How to define deprivation

In case you hadn't noticed, large areas of North London went up in flames over the weekend. Scenes reminiscent of the blitz filled tv screens and pages of the national dailies.
Various police officers made a belated appearance to explain what had happened and why they had been unable to stop the mobs turning significant area of our capital city into a passable imitation of a Beirut or Basra.
If as many had turned up to deal with the violence, perhaps fewer buildings would have been razed and fewer people forced to cower like prisoners behind their own locked and bolted doors.
Of course, the usual suspects have already started using the riots for their own ends. Ken Livingstone, never one to let anything as trivial as a moral consideration block an opportunity to score a cheap political point, has already laid the blame for the riots at the door of the Coalition.
Deprivation was the driver according to our Ken, stopping just short of drawing parallels with the Hunger marches of the Thirties. It was the Tory Cuts was that forced otherwise blameless people into desperate measures like setting fire to shops. Never mind that ordinaryt people, equally affected by the cuts, lived in the flats above those shops and were forced to flee in night clothes and with whatever few possessions they were able to grab before they were consumed by the flames.
In fairness to Ken, the deprivation was hard to miss .
People arrived in Tottenham, summoned by urgent messages pleading for their support, carried by bare-footed youngsters whose ragged clothes flapped around their frail, under-nourished bodies as they ran through the dank, malodorous streets of North London..
Actually, I made that bit up.
For the most part, people were lured to Tottenham and other parts of North London, with messages like, " I gonna roll on Tottenham, get some loot" carried not by semi-naked waifs, but posted on Twitter and FaceBook to be viewed on Blackberries, I-Phones and other smart gadgets.
Some, the genuinely deprived, had to make do with mobiles with no smart capabilities at all. But, still they joined the movement, spreading the word via humble text messaging and, in some cases, basic voice communications. And, in response, others came to join them; the tired, the poor, the dispossessed.
It was probably this group, the most deprived of all, who led the brave raids on the Halls of Capitalism in Tottenham Hale. Some, the more audacious and adventurous, made it as far as Wood Green where they battered down the barricades of privilege and helped themselves and their brothers and sisters in want to vital supplies from Currys, JJB Sports and CarPhone Warehouse.
By daylight on Sunday, sated but not necessarily satisfied, they had calmed down sufficiently to form orderly queues outside the best shops, and as an expression of solidarity in need, sharing their loot and their opportunities with those even less fortunate than themselves.
It must have warmed the cockles of old Ken's heart to see such generosity of spirit triumph in the face of the deprivation caused by those wicked, wicked, Tories at County Hall and Westminster.

