The Olympics has fixed everything

The Olympics has fixed everything. Before the games we were worried about the economy, but surely now the UK* economic engine will race away from the rest of the world like Chris Hoy on the final lap of the Keirin. British stuff is now cooler, cheaper and more plentiful than any other stuff; we could slap a Union Flag on a box of snow and sell it back to Eskimos. The Olympics has fixed everything.

The Olympics has fixed everything. Before the games we worried about education, about an education secretary who obsessed about standards but who would not assess research evidence about what works in teaching. Who is facing a severe shortage of school places, but instead of spending the serious money needed to provide classrooms for these places, wastes his time, money and effort on his pet free-school project which is the education policy equivalent of one of those denuded poodles you can buy to keep in your handbag. And we worried about standards, with UK children supposedly in free fall down the revered PISA tables, soon to be overtaken by kids from Mongolia, Chad and Albania in terms of skills in languages, science and maths.  But now we see the way forward, no need to worry about complex decisions about teacher development, pedagogy and school organisation. The answer is simple, we *do* competitive sports; just get a politician to announce funding (which they had taken away in the first place) for good old fashioned team sports like Hockey, Football and British Bulldog and watch the UK rise back up through the tables. After all we came 3rd in the medal table, surely that will give the PISA rankings a boost? See, the Olympics has fixed everything.

The Olympics has fixed everything. Before the games we worried about deep social, cultural and racial divisions in our society. Last year we stared into the abyss as British Citizens took to the streets to plunder, burn and create mayhem. The police response was feeble initially, as they proved to be only be good at stopping nice middle class people who take to the streets to protest things like tuition fees or the Iraq war, rather than more determined types set on a new pair of trainers from a burning branch of Foot Locker. We worried about the plight of young people who could not find work, and whose EMA, a small but vital lifeline to encourage them to continue in training and education, was cut by Michael Gove with the relish of a Victorian father back from the mill throwing his children’s toys onto the fire and setting them up with 4 hours of bible reading instead. How, we asked, could the UK overcome these deep divisions, and is more unrest on its way unless the political elite could do something other than obsessing about their media image and sit down and make some difficult, bold and creative decisions about tackling this problem?  But the Olympics has fixed everything. Racism isn’t cool anymore, Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah secured gold medals. Ye Gods, Mo Farah is even an immigrant. In the ultimate zero to hero ascent for a social grouping, he succeeded into turning immigrants from ‘the people who would ruin this land turning it into the ultimate festival of the ‘something for nothing’ culture’; to those who could save us with their fantastic running skills and endearing self-deprecating mimes.  Athletes ‘other than those with white skins’ won buckets of Olympic medals and not even The Sun or The Daily Mail could get a bad word in about them, so the Olympics has fixed everything, the racial tensions and social divisions have all  gone now. Even John Terry has seen the error of his ways.  The spirit of the Olympic park will suffuse over the entire nation.

The Olympics has fixed everything. Some of us before the games worried about the chopping up of the NHS and its sale by Tory vandals to the highest (or maybe lowest) bidders from the private sector. We worrried that universal healthcare, the GOLD medal for a civilised society, was being sliced up for ideological and profit purposes and that in the future care would be more uneven, of poorer quality and only those rich enough to afford American style insurance policies could benefit. But the Olympic games has fixed everything. Our concern about the ability of the private sector to deliver on services provided by the state has gone. G4S stepped into the breach admirably on security, providing nearly 20% of what they had promised in terms of guards for the games. True the uniforms did cost £7K each, but this was a stunning lesson in how well the private sector can deliver. Our fears about the NHS are unfounded it seems, it will be safe in the caring arms of the private sector. And an added bonus of the legacy of 2012 is that we’ll all be so healthy that health care will probably be a thing of the past.  Apart from the odd torn hamstring from our two hours of sport a day, all other diseases and illness will largely leave this great nation of ours. The Isle will be full of noises, but not ill people. We’ll probably all live forever now, the Olympics has fixed everything.

