I take Emily to York, and at a freezing cold Kings Cross station decide to wait in the first class lounge as I have a first class ticket. I am told that as I have a First Advance rather than a First Open ticket, I have to pay £10 to use the lounge. What? I would have thought £90 for a single to York was quite enough to buy me a smidgeon of comfort.
I receive a letter from Ealing Council threatening to fine me £80 for rubbish left on the street outside my house. This is infuriating because it is mostly not my rubbish, and it consists of flattened cardboard boxes left out for recycling. I send this email to the Council:
Dear Yusuf,
As other residents of Whitehall Gardens, we received from you recently a copy of a letter dated 12 August 2009 from Roger Jones, concerning rubbish left in the street for collection on the wrong day.
In fact, the problem in Whitehall Gerdens appears to be with rubbish which was left in the street on the correct day, but which the council have failed to collect. In the street outside out house at the moment is a large collection of cardboard boxes, mostly properly flettened, A small rpoportion of these are our own rubbish, but the majority are from other houses and were colected into a pile by the refuse men two collections ago, but not taken away either then or with today’s collection.
Obviously at Christmas residents receive a large numbers of parcels, and the Council appears to be having some argument of principle over collecting the cartons, even where they have been carefully flattened. Why the Council feels it is an appropriate response just to leave large piles of cardboard in the street is something I would like you to explain to me.
Another strange thing is that, at the first post-Christmas collection, anout four of these centralised piles of cardboard were created by the refuse men but left in the street. They were all still there when I returned home last night. But at today’s collection, three of the four piles were collected but the pile outside our house left again.
Rather than sending threatening letters, it would be a good deal more helpful if you could sort out your collectors’ Scrooge like attitude to dealing with Christmas detritus.
I look forward to your reply, and would also be grateful if you could copy this to the counillor or councillors who represent this ward.
Craig Murray
30 Whitehall Gardens
W3 9RD
07979 691085
Both my problems with the railway and the refuse collection arise from public services being handed over to private companies whose only interest is profit. The Tories believe more of this is the answer to our edonomic problems. Ha!
(Yes, I know the East Coast railway has just gone back into public hands. But the First Class tickets not valid for the First Class Lounge policy was introduced by National Express just before it lost the franchise).
This, I fear, is only the beginning with regards public services the huge financial mess that the elite have created is taken out of public service and local authority funding…
Dear Craig. May I be the first to support your grumpiness. A very good grump indeed. FYI, I’m fairly certain that the paper collection, which has scrap value and attracts a “green” enticement, is one of the few areas which makes a profit for the contractor.
Round our way (Cambridge) the roads and pavements were like ice rinks in the week before Christmas. The city councillors and the county councillors bickered about who was responsible. It was childish buck-passing. At least you have a unitary authority. In my view, every staff member of the local authority should be out gritting pavements and helping to make the roads safe during this weather. That should be their ONLY priority – stuff spreadsheets and management reports. Any Council that took the safety of its residents seriously would get a gold star in my book. Grump.
You should see the bus services around here – since Thatcher “freed” them with deregulation, they’ve done nothing but provide an ever more miserable service, while fares go up 10% – 30% a year.
The latest wheeze from First Group (who have the local franchise) comes on the heels on the council’s gift of free passes to all those over 65. Every time a pensioner shows their card, the council taxpayer gets stung for the average fare. Now how can one make sure the average fare is good and high? Why, by making a minimum charge of £3.20, even if only traveling 1/4 mile to the next stop.
Services are very slow, routes have been incorporated into each other. Hardly anything is direct, and the number of buses/hour is whittled back regularly. Buses are badly maintained so break down a lot and often don’t show up at all, and drivers are often novices, given the high turnover. The timetable is an optimistic aspiration.
But when you see the “PLC” after the First Group logo, it all makes sense.
Meanwhile, we get fingers wagged at us to “go green” and take the bus, and punished with fuel duty.
