how many people, for how long in time, have enjoyed a perfect government? suppose Sarko manages to inflict an IMF-style 'adjustment' on la belle France and starts selling off the government utilities? how safe and reliable would EDF's facilities be under private capitalist management by, say, Halliburton and Bechtel?
after many years in big projects I do not believe in "success-oriented engineering"... it always costs far too much in the end. "failure-oriented engineering" may be less giddily exciting and fun at the time, but it lasts longer and cost of ownership is lower. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Our civil service has always prided itself on being cheap, even if it's the most expensive solution in the long term. Quality is an alien concept in British public space, so long as it serves somebody's commercial interests their attitude has always been to screw the public.
Nuclear power was built to serve the military (as already mentioned) and windscale was built for the same reason. It also needlessly dumped low level radiation into the Irish sea as part of a secret experiment to test long term exposure to radiation in populations along the NW coasts of England and Scotland. (oh, lookee here, cancer rates are high for people who live on the coast there).
Our motorways were built cheaply to a rotten specification because it meant they wer cheap to deliver but bloody expensive (ie lucrative) to maintain. It's why UK motorways are always being dug up.
Our railways were closed down at the behest of the Transport Minister, a man whose personal fortune was from road haulage.
Look at the privatisations, who benefited ? How come so many Tory cabinet ministers ended up as directors ? It's one of the things I kind of admire about the USA, at least their corruption has imagination. Our's is so mundane and pedestrian.
Wanna get a knighthood ? That'll be a hundred grand. House of lords ? Half a mill to you guv. Change a govt policy ? That's a refunable million, Mr Ecclestone.
so when our government proposes something, like the Olympics, or a war for freedom our immediate reaction is to count the spoons cos we know we're getting conned somehow. We know it will be done badly because it always is. We know it will be shameful cos somehow it always is. We know it won't be built on time, or work properly, cos it always is. We'd just like it if they were above copying a 10 year old graduate thesis as a justification for war, y'know it's lack of respect. keep to the Fen Causeway
The High Speed Rail links to the Channel Tunnel were built on time and on budget - just very late, politically. That and the station renovations are one of the few infrastructure projects I can think that have been managed professionally.
Institutionalised corruption is the elephant on the table in the UK. We haven't come to terms yet with the fact that the reason that the NHS is being pushed towards marketista nonsense, and that rail has been a disaster, and that road haulage is being talked up even when the oil is about to run out, and Tube PFI has wasted around half a billion, and airports are being built and extended isn't because civil servants are myopic anal retentive penny pinchers - although some of them are.
It's because many people involved in infrastructure in and out of politics are crooks.
BAE is just the tip of the iceberg. Dig deeper and I'm sure you can easily find equally cynical, if perhaps less spectacular, conflicts of interest, backhanders and other misdemeanours.
People assume corruption usually happens at the local level. But it really doesn't.
It's the Anglo Disease.
The hunger for short term profit to feed the insatiable City at the expense of any other consideration
The incestuous relationship with the professions - particularly lawyers who have always been massively over-represented in Parliament - and consultants.
The vested interest in conflicts and complexity arisng from being paid by the hour, rather than the outcome.
The disdain - still lingering to this day - of civil servants for anything so mundane as PLANNING, as opposed to esoteric points of intellectual masturbation.
The pathological fear of putting your head above the parapet and actually making a decision.
The fact that the only thing worse than being wrong is being right by accident. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Government is badly broken in the UK. It's not quite as venal as the Bush administration is, but we've had much higher levels of corruption for much longer periods, to the extent that it's now political background is.
The great mystery is why this hasn't become common knowledge. People should be furious, but there's almost complete ignorance of the true situation. The consensus is that the population still believes that government in the UK is mostly functional. Sometimes it makes procurement mistakes, but when it does it's due to incompetence and not inherent criminality.
The reality is that UK PLC is run by the City, for the City, and that's the main aim of government - not the support of the population at large, but the support of the banks and trading floors.
This is why I'm so scathing about the Econo and the FT. Knowing that this is the case, their constant cheerleading for profit is really just cheerleading for top-down exploitation, tax evasion and outright fiscal criminality.
That's why there's little point in engaging with the talking points. They're not actually relevant, because there is only ever one message, which is "How can the City make as much money in as short a time as possible with as little social responsibility as it can get away with?"
Or to put it another way, if I know I'm playing with someone who cheats, I can live with a few rounds of poker for low stakes, but I sure as hell don't want to take their invite for a game of Russian Roulette. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