* I know that Great Britain (as in team GB) and the UK are not the same thing, but I decided on using the most common terms and not the ones which are geo-politically the most correct.  If this kind of thing really bothers you, then this may not actually be the blog for you 🙂

Image licensed under Creative Commons, by Tab59. Available http://bit.ly/PdSXjO

London 2012 and the Talibrand

London 2012. The Olympics. The Greatest Show on Earth. Now we’ve started.. or at least the UK-wide torch relay has, winding its way up and down the nations so it travels within one hour of 95% of the population (unless they are on mobility scooters, in which case they are part of the 5% who won’t get to see it, they probably should be out looking for a job anyway).  The olympic flame, according to the Torch Relay website stands for ‘peace, unity and friendship’, and the torch bearers are 8000 truly inspirational people, 7852 of whom have eBay accounts, with the rest asking their kids to set them one up as soon as possible.

If you detect cynicism in my tone, then have a ‘gold medal’, sorry ‘star’. Part of the cynicism is just default Britishness. We don’t celebrate our national cynicism the same way we do our creative arts industries or ‘ability to invent great things and never make any money from them’, but we should do, as we are, as a nation, great at being grumpy about things.  But default British cynicism was not enough to push me into posting; what pushed me to the keyboard is the antics in the early days of the relay of the torch relay team and LOCOG, the overarching organisation body for the games.  LOCOG want, according to their website, to make this ‘everyone’s games’. Which is bullshit when you think about it, complete and utter bullshit. Something for everyone would be rubbish, you can’t let everyone take part as the whole point of the Olympics is elite sporting competition, and some people just don’t like Sports in the same way I don’t like boiled eggs. Thrust them in my face and I’ll gag, I would pay extra in a restaurant for a dish which came with a boiled egg to not have the boiled egg. Some people are like that with sport. End of.

Where it starts to get interesting though, is the behaviour of LOCOG around the massive corporate sponsors of the games as the suspicion grows that the ‘everyone games’ may not be all they seem. LOCOG have a brand protection document which you can view in full here. It states:

Our Partners contribute very significantly to the staging of the Games through the provision of funding, goods and services. Without them, the Games could not happen so preserving their exclusive rights is essential.

It all sounds reasonable enough, the phrase ‘very significantly’ makes it sound like they dug deep into their corporate pockets for big buckets of cash, and without this the Olympics would just be a hop, skip and jump competition on Wimbledon common with a can of fanta for the medal winners. But it’s simply not true. Without getting sidetracked into the murky byways of Olympic funding, believe me when I say the best figure I could get for ‘partner’ money was 8% of the total cost of the games (very very generous), and the lowest was 2%, and the real answer by process of triangulation is probably about 5%.  So now we know that 5% is very significant in the wonderful world of LOCOG. Let’s hope they don’t take up drug trials or safety testing, it’s normally the other way round, with a figure of 95 or even 99 per cent being described as significant. Let’s be very very generous and say that if the partners were putting up 51% or more of the total cost of the games then we could say this was ‘very significant;. But if they have stumped up £6.5Bn between them then they’ve kept this rather quiet.

So we have established that the Partners of the game are contributing a ‘small’ amount to the total cost of the games, a games which would in all reasonable worlds, be perfectly viable without their cash, as the UK taxpayer has virtually unlimited pockets when it comes to Olympic funding and with our current strong economic growth and positive headwinds, we could easily chuck in an extra billion to get to see Chris Hoy hammering down the back strait. The partners may be lighting the candles on the cake, but they didn’t decorate it, and they didn’t bake it. and they didn’t leave the deposit for the stand either.

All the more strange then is the aggressive and almost puritanical fanaticism of LOCOG to protect the investment of the partners. This vignette is from the early days of the parade as it passed through Devon:

A glimpse of the ruthless efficiency of the torch operation was in evidence before the arrival of the phalanx of Metropolitan police officers who ferried the flame to the Life Centre to light the first torch of the day. Before they did so, Locog officials in grey uniforms swiped leaflets advertising an “Olympic breakfast” and “flaming torch bacon and egg baguette” from the centre’s cafe, on the grounds they contravened branding guidelines. (http://bit.ly/Jr9Mli).

Seriously? A cafe can’t try and make a few extra pence with a leaflet for an Olympic breakfast and even the words ‘flaming torch’ bring down the wrath of the LOCOG enforcers.  This isn’t brand protection, it’s brand fascism; the fetishisation of erstwhile commonplace words in a mangled corporate miasma of misplaced greed and self interest.