If I take a trip to town in my small diesel car, the cost is about £0.80 return, and 15 minutes each way. On the bus (for which one needs to allow an hour), it’s £3.70 return. With the wife, it’s still £0.80 in the car but £7.40 return on the bus.
By “go green”, I take it the Powers That Be mean hand over the “green” to their mates who rake in profits from this scam.
My sympathies, Craig. I know how you feel and I resent it in the same way – perhaps with less good humour than you do, judging from the civil tone of your email.
“Both my problems with the railway and the refuse collection arise from public services being handed over to private companies whose only interest is profit. The Tories believe more of this is the answer to our [economic] problems. Ha!”
Here is where we differ. When I was young I assumed that private enterprise was efficient. Then I began to see the merits of public management for large centralized utilities. Then, after living through the Callaghan era and the Winter of Discontent, I swung right behind Mrs Thatcher when she preached that the private sector could do things more efficiently.
Nowadays, possibly having become a grumpy old man myself, I see what my mistake was all those years. I was trying to figure out which was more efficient – the government or the private sector. The truth, alas, is that they are both horribly inefficient – although mostly for different reasons. The practical question is merely which is less dreadful for a given task under given circumstances.
With quite a few – but not enough – exceptions, it seems to be human nature to want something for nothing, and to grow accustomed to freebies and privileges.
The public sector is inefficient because no one is responsible, and no one stands to lose any money – the taxpayer can always cough up some more. (The bank bailout is the most immense and grotesque example of this, I should think, ever).
The private sector is inefficient because managers are only after money, and don’t care whether they give anything in return. Indeed, those who do give good value tend to be crushed by the market mechanisms that reward “return on investment”. Hence the market actually selects for weasels, spivs and cheats.
Maybe I should clarify these words:
“I was trying to figure out which was more efficient – the government or the private sector. The truth, alas, is that they are both horribly inefficient…”
As it stands, that is a serious over-generalization. The horrible inefficiency tends to appear whenever the task to be done involves public benefits rather than the private interests of the managers, owners, and workers. Private sector people and corporations can be quite efficient when they are working for their own enrichment. And public sector organizations are superb at maintaining their own health and increasing their size.
It’s working for the benefit of others that organizations of any kind seem to find uninspiring. (Even though many of the rank and file may have the best of attitudes and go beyond the call of duty).
Tom: How do you account for the fact that fire-departments, paramedics and (dare I say) the police do such an outstanding job on a regular basis?
Their jobs _only_ involve public benefits, rather than private interests of managers/owners/workers. Surely what you have proposed is not a hard and fast rule?
We should hire our own refuse collectors – works in other parts of the world.
Then if they start doing this sort of thing we get to fire them and hire someone who will do the job.
Its could be just as bad with council employed collectors.
Chin up – just look at that gorgeous partner and forget minor blips.
Brave man for publishing your mobile no. I say that because I get all sorts of ‘strange’ calls that really do annoy.
Mark
yes you would be advised to remove your home details from this blog, cant be too careful these days!
In dealing with such letters from so called “officials” when they are in the wrong, why not write back and say you will in future be charging a £50 administration fee to deal with it. I don’t see why as private individuals we should not charge corporations whether private or public a fee for dealing with them. Afterall time is money for all of us!
I sent a mailshot in return to unwanted junk mail a few years ago and guess what the junk mail stopped.
As an aside can someone tell me who actually owns the rubbish once it is put out with the intention for the council or their agents to collect? I understand that you can be done by the law for taking rubbish away as it is effectively stealing. Surely once the rubbish is left outside on the pavement, it is then it is no longer your property and responsibility as long as it is left in a sensible manner.
Glenn, They don’t.
I have no experience of paramedics, but the other 2 bodies get good press generally – for different but political reasons often. They are not particularly brilliant.
I too have similar experience to Tom in swinging from pro public to pro private and half way back.
