POLITICS CORNER

[Stanley]

As my old mate Bob Smith once said, "We've plaited sawdust for too long and now all our pigeons have come home to roost". One of the best mixed metaphors I have ever heard but it exactly describes the situation we are going to hear announced today. A last minute deal on un-advantageous terms to build nuclear power stations. We have mortgaged control over energy prices for at least two generations. We have failed miserably to nurture our own nuclear industry and given away control. A sorry story.

[PanBiker]

The operators will be guaranteed twice the current price for units generated as well. We can't even decommission the redundant ones short of burying them in concrete yet either.

[Tardis]

No one has yet said whether EDF, because it is foreign owned, would ever pay any corporation tax on it's repatriated profits made on the energy.

I would guess with the significant amount of capital that it needs to raise to build the generators, that it never would.

The headline price of energy is cut if EDF build more than one nuclear power station (and EDF may build more than 3), though the current press briefing doesn't say by how much. It may well appear in the FT.

Current guesses think it might add £8 to everybody's energy bills

[Tardis]

Handy guide from the FT, which is not behind their paywall, about the EDF deal:

http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2013/10 ... oint-deal/

[Stanley]

We were treated yesterday to assurances by the government that the nuclear deal is good for us. See this LINK for a biased but accurate précis of the deal and its consequences.
I can't help looking back to a list of names, BP, British Gas, CEGB, NCB, BR.... All cases where we had a stake in the commanding heights of the economy, all sold off to satisfy political dogma. Even Harold Macmillan complained about Thatcher selling off the family silver. All cases where the price to the consumer went up. This deal is a perfect example of what happens if the 'market' is allowed to take control. Many years ago I wrote an essay comparing competition for energy as being a Fourth World war and was ridiculed. Consider what happens when the cost of energy prices UK manufacturing out of the world market. In twenty years the 'experts' will start to realise the enormity of what happened when we allowed control of the basics of our economy to be outsourced. Problem is it will be too late then.....
However, look on the bright side! Cameron will be long gone by then and this rotten coalition will be history so who cares, kick the can down the road and carry on as normal!
Yes, you're right, an old Lefty is ranting...... but with good reason!

[Whyperion]

The thing I have noticed about Cameron , ( more so than others ) , is the more insistent he thinks his only way is right , the louder he shouts and becomes even more insistant ( not only in Parliament ) . Even if a few weeks later in the light of some facts , he has changed his mind - without reference to his former stance.


Noted that John Major has repeated the line about some people will have to make the choices between heating and eating. Given that there is ( to some persons ) financial support for some heating charges ( and it looks like Major prefers this to be financed on more taxes on energy (Gas and Electric) companies profits ). That does seem to undermine other Tory thinking and non-recognition that this might be the case. I think Labour has tended to concentrate that the phrase relates to people on (real terms reducing ) benefits , Major has indicated that he thinks it is 'many people' , I suggest , and its not been mentioned , that the lower paid working people will be particulary challenged , perhaps cold weather payments to those receiving working tax credits should be considered.


Personally Iam pleased energy company contracts have been compelled to be more simple - no more lock-in tariffs , which should make changing supplier for some easier , helping a few on financing .

[Whyperion]

John Major ( and I guess it should be noted that as PM his record on many things was not exactly a glowing success - being undermined by his own party on EU matters probably not helping ) goes on (in relation to energy companies)

I do not regard it as acceptable that they have increased prices by this tremendous amount. Nor do I regard their explanation as acceptable, that they are investing for the future. With interest rates at their present level, it’s not beyond the wit of man to do what companies have done since the dawn of time and borrow(*) for their investment rather than funding a large proportion of their investment out of the revenue of families whose wages have not been going up at a time when other costs have been rising,

(*) Major also forgets that things like shareholders can contribute capital.

An interesting comment , and one that I have often wondered why ( capitalist favouring Conservatives , or Labour oppositions ) have never raised in relation to capital projects like Thames Water tunneling , Network Rail and Similar railway investments ( and will be the next justification for more Royal Mail postage price rises ) . I suppose though that interest payments start when the borrowing begins , not when the project is completed and revenue earning.