And it’s stupid too. Very stupid. Radio 4 had a feature today on how the Brain’s beer signs on Cardiff bridges needed to be covered up because they were within the Millennium Stadium Olympic Exclusion Zone. The signs have been their years, I bet the locals don’t even notice them anymore, although paradoxically covering them up and uncovering them once this olympic madness passes will bring them alive in the minds of the population and probably rejuvenate sales of the local brew.  LOCOG should pay attention to this, they should consider razing the brewery to the ground during the games as this will of course ensure that no commercial benefit accrues to a ‘non-sponsor’. And pity the 5 or so ‘Olympic garages’ along the torch route (as far as I could see on Google maps), they are just asking for trouble. And what about Mr and Mrs Torch of 78 Chorley Road Bolton: who can vouch for their safety from the Talibrand of LOCOG if they try and make as so much as a single penny from the games as they pass by their front door.

Unlike others who studied useful stuff at university I was fascinated by language and meaning, and schools of thought such as structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction which all attempted to explain how language worked (or didn’t). Early doors (1910ish) was a guy called Ferdinand de Saussure with an explanation of how the word tree (in either written or spoken form) was linked with the mental concept of tree in a way which made communication between people possible. His main insight being that the arrangement of letters or the sound of the word was arbitrary, it carried no meaning in and of itself, it only worked because ‘tree’ was different to other words (‘free’ for instance).  Later French hotheads came along smoking brown fags and pointed out that even one-to-one correspondences between the signifier (text or sound symbol) and signified (mental concept) were problematic and they showed how multiple meanings could attach to a single world. So a ‘tree’ could be an object in your garden, a symbol of strength, a biblical term (tree of knowledge) or a metaphorical tree (family tree, mug tree (ok, not mug tree, the French only drink out of cups).

Language is playful, sinuous, slippery, uncontrollable. Master it, only to see it disappearing over the horizon playfully flashing its arse at you whilst your leaden brain struggles to comprehend how it got free. And brands are just words too. Product names and slogans, but no more exempt from  language’s carnival than words like austerity or turnip or God.  By and large only totalitarian regimes seek to impose drastic constraints on language, either in the name of religion or political control or both. Mature democracies have moved beyond this, consumers are alive to the ways in which meanings can be manipulated.  For instance most people know that if you don’t buy Coca Cola the ‘holidays are still coming’. Buying 2 litres bottles of brown sugary liquid is not an offering to the Gods for a few days off work.

So LOCOG, why don’t you treat us with a little more respect, a little more dignity and a little less fanaticism, after all, we paid for your fcuking games.

‘I can politic’ scheme to give all politicians a sound basic education

 An initiative which seeks to tackle the chronic problem of low levels of education amongst politicians and their seeming lack of grasp of reality has been launched.  Titled ‘Can Politic’ it combines a friendly and targeted approach to ensure that all politicians, regardless of party, are familiar with some of the basics, such as maths, english, basic health and safety, and some rudimentary sociology.

The president of the scheme Dr Ed Nobles said: “We hope this scheme will make politicians who have to attend basic education classes as normal and pleasant as going to cookery or line-dancing classes.  They will get a voucher worth £100 which they can take into their local branch of Boots and cash in for training courses at their local academy or free school.  In many cases politicians seem to be wilfully ignorant of the basics, so urgent remedial work on maths and understanding basic economic concepts is needed.  Sometimes it’s a lack of understanding of quite easy to grasp principles which can hold these politicians back such as thinking that negative growth is a  sign that economic policy is working.”

Other learning needs are more specialist, such as ‘storing petrol at home safely’, and ‘knowing what day of the week it is’; and the organisers believe that these courses we be useful for politicians who have shown confusion about these issues in the recent past.

Bad politics is blamed for everything, from obesity to last year’s riots to the complete and utter shambles that the country is in. This massive state intervention to improve the quality of politicians may seem a huge waste of money in the midst of the biggest recession since the 1930s, but few of us want to see a continuation of what have been dubbed ‘Yes Minister’ relationships, where one generation of feckless, simple-minded and devious politicians produces the next.  We must break the cycle of politicians breeding more politicians and living inside a Westminster bubble where nothing makes any sense unless you are also inside that bubble.

