[DaveO]

Re: What's the alternative to capitalism? : Fri Jan 17, 2014 10:36 am  

Richie wrote:

Despite some short term ups and downs does seem to be delivering growth in living standards over the long term. Have we come up with a significantly different alternative through this, or just suggested minor tuning to the levels of regulation?

"Tuning" would imply a system that was on the whole delivering an equitable and sustainable result. I think we have been moving further and further away from that for the best part of 30 years and it is only now we see the results of things like deregulation and yet our current government is challenging the EU to go even further down the same path.

Personally, I don't have a revolutionary answer. I'd like to see a little less of gov. Certainly less central gov and more devolution to local gov. I see problems getting the right level of personnel in both areas, especially local gov though. The big problem I see with our govs is they are so tied into ideology and positioning against their opposition that they're backed into a position of having to follow an ideology regardless of whether it's the right thing or not.

I think you are right on the ideology front and it is bizarre to my mind that when it is plain sticking to the neoliberal mantra can be shown to be failing it is still slavishly stuck to. I think this is why some people think there is a grand conspiracy organised by a plutocracy.

An example of the stupidity of it all is what is happening in my area with the council. Local government provision of services such as payroll, legal services IT support and so on that things like schools would draw on are being turned into private companies or contracted to private companies to run. So the entire legal department is being turned into a private legal practice that will then bid for work from the council itself and schools etc. Same with IT support.

Now this is monumentally stupid because that implies there are people in places such at as schools who have the time and the skill to judge competing bids for the work. What is more some idiot of a government minister will probably make it compulsory in some way that schools have a duty to get best value as if this is a simple matter to judge.

This is taking small government to extremes and to the detriment of everyone except those who stand to profit from this, no doubt those running these new companies. It won't save the council tax payers a penny IMO. probably cost us more in the long run.

Re: What's the alternative to capitalism? : Fri Jan 17, 2014 10:49 am  

DaveO wrote:

"Tuning" would imply a system that was on the whole delivering an equitable and sustainable result. I think we have been moving further and further away from that for the best part of 30 years and it is only now we see the results of things like deregulation and yet our current government is challenging the EU to go even further down the same path.

I'm not going to go get a bunch of graphs, but it certainly feels like both UK and world wide affluence has grown since 1984. The point I was making wasn't whether we had grown, which can of course be disputed but that we don't seem to have any realistic alternatives other than minor tuning to levels of regulation and commercial intervention. The model of private enterprise providing most needs and wants with gov filling in seems to be the world wide model now with only differences around how much enterprise and how much state.

DaveO wrote:

I think you are right on the ideology front and it is bizarre to my mind that when it is plain sticking to the neoliberal mantra can be shown to be failing it is still slavishly stuck to. I think this is why some people think there is a grand conspiracy organised by a plutocracy.

An example of the stupidity of it all is what is happening in my area with the council. Local government provision of services such as payroll, legal services IT support and so on that things like schools would draw on are being turned into private companies or contracted to private companies to run. So the entire legal department is being turned into a private legal practice that will then bid for work from the council itself and schools etc. Same with IT support.

Now this is monumentally stupid because that implies there are people in places such at as schools who have the time and the skill to judge competing bids for the work. What is more some idiot of a government minister will probably make it compulsory in some way that schools have a duty to get best value as if this is a simple matter to judge.

This is taking small government to extremes and to the detriment of everyone except those who stand to profit from this, no doubt those running these new companies. It won't save the council tax payers a penny IMO. probably cost us more in the long run.

and you know it will probably get to a point where it's working well this way and then we'll have another party come in, reverse all the changes, get that to the point it's working well before it gets changed again

Without wandering too far off topic I used to have local gov and local education in my sales patch for IT support. Our area was datacentre, not end user. I know we were better quality and more efficient at that than any council or uni would be doing it themselves.
Not so with laptops and end users which requires a more local level contact and on-site personnel, we got out of that business. However there are companies that are very good at that and can use expertese and skill earned by doing the same elsewhere to do it better.
I've also seen the likes of Northgate help both private and gov enterprises with payroll and personnel systems.

[DaveO]

Re: What's the alternative to capitalism? : Fri Jan 17, 2014 1:17 pm  

Richie wrote:

and you know it will probably get to a point where it's working well this way and then we'll have another party come in, reverse all the changes, get that to the point it's working well before it gets changed again

The point is it won't work well this way and this is based on experience so far. It is costing my wife's school more to pay for services once organised centrally.

Without wandering too far off topic I used to have local gov and local education in my sales patch for IT support. Our area was datacentre, not end user. I know we were better quality and more efficient at that than any council or uni would be doing it themselves.
Not so with laptops and end users which requires a more local level contact and on-site personnel, we got out of that business. However there are companies that are very good at that and can use expertese and skill earned by doing the same elsewhere to do it better.
I've also seen the likes of Northgate help both private and gov enterprises with payroll and personnel systems.

I am sure but there are numerous tales of private IT companies making an absolute disaster of various projects for government and other public bodies to suggest they are not any better a bet than any other alternative.