[Stanley]

Macmillan finally accepted a peerage on 10 February 1984 and was created Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden. He took the title from his former parliamentary seat on the edge of the Durham coalfields, and in his maiden speech in the House of Lords he criticised Thatcher's handling of the coal miners' strike and her characterisation of striking miners as 'the enemy within'. He received an unprecedented standing ovation for his oration, which included the words:
"It breaks my heart to see—and I cannot interfere—what is happening in our country today. This terrible strike, by the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's and Hitler's armies and never gave in. It is pointless and we cannot afford that kind of thing. Then there is the growing division of Conservative prosperity in the south and the ailing north and Midlands. We used to have battles and rows but they were quarrels. Now there is a new kind of wicked hatred that has been brought in by different types of people".
In the interests of accuracy he later explained the 'family silver' speech by saying that he was in favour of privatisation but not of treating the capital gain from the sales as income. Nevertheless, there was a bit more to it than that because referring to the sales as family silver was a pejorative remark. Macmillan was a well-educated man and weighed his words carefully. His remarks about the bitter quality of the attitude to striking workers is as pertinent today as it was in the miner's strike. We're looking at a deeply ingrained attitude here, anyone not in the club is a troublesome oik. (Or even a pleb)

[Stanley]

John Major throws a grenade into the Cabinet Room at Number Ten. They have responded by saying it's 'interesting'. I'll bet it was a bit more expletive deleted than that....
The chartered Institute of Housing has grave doubts about the efficacy of the cap on housing benefits. (LINK). Many tenants are making up the shortfall by getting more discretionary Housing Benefit from the local council who it would appear are acting responsibly because they can see the damage that could be caused if families are evicted. Problem is of course that they have less money under the cuts so something else will have to suffer.

[Tardis]

News today that the difference between a 'qualified' and 'unqualified' teacher in the eyes of the Unions and Central Government is 18 days training

[plaques]

John Major’s Windfall tax suggestion.

I can’t understand Mr Cameron’s reluctance not to take up this suggestion. As far as I can see it’s a win – win idea.

1 He has plenty of time to redefine what a cold winter would be.
2 The odds of it happening are probably more than 3:1 against.
3 The energy companies have at least 6 months to adjust their figures.
4 The consumer will carry on paying the high tariff for all time.
5 The windfall tax will go to the treasury who will grab the tax to reduce the deficit.
6 Mr Cameron will claim to be on the consumers side against the companies.

Brilliant!! The consumers (poor suckers) will go on a diet, buy an extra sweater and carry on paying.

[Stanley]

Nice one P. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. By the way, have you noticed that paying green levy through bills and not central taxation is the fault of Labour? Does Cameron mean that in their place the Tories would have done it differently? All problems are either being kicked up the road or back to Labour.

[Tardis]

News revealed yesterday suggests that the NHS sets aside 22% of it's budget for negligence law suits

To use the routinely peddled adage, how many Nurses could that employ? A lot. Well, just over one million actually. In fact, the NHS sets aside more on Medical Negligence liabilities than it spends on healthcare in Scotland and Wales combined

[Stanley]

I won't believe that last post until I have seen evidence of the source. If true it's a disgrace but it sounds far too high to me.
See this LINK, 52nd anniversary of Private Eye today. Here's to the next fifty years!
Just heard useless advice for people who can't afford to heat the whole house. We are second only to Estonia in terms of energy poverty. (LINK)
I note that the use of language has moved on. It appears as though 'selling the family silver' is redundant. During questioning of Vince Cable in Parliament over the RM share sale he was accused of 'selling his granny'. I thought you should all know this.....