Dr Noble continues: “Obviously for the scheme to be successful we need to reach the right politicians. Some have proved to be very difficult to educate, and continue to hold reckless and factually wrong attitudes despite mountains of empirical evidence and research to the contrary.  One high level politician believes that social mobility can be improved without tackling income inequality and appears to be wholly ignorant of decades of social research and evidence which suggest the two are very strongly linked.

In some cases we have politicians whose basic maths is so poor that they believe that 62% and 142% are the same number, and are comfortable stating in public that the UK and Greek levels of debt are the same as a result of this misunderstanding. This obviously makes them look foolish, and by association the country too, so ‘Can Politic’ is a targeted initiative designed to tackle ignorant politicians and stop them talking rubbish every single time they open their mouths.

(you may find this link helpful if not all of that made sense)

CampEd12…

This weekend was CampEd12, a learning festival held, for the first time, near Oxenhope in Yorkshire.  The event was conceived after Tim Rylands commented that learning conferences were often too expensive and disappointing and he could run a better one from his shed.  The idea went viral on twitter amongst UK twitterers involved in education and the concept of ShedFest was borne, with a seamless change of name to avoid the conflict with a wine festival which had already ‘bagsied’ the ShedFest name.  Camped12 shares much of its DNA with ‘Learning on the Beach’ events (organised by John Davitt), and with the ‘unconference’ concept where the top down organisation and control of the conventional conference is rejected in favour of a looser structure, a more democratic mode of participation and a more affordable price tag to boot.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Dughall McCormick (@dughall), Bill Lord (@joga5) and Helen Daykin (@helendaykin); what started as a tiny little riff on twitter – 140 characters of aspiration with nothing solid behind it; turned into reality as a full education festival emerged complete with a tea urn, portaloos and people travelling from all over England to take part.  I was lucky enough to attend, and had a brilliant time, meeting new people, meeting people I had only before known from Twitter, and renewing acquaintances with people I know both in real space and on twitter.

Sat down on the final evening, chatting about CampEd12, @Dughall and I had a brief conversation about the event and the great opportunities it presented for both the children who came (there were lots, CampEd12 was a real family event), and the parents.  The kids got to do some really cool things such as: geocaching (using GPS to find hidden goodies on the site), den building, practical science, arts and crafts, astronomy and a game of perpetual football on the top field which would still be going on now if the parents had not hidden the ball. We then got to talking about how ‘middle class’ the event was. We weren’t completely consumed with guilt (I don’t think), that the event *was* middle class, but there was also a realisation that the children who could gain the most from #CampEd12, and see learning in a new light, set in the context of engagement with the outdoors and practical activities were also those least likely to ever have a chance to experience it.  Children trapped in urban poverty in Northern Cities just 30 minutes travel from the CampEd12 site, children whose parents for whatever reason, don’t have the social capital and networks to connect them into events like this or the required knowledge and confidence to take part.

I think that many (perhaps even ‘most’) teachers believe that educational opportunities should be available to all (regardless of background or economic circumstances), and therefore educators have a moral and ethical obligation to find ways of spreading opportunities to as many as possible.   So this lays down a challenge to CampEd.  What could be done to enable participation in this event for those least likely to ever come to it? Is that possible, and if possibile, is the desire there to make this happen? Is the CampEd ethos and methodology one which could somehow be tweaked to give the event a social impact far beyond its original ambitions?

The left hand image is of the campsite for CampEd12, the right hand side is a derelict community building in Bradford. The Bradford image is creative commons licenced and provided by kind permission of Tim Green on Flickr and is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/6882270649/

Dale Farm: Racists and the ‘law must be upheld’ brigade

Apply the law equally to all?

The Dale Farm evictions are over. Millions of words have been piled up writing about this issue, and given that words are still largely free, even in this age of austerity, a few more words from me won’t make much difference.

In a previous post I expressed my sense of shock about some people’s racist reactions to the Dale Farm evictions on Twitter, and the lack of symmetry between people jailed for inciting a riot on Facebook (which did not happen), and those inciting direct hatred and murder (including that of children) towards travellers.

In the month that has passed, the Dale Farm issue has been to the high court, where legal experts have examined almost every inch of the plot and in the end decided that most of the tenants could be removed.  The high court judge did say that all fences and wall should be left though, but there must have been a breakdown in communication between the goodly judge and the Essex Police as they set about their site clearance by not only knocking down fences but also walls on the legal part of the Dale Farm site.