I think the problem is size. Some enterprises have to be enormous to work. The cost of building power stations or huge infrastructure projects requires big organisations. But there is a cost in the sheer size which is efficiency, quality of service and value for money. My own view over the years has boiled down to a reluctant acceptance that some things have to be done by the state, but that private enterprise is preferable to keep politicians from meddling for personal/private gain.
However there should be very strict controls on market share and where a monopoly is inevitable it should be – reluctantly – (dis?)organised by the state in the common good. Your bus services would be probably quite reasonable if there were smaller competing bus companies. It is strong competition authority enforcement which is required.
How is it that a handful of giant multinational car companies can satisfactorily supply automobiles, and 2 soft drinks companies can supply the world with carbonated drinks, yet a handful of banks can irritate an entire nation?
Its a failure of politicians in competition policy.
Glenn, They don’t.
I have no experience of paramedics, but the other 2 bodies get good press generally – for different but political reasons often. They are not particularly brilliant.
I too have similar experience to Tom in swinging from pro public to pro private and half way back.
I think the problem is size. Some enterprises have to be enormous to work. The cost of building power stations or huge infrastructure projects requires big organisations. But there is a cost in the sheer size which is efficiency, quality of service and value for money. My own view over the years has boiled down to a reluctant acceptance that some things have to be done by the state, but that private enterprise is preferable to keep politicians from meddling for personal/private gain.
However there should be very strict controls on market share and where a monopoly is inevitable it should be – reluctantly – (dis?)organised by the state in the common good. Your bus services would be probably quite reasonable if there were smaller competing bus companies. It is strong competition authority enforcement which is required.
How is it that a handful of giant multinational car companies can satisfactorily supply automobiles, and 2 soft drinks companies can supply the world with carbonated drinks, yet a handful of banks can irritate an entire nation?
Its a failure of politicians in competition policy.
It’s that postcode lottery thingy, isn’t it? My council in Norwich is fantastic, no complaints but for minor niggles. Excellent schools, clinics, transport and rubbish-collection. Wonderful library to while away a cold day within – FREE. Compared to what is laughingly called “public services” in developing nations, the average Brit doesn’t know he’s born.
I think I’ll write a letter of thanks to my council.
What a shame you aren’t a company.You would have paid, and claimed for, the extra ten pounds. I have seen business travellers pay, and take a receipt for, sixty pounds for airport parking.
Our parliamentary system listens to lobbiers from every different privatised sector. And the security industry is winding up the government with false fears. But the people are never listened to, either individually or when represented by their M.P.s.
I hope the ballot to listen to Blair give evidence doesn’t come from the same database as the Jury system. I might get fined for refusing to attend.
Having worked in both public and private sectors, quickly opting to spend the majority of career in the private (public too oppressive) I often wondered about the possibility of retaining a public service but privatising its management on a renewable contract basis, rather like football management.
A firm of (say) refuse collection managers is appointed for a 5-year term. All other staff are public employees. At the end of the term the management team performance is assessed and their contract renewed or put out to tender if they have disappointed. There could also be options to remove them early if, continuing the footall analogy, they have a string of bad results.
Craig, my sympathies about the problems with rubbish. A few years ago when I was living in Amsterdam I came back from work one evening and found some rubbish tipped outside my house. I was then received a letter from the town council threatening to fine me for putting out rubbish on the wrong day. I was quickly able to identify the culprit by sifting through the rubbish and finding an envelope addressed to the person concerned. I phoned him to ask him to remove the rubbish. This he did – by shifting it 2 doors down the street! At that point I shopped him to the authorities.
Hi Glenn! You wrote “Tom: How do you account for the fact that fire-departments, paramedics and (dare I say) the police do such an outstanding job on a regular basis?”
I tried to account for this with my mention of “the rank and file”. It’s often remarked that individual police officers, paramedics, firefighters, etc. do great work and never stint their efforts. But even those front-line workers are often known to criticize their own organizations and leaders. For the police, see (e.g.) the recent books by David Copperfield, Inspector Gadget, and E.E. Bloggs (“Diary of an on-call Girl”). All three paint a dismaying picture of the way in which their own efforts are muted and suffocated by bureaucracy and unimaginative management.