[Tizer]

The NHS budget...The Telegraph says "More than £1bn was spent on settlements last year" but also says "Latest forecasts suggest the bill for negligence will soon reach £19 billion - almost one fifth of the total NHS budget." The figures don't seem to stack up. A jump from 1 to 19 billion in a year? I know it says "More than £1 billion" but they wouldn't use that term if it were more than £2 billion. And it also uses the words "will soon reach", so how soon is soon - 2 years, 20 years? And I know that "spent on settlements" is not the same as the amount claimed (some claims must be unsuccessful). But I can't see these numbers making any sense. A job for BBC's More or Less programme!

Here's a different version reported on 3 october 2013 by the law firm Coles-Miller:
"Recently the media reported that the NHS Litigation Authority had set aside £1.2 billion to pay solicitors for medical negligence who pursue compensation. The £1.2 billion is just under a fifth of the £5.8 billion provision for unresolved clinical compensation claims against the NHS."

I wonder if a journalist somewhere, not paying enough attention to what he/she reads, saw the words "just under a fifth" (or something similar) and transposed it into "a fifth of the NHS budget?" And believe me, mistakes like that are made frequently in the news media.
The Cole Miller page here: http://blog.coles-miller.co.uk/rising-c ... egligence/

OGFB reveals the truth!

[PanBiker]

You could always get a job with "Private Eye" Tiz.

[Bruff]

I would also note that no medical intervention is risk free. First and obviously, with respect to the inherent risks associated with any intervention (the side-effects if you like and the reason why, when you are undergoing some procedures, you sign a consent form or your pills come with an info sheet). But second as here, with respect to negligence, medical practitioners are not infallible, they make mistakes. All of these are regrettable, a tragedy for those affected and so far as is possible to be avoided. But you will never eliminate this risk. Human error, or negligence, on the production line leads to a spoiled batch; in the operating theatre a life of disability or worse, no life at all. That is the realm within which the medical profession operates.

So I am not quite sure what the purpose of reporting on this 'cost' is. I guess one purpose could be to sow the seed that the bill is so huge as the medical profession is full of useless individuals But one could read it as settlements are very large (a consequence of lifetime care needs etc?) On the latter, one might need to know what % of interventions lead to a negligence case - 1%? 10%? 0.001%? - and then muse on what level of negligence should we tolerate? If it is 'none' then how realistic is this given we are talking about human beings? The benefits if 21st Century medicine traded-off against the human propensity for error and negilgence is just one of many policy conundrums.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

My heart always lightens when I see that Richard has posted, we know we are going to get some informed comment. I agree with what he says. I was brought up in a time when we all knew that any medical intervention was a risk and if it went wrong it was regarded as an Act of God. The culture now is that people sue at the drop of a hat, often encouraged by 'no win no fee' packages based on the lawyers assessment of whether they can succeed in screwing a settlement out of the system. It's all part of this modern obsession with 100% safety and very often the people who advocate this are the same ones that want access to litigation and at the same time complain about the cost of medicine. Again, many of the cases brought against individual practitioners are in the final analysis down to the fact that bad internal systems have let the doctors down but this can't be admitted so the individual has to carry the can. Whichever way you look at it, it's a mess. I'm not arguing against the ability to seek redress if there is an obvious failing but I question how a large settlement can alleviate the tragedy of say the death of an infant. Yes, the cost of long term care would be a powerful argument for a large settlement but how do you value a life?
Let's put it another way, if my surgeon cocks up with my second eye operation I shan't blame him, just put it down to bad luck and be grateful I have one good eye. One of the glorious facts of life is that nobody ever promised it would be fair or risk-free. Without that factor it would be very boring!

[plaques]

At first I thought that the move to change the emergency call number to 111 was an attempt to reduce the weight of the calls away from 999. But with all the adverse publicity with respect to the NHS and now the police I now realise its just an intermediate stage of getting it to 666.

[hartley353]

The NHS unfortunately has left itself open to the financial abuse by ambulance chasers. A lot has to be said for the American system where a doctor or surgeon has his own liability insurance, and can't work with out it. Should their negligence result in a large claim they will find it hard to get insurance again and thus cease practicing. Many like myself would not sue the system and as Stanley says take it on the chin, but there is a lot of sloppy work done by the people working for the sytem and a culture of cover up.