The month since the aborted eviction on the 19th of September has been a jamboree for the racists, a kind of unofficial but vibrantly racist ‘Festival of Britain’ with a spectacular celebration of every type, manner and style of racist abuse as people queued up to add their tweets to the bonfire of abuse aimed at the residents of Dale Farm.  Maybe you can’t begrudge the racists their month of fun, after all racism is not what it used to be.

Racism (before about 1960) used to be like wallpaper, all around us, part of our lives and probably hardly ever noticed, unless someone came up with a particular unusual style in which case they might attract a compliment on their creativity.  Then laws were gradually passed and it became more of a life-style choice, you could still do it, but you needed to work at it. Put in some time, invest.  Alf Garnett could therefore practice racism in the same way that others could fancy pigeons or bet on the horses, it needed some work, it did not always come easy. Extreme censure for Garnett’s views on Blacks and Jews was never going to happen.  But the tide was gradually shifting, as imperceptibly the numbers of people laughing ‘at him’ increased and those laughing ‘with him’ decreased.  Many people ceased to do racism realising that to attribute every evil in the world to a particular ethnic group was neither sensible or ‘de jure’.   And then things got much much tighter for even the most determined, and laws made even the hobbyist racists retreat indoors, in a kind of mirror image of smokers (another group under attack) who all had to flee outdoors to practice their socially unacceptable habits.

So ironically the racists,  much like the travellers they despise, have suffered from attacks on their way of life and state-sponsored initiatives to prevent them from doing what they want.  Maybe this has caused some desperate, venom fuelled feedback loop; so much hatred but nowhere to vent it (until the Americans invited social media). So they all got twitter accounts and Dale Farm loomed into view.  As I said, a racist festival of Britain, something we can look back on, much like the great events of 1851 and 1951 and feel truly proud. The year even ends in a 1, to keep mathematically OCD racists happy.

You know where you are with racists. It’s not pleasant, it’s sickening most of the time, but at least when you read a tweet from a racist you are clear where they stand. They have characterised all travellers as benefit cheating, tax dodging lowlifes who defecate in the hedges and steal with the same kind of regularity as normal people breath. You read the tweet, you get annoyed and then you move on…nothing more to see…

The problem I have is with a particular tribe, namely: ‘the law of the land should be upheld, the travellers have broken the law so they should leave the site’ brigade. Perhaps not the most terse way of describing them, but you get the picture.  These people squat on the #dalefarm hashtag with as much, if not more fervour, than our old friends the racists above; but they are keen to point out, endlessly, that they are NOT racists. They simply want the laws of the land to apply to all.  Of course Tony Ball the leader of Basildon Council is one of these people (although he does not tweet).  He simply wants the law to be upheld, and for the same law to apply to the travellers as it does to everyone else.

Unless of course it’s Tesco.

Tesco built an unauthorised car park, in Basildon, of all places! (http://bit.ly/oc6yEe).  The Tesco spokesman could not explain why planning permission had not been sought sooner, which suggests a kind of fecklessness and disrespect for planning law which is at least equal to the charges levelled at the travellers on Dale Farm. And when the Tesco spokesperson says ‘sought sooner’, let’s be sure about what that means. That means BEFORE they built the car park. In the same way as the residents of Dale Farm erected their meagre dwellings BEFORE seeking planning permission.

YouTube is a great resource and you can source many great clips of things on there including harrowing footage of previous gypsy evictions. I searched for the inevitable footage of riot police converging at dawn on the illegal Tesco structure, and the moving of heavy machinery (the muncher), to tear it down. I searched for Tony Ball or his colleagues giving speeches to the cameras explaining why the law needed to be upheld, as a massive camp of bailiffs stretched out in the bokeh of the camera.  But for some inexplicable reason, the footage was not there. The internet must be broken.  Or did the council simply turn a blind eye to Tesco’s transgressions?

And this was hardly a one-off incident; MPs were told in 2005 about how Tesco was riding roughshod over local planning laws. (http://ind.pn/odPr0x) including the building of a store in Stockport which was 20% larger than it should have been.  So the law should be applied equally to all, unless of course you are a supermarket giant, in which case there is a little bit of ‘wriggle room’.

