Kern wrote:
The Tories probably have the edge on the economy for me, but I can't forgive them for the dog's dinner of a reform that was the Health & Social Care Act (despite being quite relaxed about the use of private companies to provide care free at the point of use)
For me it's about
this:
Quote:
What makes the NHS unique is not that it is free at the point of need - many other health systems are - but that it is planned on the basis of need. We have to have unprofitable services as well as those that can make people money. Once you get other providers involved it is about who can shout the loudest for their service. Once that planning goes and the risk is other areas of healthcare lose out.
Danielle, having extensive experience of the shitshow that is the US system, thinks we're mad to be fucking about with the NHS. In the US, private healthcare companies bill your insurer for your treatment. Those treatments costs are quite routinely 5x-10x of what we pay here; the inefficiencies of having a fragmented landscape of pricing plus lots of middlemen all adding their profit margins mean there's no funtioning free market (plus a litigious culture tends to over-treat everything.) Here, at least the NHS can negotiate very hard with suppliers to keep costs down. Suppose we move all the way to a system where the NHS acts as a tender house, buying in many services from commercial partners, but still free to the patient. It's not at all clear than the efficiencies people claim privatisation will bring will outweigh the inefficiencies the blight the US system.
Plus it keeps going wrong.
Privatised hospitals that collapse, requiring the government to bail out the company (at more expense to the taxpayer.) Contracts worth
hundreds of millions granted to firms that "have been heavily criticised... for providing poor quality of care in hospitals and care homes."
Reminds me of how Serco and G4S somehow keep getting contract after contract, despite fucking up everything they touch e.g.
the Olympics and
a £109m fine for overcharging the government. We're
considering privatising the part of the social services that decides to take children away from their parents to those firms, BTW, after
ATOS did such a bang-up job of assessing fit-to-work claims that the government shut the contract down early. Oh, and don't forget we undervalued the Post Office by hundreds of millions when selling it off. I won't get started on the railways, beyond noting that the East Coast line was privatised, collapsed, was nationalised, ran at a profit as customer satisfaction soared, and has now been sold off again.
Seems to me there's two debates to be had: an ideological one about the size of the state and how many of the state's services should be privatised (there are two sides here), and a pragmatic one about whether either the Tory or Labour party are capable of privatising things without fucking it up (I don't see how anyone can argue that privatisation has a great track record of success.)
Many privatised services are like the banks: too big to fail. Companies can pitch low bids and gamble, knowing that if they fail the government will be forced to step in anyway because you can't have true market competition on running a monopoly resource like a hospital or a train line. People have to see doctors and have to get to work, so the facilities have to run. If you can't introduce actual competition -- if you can't force a new entrant to build new train lines or build new hospitals -- then you don't have a functioning market, you have a state-authorised regional monopoly. If you have a monopoly, you don't have any of the benefits of free-market capitalisation, just the costs.
Capitalism cannot survive when entities become too big to fail, because letting weak companies fail is one of the vital balances in capitalism.
Quote:
and whilst Theresa May started well, she's finally gone batshit, as happens to all Home Secretaries.
Scared the shit out of me when Cameron mooted the possible future leaders of the Tory party when he steps down: Boris Johnson (a
nasty piece of work cloaked behind buffoonery), May (who's as you say seems to be batshit), or Osborne. I mean, Osborne is probably the lesser of those evils, and that's saying something.
Quote:
Lib Dems: Unfairly criticised over tuition fees, but that was a completely avoidable own goal. Probably done better in government then we've given them credit for. Can't trust them on Europe.
What most angered me (as a previous LibDem voter) wasn't tuition fees, where they betrayed an election promise; I could put that down to the pragmatic demands of being in coalition government. For me the low point was the vote on judicial review, where they
betrayed a founding principle of the entire party.
Quote:
But last night the party sold out whatever remaining principles it had after four years in office. There can be no excuse for what it did yesterday evening.
It was a debate on judicial review. Judicial review sounds boring but it is one of the most democratic legal mechanisms available to the British citizen. It allows us to challenge illegal government decisions, to fight government irrationality and to challenge the decisions made by authorities. In the words of one peer, it is "the British defence of freedom" and the means by which we avoid "elected dictatorship".
Chris Grayling has lost several judicial review cases this year, for the simple reason that he keeps acting illegally and irrationally. So he has decided to try and eradicate it. That's not what it's called, of course. It’s called 'reform'. But his reform will make it impossible for anyone but the very rich to use it.
The Lords fought back and voted down several of the bill's measures. Last night the criminal justice and courts bill returned to the Commons.
...
Apart from Sarah Teather, who has shown herself to be the beating heart of the Liberal Democrat soul this parliament and is consequently leaving it at the earliest opportunity, no other Lib Dem MP rebelled.
No-one else. Of all the Lib Dem MPs who liked to get on their soap box about liberalism, or how they are the only party which still believes in civil liberties, or which opposed the authoritarian tendencies of Labour – no-one apart from Teather had the courage of their convictions.
(I could write at length about the farcical number of times that Grayling has had his arse handed to him by our judiciary, but this post is long enough.)
Quote:
Greens: Disagree with them on trade issues and genetically modified organisms.
I also object to their nuclear policy. We need more nuclear, not less, if we're going to start cutting carbon emissions.
Quote:
UKIP: Only benefit of voting for them would be to force the Tories to hold the long-awaited referendum, but as they are not a single issue party and composed of nasty right-wing fruitcakes I can't support them.
Also marginally increases the risk that we end up in a Tory-UKIP coalition, which I think is a worst case scenario for the country.
Quote:
I hate the idea of the student politicians of the SNP holding the balance of power
Better Together. If one campaigns to keep Scotland in the Union -- and all our parties did, hard -- and if one also campaigned to keep first-past-the-post in place -- which, again, all our party leaders did during the AV referendum -- one cannot complain when it turns out the SNP might hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. The phrase "hoist by one's own petard" comes to mind.
Quote:
Also, don't play the outsider card when you're holding power yourself.
I find that particularly odious of UKIP. Farage is a millionare ex-banker nob. Roger Helmer, one of their MEPs, is constantly playing the anti-establishment card, despite having been a Tory MP for 20-odd years. They're about as establishment as it comes.
Quote:
I think I'll vote Whig.
SGTM. I'll join you.