There is a service industry - but service is not a business

One of the less appealing legacies of the Thatcher era, magnified throughout the Blair/Brown continuum, is the contention that all Public services will perform more efficiently if they were run like businesses.
This wrong-headed philosophy has landed us with a Post Office which is no longer capable of making twice-daily deliveries and whose employees routinely lie to their customers; national and local transport systems which, despite their nominally private ownership, are as heavily subsidised as they were when all transport was publicly owned; water companies who, after twenty years of trying, still cannot plug the leaks in their networks let alone guarantee continuity of supply; energy companies who exist solely to enrich their foreign owners and crucial health and social services that cannot even provide clean, safe accommodation for their sick and elderly customer base.
Many from these sectors report to or liaise with local and national Government agencies who slavishly follow the dictates of assorted lobbies, pressure groups and the EU rather than the people who elect or appoint them.
What they share with each other is the mistaken belief that services and service businesses are synonymous. The fastest growing sector in the UK economy for the last two decades has been the Service sector. Ergo, all we have to do to achieve the same levels of productivity and efficiency in our public services is to mimic those successful private service industries.
Wrong. Wrong and wrong again.
Despite the Service tag , these businesses exist for one reason only; to make money. They do this by making a profit. If, to achieve this, they need to close facilities, sack people, reduce working hours, relocate staff, slash benefits and even selectively shed customers, that is what they will do.
Public services exist for a very different reason; to provide vital services. That means running buses in rural areas where demand is intermittent, delivering letters to out of the way locations, manning fire and police stations in sparsely populated areas, emptying bins when the local populace wants them emptied; making sure that hospital and care staff follow basic hygiene routines to prevent infections. And accepting that to achieve these aims it will sometimes be necessary to subsidise some aspects of the service.
There is nothing remotely similar between balancing a budget to create value for shareholders, placate the bank manager and reward employees, and ensuring that bins are emptied, streets are cleaned, pot holes are filled, pensioners and other vulnerable people in the community are cared for and the police, fire and ambulance services are both local and respond rapidly when they are needed.
The problem is, of course, that "learning from business" has become the conventional wisdom. Councils, the Civil Service, the Police and Fire Brigades all routinely send their brightest and best to colleges where they rub shoulders with genuine business people. What they bring back from these courses - apart from an unhealthy addiction to management speak - is a mind set that makes no distinction between cost and value.
So, faced with a choice between maintaining a police station in a rural community or taking care of things from a central station twenty miles away, the new Police manager will opt for the latter. As long as he still ticks the right boxes, his decision Will be judged the correct one by his political masters. They, and he for that matter, are unlikely to live in the community thus affected.
The people on the ground might take a somewhat different view. Once the police are no longer in situ, they are no longer local. No glossy brochure can reassure like a blue light over a police station in the centre of town. No matter how artfully presented, all the statistics, pie charts, spreadsheets and matrices in the world will not convince the community that a mad twenty mile dash is as effective a deterrent as a large, uniformed bobby strolling down the High Street.
Does one provide better "value for money" than the other? It depends on your definition of value. If all of your assumptions are based on cost efficiency, then there can be no argument. (Unless, of course, the policies of our latest, mad Energy Minister drive fuel costs so high that a forty mile round-trip becomes as expensive as a month's rent and council tax.)
If, however, you evaluate the service on the basis of its value to the community, then the argument takes on a different complexion altogether. Only a business-man would choose the first option. Someone with the service of the public as his principal obsession would, unhesitatingly, opt for the latter.
Until and unless our political masters and their acolytes learn that lesson, our Public services will continue to decline to the point where, as is the case with the Post Office, it will be hard to make a sensible argument for their continued existence.

Bully boy Brown

Methinks the News of the Screws hacking row has now passed the point where there is anything new or useful left to say.
Granted, the NoW and News International mined a very large seam of filth with their hacking of Millie Dowler's Voicemail and the mobiles of the families of dead soldiers.
All involved should already have been hauled before a beak. That includes assorted Murdochs, the unlovely Rebekah ( where did she get that spelling?) Wade/Brooks, Andy Coulson and any and all of the police officers who took money for information. No new legislation is needed to make this happen. Everything is covered by laws already in existence, ranging from those governing illegal interception of telephonic communications to the 2006 Companies Act which makes it clear that a company is considerd an individual when it comes to criminal activity - and the officers of that company are responsible for its actions,jointly and severally.
Given this fact, it is sickening to see an assortment of chancers, self-seeking publicity hounds and creeps baying on the BBC and in Parliament for heads to roll, enquiries to be launched, the Press to be neutered and, generally demanding that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, when they all know that the remedies already exist.
Yesterday, it was Gordon Brown's turn to try to snatch the moral low ground away from the likes of Blair, Peter Mandelson, David Mellor, Hugh Grant, David Cameron and Alastair Cambell.
There he was in the Commons, making his first appearance since before the flood, one huge bundle of resentment and thwarted ambition.
Sullen with anger, and seeking sympathy for the way that Rebeka and her friends had stalked the Brown family at the time of a terrible tragedy, he failed to mention the times subsequent to this terrible harassment when he and Sarah had the fragrant Rebeka, Mrs Murdoch Junior and Elizabeth Murdoch to stay and play with them at Chequers. Or that the Browns, en famille, had been guests of the same Rebeka when she married the old-Etonian, Charlie Brooks and became a close neighbour and chum of David Cameron.
No. any outrage our Gordie felt in those times was carefully disguised as affection and respect for all things Murdoch and News International.
It's only now, when the Murdoch connection is getting a right old kicking, that big, brave Gordon decides it's safe to put his own boot in.
So very typical of the man. A terrible bully and coward in office and a cowardly bully out of it.