And what of the case of Lakeminster Park (http://bbc.in/nU8owO). Looking like a slightly neater version of a traveller camp but with the distinct whiff of ‘caravan’ about it, this development is home to 200 pensioners in  Beverley. Turns out that the pensioners bought the houses thinking they could live in them all year round when the council maintains planning permission was only for holiday homes so they cannot be used as the sole or main residence (the oldies need to be gone to another place for at least 3 months a year). In another cruel twist of fate, the pensioners on Lakeminster need to be travellers.  Why don’t they just travel you hear the baying crowd on twitter shout..after all, they are, um ‘pensioners’,

Should we feel sorry for these pensioners? Well the local Conservative MP does and he  takes the residents case up immediately in that very same article. Rather a contrast to John Baron the local MP for Dale Farm who made sure he turned up to get his 5 minutes of fame spouting the same line as Tony Ball about the law being upheld as men, women and children were turfed off land they owned at Dale Farm by overwhelming state sponsored force.

The Lakeminster pensioners are living illegally in their houses, they failed to check the contracts when they signed or made sure they had good quality conveyancing in place to make sure this situation did not happen. They are living there illegally, and I hope they have some ex-scaffolders amongst their number as at the moment from what I can see on Google Street view their attempt at a gate to repel the bailiffs is piss poor.

So my ultimate point is this, and is directed to the good people of ‘the travellers have broken the law, nobody is above the law’ tribe on twitter; now that Dale Farm is cleansed and ‘justice’ is done, can we see #lakeminster lit up as a trending topic as you deride the tax-dodging pensioner scum who have infested a perfectly good town and chosen to deliberately ignore the law? Some of them even have their grandchildren to visit, using them as human shields to deflect the aggression of the state.

After all the law applies equally to all.

Or does it?

Image is creative commons, courtesy of InsideMyShell, sourced from Flickr, Available http://bit.ly/oJunJ9.

NB: The chances of getting a comment approved under this blog posting are slim if you are going to use the ‘but what about the travellers who ruined my village, destroyed my pub, kidnapped my children?’ line.  Here is not the place for you….get annoyed and move on.

By all means write a 5 paragraph rant as some of you did under the previous Dale Farm post, I will read every single word. By my reckoning that is about 4500 key presses.  My key presses to not approve the post, 1.  My advice: get you own blog and write about the issues there. That way you can make the decisions about what gets posted or not.

If you want to write a comment supporting my point of view, then knock yourself out 🙂

The limits of the free market, energy and health compared

This blog posting is not about teaching or technology, but sometimes you just need to write about what makes you angry.

When general elections come round, UK politicians start agonising about the public’s lack of engagement with the democratic process and then they begin to blame each other for this mysterious disjunct which has formed between the House of Westminster and the ordinary person in the street.

Well maybe if they weren’t such ideologically-driven, greedy, narrow-minded idiots this wouldn’t happen.  Today Chris Huhne the Energy Secretary, and David Cameron (the Prime Minister) have been making a great play of an energy summit where they have called to account the 6 major energy firms in a bid to save the “hardworking families” of the UK from major increases in fuel prices (http://bit.ly/rel4qc). It seems that these companies have been spectacularly successful of late, managing to ratchet up their profits by 733% per customer. You would think in an economy whose recovery, so the Con-Dems say, is going to be built upon private enterprise, that this would be cause for celebration. Surely Huhne and Cameron were meeting them to see what the secret of their success was and how they could share this excellent business knowledge with other sectors of the economy.  But alas it is not the case. Apparently the British consumer does not like being ripped off with high energy prices, particularly when the cartel of the big 6 who supply around 95% of the gas and electricity we use put up prices at the meter when the wholesale price goes up, but never reduce them if they fluctuate downwards. It is a licence to print money; well when I say ‘print money’ I mean this in the old figurative sense of the term, meaning make a pile of cash for doing sod-all. Not the new literal: ‘licence to print money’ meaning, which is where the UK taxpayer prints money and then gives it to the banks so they can rebuild their balances which they blew on greedy speculation in casino style banking games.  But the banks have had a hard time of it lately, and it’s only right that in a free market economy that the tax payer steps in to prevent private entities going out of business.  After all, they were and are, too big to fail.