Yes, the refuse problem sounds very familiar – and infuriating! One of the problems in some areas is that local authorities are trying to cut their budgets and and so are reducing the ability for some groups of workers to work overtime, which means less gritting, less everything.
The train ticket thing is surreal, but typical.
Here are some appropriate maxims, which applies across public and private sectors, but which you will never see on any organisation’s Mission Statement:
Bureaucracy is bad for the brain
Bureaucracy is a substitute for thought
Bureacracy is an excuse for inaction
Bureaucracy is cowardice
Let us dismantle our bureaucratic mindsets and re-learn the skills of infanthood:
THINK! LEARN! DO!
AND ABOVE ALL, IN ONE ANOTHER DO WE TRUST!
Yours,
An even grumpier old man
How about Pay Per Poo.
Toilets in your house should have a coin slot, that only opens when you put in a coin?
you thought you have problems. Your fellow Scotsman George Galloway is rumoured using his ‘boxing’ skills to get supplies into Gaza.
Off copurse the media is trying its bets not ta say very much about it, just as they dare not say much about Gaza and the increasing air raids by the IDF.
last night they attacked hamas activists in the process, about to shoot a missile/firecracker, so they say.
If anybody who is ‘about to’ shoot a missile is attacked, they must not wonder if they try again.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8442758.stm
“Some enterprises have to be enormous to work. The cost of building power stations or huge infrastructure projects requires big organisations.”
Often these big infrastructure projects are undertaken precisely because they make massive profits for big corporations.
Why renovated two or three good but outdated schools/hospitals (for figures in the tens of millions) when the government can pay there pals in big business hundreds of millions to knock them down, build one brand new one on cheaper land, with less facilities – and throw in the (often central, and valuable) real-estate as a bonus? Oh, and then let the corporation run the hospital for up to 30 years, with guaranteed profit, possibly even keeping the land it was build on afterwards. Thus is the PFI/PPP trough that the Con/Lab has created.
This is true for power generation too. There is no particular reason that Britain (or most other countries) should have a few hundred big power stations rather than thousands of more localized ones. This was actually Edison’s original intent when he build the power generation for Wall St. Less energy is lost in transition. In Edision’s original setup waste heat from the power generation was used to heat the building too. The reason we do tend to have large centralized services has as much to do with it being extremely profitable for a few huge corporations and allowing them to be less democratically accountable them it has to do with anything else.
On these sorts of topics:
“Captive State”, George Monbiot
– ten years out of date but probablu more relevent now than when it was written.
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (or watch the DVD)
“Shock Doctrine”, Naomi Kline
PJL
Craig,
Whilst it may be acceptable to seriously embarrass the kind of people who employ hitmen for which you seem to have a life long skill, complaining about bin men, puts you on very dodgy ground.
Do you realise what these people can be like, if you get on the wrong side of them?
I suggest a far better technique would have been to get your Missus running after them, when scantily clad, offering them a minor Christmas Present and thanking them for the wonderful work they have been doing all year.
Hopefully, some good samaritan, will read your post here and clean up your neighbours rubbish and all will be forgotten.
Good Luck,
Tony
I read somewhere that in the USA, by 1970, almost every economist in and out of academe was of the neoclassical/neolib kind. Their greed-is-good monomania has poisoned western commerce to the point where only heartless, dead-eyed psychopaths can make it to the top in Big Business.
And of course, the ethos of maximise profits, minimise loss, has now spread throughout society and led directly to the progressive subversion of public services as witnessed today. As citizens, we would have more influence over council-run services than we do over outsourced, private sector same. At least a democratically-accountable system is run according to one person one vote; market-based systems are run by one pound one vote. And the person with the most pounds has the most votes!