[Bruff]

''.............but how do you value a life?''

Dispassionately I guess, in this context. I suppose if one was asked to value the life of one's child or other loved one, it would be hard to come up with a figure and simply asking the question might be deemed distasteful. But quite a few Government Departments for instance do spend a lot of time deciding on the 'value of a life', or the 'value of preventing a fatality' or some other metric.

If you have a fixed pot and you wish to, or are called to, commit spend to an intervention designed to protect people, you have to have some mechanism to evaluating whether spend on this is beneficial when set alongside other competing spends. Thus, civil servants in transport have 'values of life', or 'value for preventing fatalities' for spend on road safety projects. And on rail safety. And so therefore, spend on roads versus rail perhaps. Same at health, spend on intervention A, or B and so on. This will involve economists, perhaps statisticians and epidemiologists, as well as importantly other social scientists. One can 'crunch the numbers' in a quantitative assessment, but the public too have preferences that need to be teased out and social scientists can design the appropriate qualitative research, or what are termed public preference studies. And not all 'risks' are the same; risks have attributes and the public for example recoil from some risks above others - those that are involuntarily run versus those we engage in voluntarily; risks that impact on vulnerable groups; those that lead to a dreaded outcome (cancer for example), or have the potential for single, high volume adverse effects. Rail v roads is a good example here where a rail crash with a couple of fatalities is all over the national media(s) yet each day three or four folk'll die on the roads their passing marked only by passing comment in the local paper.

It's worth remembering that, when the cries of 'something must be done!' go up, there is a lot that could be done. But whether it is actually beneficial to commit spend here as opposed to elsewhere needs thought and analysis if we are serious about spending wisely.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

I recognise that public attitudes have a bearing on the decisions and sometimes wonder about the modern quest for higher levels of certainty of safety than my upbringing instilled in me. Sitting in an Anderson shelter listening to bombs exploding was at least a de-sensitising experience! But then you put against that the culture of seeking risk, the 'adrenalin-junkies'. I remember some young friends of mine trying to persuade me to go on an extreme ride at a traction engine rally, I told them to include me out! I had experienced all the white knuckle I needed in my life and never had to pay for any of it. Different generations have different standards. I have a degree of fatalism towards health issues, I suspect this is not shared by the young. They have been brought up to believe that science can cure all ills.
Meanwhile, I watch what is happening in Iraq Kurdistan which is quietly converting itself into an independent state in all but international recognition. I forecast years ago that the end result of the incursion into Iraq would be internal strife and eventual division into the three original kingdoms of Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Baghdad and Basra which we destroyed in the creation of Iraq during and after WW1. History is littered with the failure of artificial states created by western 'statesmen' motivated by what helped them to best exploit the regions. They ignored ethnic and religious divisions and in the process created many of the problems we have to address today. Try searching for Gertrude Bell, you could start HERE. I've often been taken to task by those who don't believe history can teach us anything. Sorry, but that's not true. We can get a much better picture of ehat is happening if we take the trouble to learn about the hinterland.

[Tardis]

I have to say, I am greatly impressed by Eric Joyce's blog and his current scribblings about Grangemouth and UNITE:

http://ericjoyce.co.uk/2013/10/stephen- ... signation/

His comment at the bottom in reply certainly encapsulates even what I felt when I lived in Scotland.

[Tardis]

Ulimately useless, uninformed grandstanding by the select committee yesterday as it saught to 'grill' the energy bosses

On top of which Labour in the Lords tried to push through a Bill which would have enshrined in Law another £125 per year on everybody's energy bills by locking us into only expensive sources of electricity for 17 years. It was defeated, by 216 to 202

[Tardis]

Does Bliar's intervention destroy what little credibility Milibland had left?

Who was Energy Sec in 2008-9 when a recommended inquiry into the Energy Market was rejected?