any spending decisions with which central government did not agree.

(kim)

Thanks for the correction. Anyhow, the mania for "efficiency" drifted across the Atlantic, and infected our politicians, too.

The semantic trick was to equate efficiency with saving money, which is not the same thing. If efficiency == saving money, then you are most efficient when you spend no money at all.... which is absurd, as my teacher used to say in math class. ;-)

"simon" wrote

Ah yes, if it moves privatise it, if it doesn't move, kick it until it does and then privatise it.

We've really seen the benefits of privatisation of late. A railway network which costs four or five times what it did when in public hands. Gas and electric prices escalating out of mosts people's level of affordability (and don't tell me that nationalised utilities would be going down the same route), same with water and so on ................

John.

Not the corporations I've suffered, they sack left right and centre with the occasional purge from top to bottom. The really seriuos clearouts ones being when they merge or take over. of course those at the top get a nice fat packet to go away with - theres a big difference.

Cheers, Simon

Yeah, but just think of the profits accumulating in your private, equity-based pension plan....

"Wolf Kirchmeir" wrote

Doesn't seem to work that way - the value of my pension plan is down 20% in the past year.

John.

Tell that to all those "Equity Life" (sp?) policy holders...

If they didn't, how do you think the shortfall would be made up?

MBQ

Then you need to take a serious look at what the f*ck the fund manager is playing at, especially if you have been paying premiums over that time.

I have a number of plans that I no longer pay into, they are all down, but nothing like 20% year on year August - August.

I don't know the figure for the one I'm actively funding, but I'm sure it's nothing like 20% down.

MBQ

From not paying frecking great bonuses and dividends to directors/share-holders, also through the previous building of mass storage facilities (something that the private sector is only just, begrudgingly, accepting they will need to invest/build) so that gas can be bought and stored when the world price is low and then used to pad out the supply when the price is high.

Don't even start on about the railway system, more public money has been given to private TOCs over the last 16 years than was invested in the nationalised rail system in the last 16 years of BR. What is more, just at the time when more people should have been/should be travelling by public transport the service (in many cases) got worse (who remembers Connex in the south...) whilst ticket prices went through the roof - never mind getting so complicated that people just gave up trying to understand just which trains they could travel on, not only which times they can travel but on which actual trains they can travel on.

Jerry wrote: [...]

Well, of course. The purpose of privatisation is to provide profit for the Friends of the Government.

Indeed, what is more annoying though is that Blair and Brown carried on with the policy [1], we are now (as john Turner said) seeing the folly of such policies...

In retrospect they did better than people in other companies as they were forced to sell shares before the others did and as a consequence did not lose out as much as the policy holders in other companies. The same happened for Railtrack investors as the FTSE fell substantially after it went bust and before they were compensated based on the pre FTSE fall.

Chris

Power companies should never have been allowed to use North Sea gas to generate power, the policy before BG was privatised when we had an energy policy.

That was the privatisation that even Maggie baulked at.

Chris

I thought Railtrack investors didn't get any compensation, due to the company being (effectively) nationalised, as the company went bust - or was compensation paid after court action by share holder, due to the fact that Railtrack was effectively sent bankrupt due to the removal of HMG grants and other payments due?

We should have listened to a certain Arthur Scargill to, which is the real point as to why Maggie allowed NSG (and oil) to be used as a prime energy source power generation...

Unfortunately it was always on the cards, in time she would have, she just chose to sell off the easy stuff first.