I am dreading the prospect of a Tory government; I can practically guarantee that after 2 years the NHS as we know it will cease to exist. Oh, there will be something called the NHS but none of its staff will be working for you or me or the government. No, they’ll all be employees of private health providers. Thus when David Cameron talks of increasing the NHS budget, he really means increasing the revenue stream to those private health providers. They know they cant get away with openly dismantling the NHS and turning health provision in the UK into something like the hell of American health insurance, but service outsourcing is the next best thing.
Its all about transferring wealth from us to the rich elite. Or as one big American exec once said, ‘Giving people less but making them think they’re getting more.’
Banana republic. Well said Craig. everything has been outsourced and outsourced and the Third Way dominates. The present snowy weather exposes all the gaps – carers from agencies not getting to their ‘clients’, ambulances up north having no snow tyres and so on ad infinitum. In the old days a sensible manager on the ground would have made these decisions off his own bat. Not it is jobsworths sitting in overheated offices at their computers who decide.
I think this kind of says it all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7GeZ3YmONw
“Now here’s a little story
To tell it is a must
About an unsung hero
That moves away your dust
Some people make a fortune
Other’s earn a mint
My old man don’t earn much
In fact….he’s flippin’…..skint
Oh, my old man’s a dustman
He wears a dustman’s hat
He wears cor blimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat
He looks a proper narner
In his great big hob nailed boots
He’s got such a job to pull em up
That he calls them daisy roots
Some folks give tips at Christmas
And some of them forget
So when he picks their bins up
He spills some on the steps
Now one old man got nasty
And to the council wrote
Next time my old man went ’round there
He punched him up the throat
Oh, my old man’s a dustman
He wears a dustman’s hat
He wears cor blimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat
I say, I say Duncan
I ‘er…I found a police dog in my dustbin
(How do you know he’s a police dog)
He had a policeman with him
Though my old man’s a dustman
He’s got a heart of gold
He got married recently
Though he’s 86 years old
We said ‘Ear! Hang on Dad
you’re getting past your prime’
He said ‘Well when you get to my age’
‘It helps to pass the time’
Oh, my old man’s a dustman
He wears a dustman’s hat
He wears cor blimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat
I say, I say, I say
My dustbins full of lillies
(Well throw ’em away then)
I can’t Lilly’s wearing them
Now one day while in a hurry
He missed a lady’s bin
He hadn’t gone but a few yards
When she chased after him
‘What game do you think you’re playing’
She cried right from the heart
‘You’ve missed me…am I too late’
‘No… jump up on the cart’
Oh, my old man’s a dustman
He wears a dustman’s hat
He wears cor blimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat
I say, I say, I say (What you again)
My dustbin’s absolutely full with toadstools
(How do you know it’s full)
‘Cos there’s not much room inside
He found a tiger’s head one day
Nailed to a piece of wood
The tiger looked quite miserable
But I suppose it should
Just then from out a window
A voice began to wail
He said (Oi! Where’s me tiger head)
Four foot from it’s tail
Oh, my old man’s a dustman
He wears a dustman’s hat
He wears cor blimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat
Next time you see a dustman
Looking all pale and sad
Don’t kick him in the dustbin
It might be my old dad”
Tony
Mmm thankyou Tony – why can I remember every word of that song?
Moving on there are underground currents that ‘Friends of Israel’ are involved in the recent attempt to vilify Gordon Brown and force a secret ballot. The reason? All is revealed here:
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/25698/idf-cancel-uk-trip-after-arrest-fears
VOTE FOR BROWN I say – keep Shin Bet out of Britain!!
Never mind Craig, I am sure by now the rubbish is covered by at least 16 inches of snow and therefore unrecognizable. Maybe now is the time to request your friendly council rep to come to visit for a cosy chat. I am sure he will be keen to brave the conditions as that is what he is paid to do !
Craig since when have you had the money to use first class?
Serves you right anyway, wasting money like that.
I always sit first class. I pay for second class tickets though, but I sit in first
That is because I am a first class type with second class money.