Private companies are good at selling commodities where we are happy for some of them to fail but all what is happening here is we will end up with as fragmented purchasing regime where schools and others buy services from different providers and the overhead of doing this will end up costing us more.

My wife works in a nursery school which has less than a dozen computers and so will have little clout in obtaining the economy of scale the council currently can when purchasing laptops and software for example.

There is also the possibility that any these private companies could actually go bust leaving them high and dry which could be a serious issue given the fact some of the stuff that has to be done is time critical (budgets mostly) and some comes with legal requirements about what and when is recorded.

A council IT department won't go bust and can plan for such situations far better than a school with two admin staff, two teachers (one the head) and a few teaching assistants.

Having all support services bought in from outside requires someone in each school to do the negotiating and the buying and I think expecting this model to be cheaper and any more efficient than a centrally planned council wide purchasing policy is going to be expecting too much.

Re: What's the alternative to capitalism? : Fri Jan 17, 2014 4:10 pm  

That sounds a bizarre structure, to break down to such small units.

I didn't do anything with that level of education but saw things happening differently in healthcare. I'm not in the health care sector these days (I was for the latter half of 2012 and put all my efforts into the corporations supporting healthcare providers, the likes of Cerner, McKesson, BUPA, etc) so I'm not entirely up to date on their structure. What I understand of it is though: Surgeries are encouraged to run like standalone businesses, but that are also encouraged to for consortia to work together for projects that benefit from economies of scale such as IT infrastructure and out of hours coverage. That consortium can be hundreds of surgeries.

What's interesting for me in that space is the way such consortia or unis or hospitals can become skilled and specialists in particular areas, and use that to earn revenue. That means for the likes of me I have more than just ways to save costs - we can help them build capabilities they can sell on to their peers. i.e. one hospital was working on an imaging system that they planned to sell the use on onwards to other hospitals. One of the resellers I work with now is putting together a data storage solution for a uni who plan to sell usage of that storage facility to other unis as cloud storage, saving those unis costs compared to having and managing their own storage, but generating revenue and profit for the uni we're working with.

Re: What's the alternative to capitalism? : Fri Jan 17, 2014 11:59 pm  

DaveO wrote:

My wife works in a nursery school which has less than a dozen computers and so will have little clout in obtaining the economy of scale the council currently can when purchasing laptops and software for example.

And how much do you think the council currently pays for it's laptops and software? An ex missus of mine is a "Public Sector Alliances Manager" for a software company. Basically, instead of my local council (Capita sponsored) simply going to PC World and buying a few dozen copies of Windows, due to some insane licensing agreement they have to buy it through a third party, who obviously shove a whopping surcharge on.

My own employer is the same, and it's a huge international company, every month or so we have the new hire car supplier, flight arranger etc etc. Even the tea bags, sugar and milk go through this process. The bloke who delivers the milk from his battered old pick up has to invoice, which then gets sent to Germany for approval, he then gets paid. The place that supplies the biscuits (Family Circle) charge £10 or £11 per box, the exact same box in Sainsbury's, £2.50! And don't get me started on how much it costs to lease, LEASE, a printer.

What a behemoth like a council or the NHS wants is a supplier who can pretty much guarantee supply, so they'll pay a premium for that. Your wife's school should get down to PC World/wherever and buy the dozen computers like any ordinary Joe, without the hassle of having to go through "procurement".

Re: What's the alternative to capitalism? : Sat Jan 18, 2014 8:23 am  

BobbyD wrote:

And how much do you think the council currently pays for it's laptops and software? An ex missus of mine is a "Public Sector Alliances Manager" for a software company. Basically, instead of my local council (Capita sponsored) simply going to PC World and buying a few dozen copies of Windows, due to some insane licensing agreement they have to buy it through a third party, who obviously shove a whopping surcharge on.

My own employer is the same, and it's a huge international company, every month or so we have the new hire car supplier, flight arranger etc etc. Even the tea bags, sugar and milk go through this process. The bloke who delivers the milk from his battered old pick up has to invoice, which then gets sent to Germany for approval, he then gets paid. The place that supplies the biscuits (Family Circle) charge £10 or £11 per box, the exact same box in Sainsbury's, £2.50! And don't get me started on how much it costs to lease, LEASE, a printer.

What a behemoth like a council or the NHS wants is a supplier who can pretty much guarantee supply, so they'll pay a premium for that. Your wife's school should get down to PC World/wherever and buy the dozen computers like any ordinary Joe, without the hassle of having to go through "procurement".

I've got similar crazy stories from the hotel group my wife works for, they are a Scottish company with all of their hotels in Scotland except one, which is in Leeds, which lets be honest is not a city that is short of all sorts of suppliers to the hotel industry, but every day a truck is sent down from Scotland to deliver clean linen and collect the used stuff, at least an eight hour trip that cannot be cheaper than sourcing it locally

I think businesses always look for the cheapest and quickest way to source supplies while they are under the control of board members who are "grounded", that is they live locally, have a connection to the area, to the county - as soon as they become part of a Group from outside the area or outside the country then common sense goes out of the window and the "corporate" workers take over, usually the ones for whom you'd be hard pushed to define what role they play other than turning up and drawing a salary.