But back to the energy companies and government’s laughable attempts to try and appear tough on the price rises and on the side of the consumer. To be honest I have an image of Huhne and Cameron feebly tapping on a pensioner’s kitchen window as inside he is bent over the kitchen table (we are back to figurative language here you understand) whilst the energy firms queue up to give the poor old boy a long hard lesson in free market economics.  From outside the window the hapless politicians watch on and cough feebly to draw attention to themselves ‘I say, do you mind taking it a bit easy on that chap, we’ll need him again in 4 years time as a voter; and when we have to bail out RBS again in a few weeks time, I’m afraid he’ll be in for more of the same then too’.

So it appears that even a conservative politician has to admit that free markets are not perfect and companies do not always deliver in the best interests of the consumer, they can put profits before service (SHOCK HORROR). And even a Liberal Democrat who authored a chapter in ‘The Orange Book‘ a liberal paean to the forces of choice, competition and neo-liberal abandon has to follow suit and appear to give the companies some tough words as if the magical self-correcting mechanisms of the free market had somehow been knocked out of kilter when it comes to piping electricity and gas into people’s houses.

In something of an anti-climax, after the summit Huhne urged us all to: switch providers more often, shop around as we would do for a a toaster, pay by direct debit, and to insulate our homes. (Thanks Chris, I never thought of those steps, you are certainly worth every penny of your £134K of tax payer’s money, well done!).  So the responsibility for the energy price debacle mysteriously rebounds upon the consumer who appears, in Huhne’s construction, to be a rather feckless kind of fellow, careless with his money, with leaky roof and windows, and not able to shop around for the best deal.  Well if Chris Huhne can make sense even of my energy bills, let alone the bewildering number of tariffs on the market then he truly is a better man than me. I have switched 5 times in the last 5 years, and never really knew if I got a better deal. What I do know is that the process is time consuming, opaque and the companies appear to conspire to make it as hard as possible for the consumer.  If this is true consumer choice at work, then I’ll bend myself over the kitchen table and take what’s coming to me!

So back to this concept of private companies, competition and the free market. The big idea behind the NHS reforms, so big that it was absent mindedly left out of the Conservative Manifesto is to have private companies provide services for the NHS.  The increased choice and competition, it is argued, will drive up standards and provide better value for money. This is the point at which the person in the street loses it with the politicians. Are these besuited benighted politicians too stupid (or greedy) to see that they are simply creating a similar situation in health that they created in energy (and transport for that matter), and that companies will enter the market looking to make money, solely, entirely, exclusively to make money? Because the lesson of the shitpile excuse for an energy market which are saddled with is that companies do, exactly that, they look to make money to the detriment of any other possible activity. And there will be no doubt be a limited number of providers who will soon build a cartel of pricing and service and hold the NHS to ransom. This is the very opposite of the free-market rhetoric which the politicians use, this is just an excuse to let some people get very rich by cherry picking services which should be in the public sector.  Switching between providers for the GPs who are supposed to ‘commission’ healthcare will be a tough business I imagine (the companies will have better lawyers and wilier contracts than the GPs); and whilst the medical professionals spend their time agonising over these decisions, the patients will be piling up in the waiting rooms wondering when they are going to get seen.

What will the politicians do when a cartel of companies corner the market in cost effective terminal cancer care and their profits soar by 733% per dead patient? Will David Cameron and Andrew Lansley (the vacuous robot in charge of Health) look annoyed and call a summit and gesture idly at some toothless watchdog which they believe will bring these companies in order? Will they take the Huhne approach bouncing responsibility off government, off the company and simply advise the customer to eat his greens, exercise and jolly well not to get cancer in the first place? Probably.

What they should do, the honest thing, the neo-liberal thing,  the thing which will never happen, is visit the company and laud its commercial acumen and make a speech congratulating the highly paid CEO and board of directors (which they will probably be joining in an non-exec capacity in the future) upon how efficiently his company has turned illness and misery into a money-making enterprise.

It’s a good job there is a kitchen table in nearly every household in the UK; we are going to need them.

Image is creative commons, from Flickr, courtesy of JohnWilson1969. Available: http://bit.ly/qfLI03. Image adapted by author.