What you’ve basically said is that you will believe the Conservative (note spelling – less offensive to Conservative party members/females depending on your taste) proposals if they show they are socialists.

Glad we’re singing from the same hymn sheet

But yes, I think that giving some of the power back to the employees rather than faceless corporate speculators would do some good. As for Gov not interfering in private companies, I refer m’lud to HBOS, Northern Rock etc etc.

and

It is always designed to defend the ‘poorest’, but you do not explain why you think these people will also not want to huddle round nice schools and hospitals.

Of course they will. But if/when a good comp/hospital turns “co-op” what’s to stop effectively choosing their intake? Hence it’s a divisive measure.

and this

depend on the likes of you to protect them.

made me chuckle. Not sure what you mean by the likes of [me], I’m off to sign-on tomorrow..!

“One thing though which is never mentioned by the libertarian right, is what about defence spending. Who pays for that ?”

The state (in most interpretations), as defence is meant to be one of those functions best conducted by the state. As is street lighting apparently, which could make for entertaing election manifestos.

J. Alfred,

Why would turning Tesco or ASDA into a co-op help anyone, as they are private companies and therefore not in the state’s power to do with as it will? What you’ve basically said is that you will believe the Conservative (note spelling – less offensive to Conservative party members/females depending on your taste) proposals if they show they are socialists.

Incidentally, one thing with that line of criticism that always gets me. It is always designed to defend the ‘poorest’, but you do not explain why you think these people will also not want to huddle round nice schools and hospitals. It as if you think the poor cannot help themselves and depend on the likes of you to protect them.

So the danger is that the service will not be provided by a public sector organisation, if a private sector organisation can provide that service more cheaply?

This is why I don’t think that the Left is serious about cutting costs.

Not only that, there’s a link that damages (but not strongly) your argument on that same wiki page. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080820/full/454927a.html

Discuss, I guess?

Amazon blocked at work, I’ll make a note to check that link later though. I should point out though that Semiconductor companies, in common with Pharma and Biochem companies, will usually submit their breakthroughs to journals immediately after filing patent applications. Bell is no different.

Well there is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

But you are really going to have read this to get the full story: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sex-Science-Profits-Terence-Kealey/dp/0434008249

I’ve clearly been reading the wrong stuff.

The problem is that the new Co-Op will get a contract to run the service – public sector contracts are rarly more than 5 years. After that the contract is renuewed by competitive tender.

The Conservatives are hamming up that if the Co-Op performs well, they will be well placed to succeed in that tender. However, we are still then faced if they don’t perform with the contract being taken completly into the private sector – NOT returned to the public sector.

Plus – even if the Co-Op does perform – what happens if they perform well but another private company tenders and puts forward a cheaper alternative while promising to deliver more? Then, even with the Co-Op performing well we still see the contract lost to the private sector.

We should be looking at employee involvement in service-delivery, and more effective employee reward not ownership – ownership is just opening the door to privatisation.

A relatively rare moment of absolute agreement, at least as regards Britain since 1066. As a medievalist by training I couldn’t understand in the early to mid 90s why everyone seemed to think we were living in a free market economy. It was almost as if they’d bought the government propaganda to that effect.

Planeshift @55:

Nonsense. It’s not that humanity has never had free markets: it’s just that we, late- and post-medieval Europe, haven’t. The introduction of essentially theocratic, imperial kingship during the 8th-11th centuries changed models of law and land ownership so radically that one man in seven of working age was outlawed [1] for living somewhere inconvenient to a capital accumulator of real estate. Since then, there’s been nothing even remotely resembling a free market.

Confederate Iceland on the other hand… And there’s many examples from outside Europe of genuinely free-market economics happening on a scale which today would be considered local, and is therefore largely unconsidered: but which to the people involved constituted a global condition.

[1] Trials of Trailbaston. This figure was calculated for the “Robin Hode” period, circa 1315-1340. It took nearly two hundred years for the civil service to evolve, around the Knights of the Exchequer, a record-keeping and collecting system [2] that allowed them to systematically enforce the new paradigm of land ownership. The Trailbaston Assizes were the savage instrument of the new world order. “Everywhere the walls spring up at their command”.

[2] The Great Rolls of the Pipe, complete for every year from 1132 to the present day, with some fragments dating from earlier.

No, not saying you can’t advocate something that has never been tried before, but that you do need to be aware of the fact that is what you are doing. Particularly when advocating whole scale radical changes of the economic system, which don’t have a particularly good historical record.

I’m not convinced 51 was saying man’s inate greed is a good thing.

It’s well known that in famine is rarely caused by a shortage of food. Its caused by a shortage of access to food. The richest and the powerful get the food. And in most cases sell the food on. In the Irish potatoe famine there were still enough potatoes grown to be able to very comforatble feed every man, woman and child in Ireland. Trouble was, the British/Irish land owners were making a mint selling those potatoes to other markets – they wouldn’t give up their sales just for some floppy-wristed-lefty-liberal notion like keeping people alive.

If you have enough food for what people will sell plus whats needed to feed people you’re alright. When you don’t have enough its always the people getting fed part that falls first not the selling for profit.

‘And I personally trust insurance valuations and corporate market research as much more likely to offer truthful information about people’s behaviour and risk factors than something coming out of formal social science. It is because money rides on that sort of research being right now and then.’

Market research maybe one thing, but any market research done by a company that has ‘truth’ in it will be kept firmly under lock and key soas competition doesn’t get it.

If you see research published by a company you can be very, very sure that the questions asked, interpretation of results and design of the text have all be tailored specifically to say what was decided in a project meeting when the research was first commissioned.

Of course all science can never be fully free of personal slants and prejudice – but actual science done is much nearer to being value-free than any company-commissioned research will ever, ever be.

you can’t use any real life working models to illustrate how one works in practice. Meaning what you advocate has never been tried before, and is hence utopian.

Eh? So the only theories people are allowed to advocate are things that have already been tried (and presumably found wanting)? Peculiar. Try telling the Sufragettes that back in the day…

After their contract period, the co-operative enterprises will need to bid to renew the contract, so would be open to competitive pressure, like any other social enterprise working for government. (http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2010/02/~/media/Files/Downloadable%20Files/powertopublicsectorworkers.ashx)

So within 6 years of a Tory takeover sections of the NHS and other public organisations would be up for tender.