Comments on: Open Left at Demos

By: Guano

Guano — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:33:55 +0000

By chance the latest Private Eye has a small item about a report from the consultancy company Ernst and Young sugesting that patients should be encouraged to move from one General Practioner to another so as to create an internal market for health service providers. The problem is that there are already other better mechanisms for monitoring the quality of service of GPs, and continuity of care by one practice improves health care.

By: bert

bert — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:41:51 +0000

Good link at #28, Alex.
To connect a dot or two, ICL had absorbed the remains of LEO, the teashop-based granddaddy of enterprise computing. It had been spun off/outsourced, had thrived briefly, then failed. A might-have-been British SAP or Oracle. Pinning down the reasons for the failure involves rehearsing all the old arguments about postwar decline. For my money, the size of IBM’s domestic market clinched it. But IBM also got all kinds of help from the US government.

Would a more Benn-style industrial policy have improved the outcome?
The French experience with Bull suggests not.
But who knows? British Leyland collapsed; Renault thrives. There are any number of counterfactuals to argue over.

By: ejh

ejh — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:39:45 +0000

Re: comsumer choice, the point (or one point among many) is surely that in a market economy, where people are enthusiastically making choices, the market responds by throwing money at production and improvement of the type of goods they’re buying. It doesn’t just shift a proportion of a fixed quantity of resources from unpopular good A to popular good B, it does much more than that. And without that, the goods-improvement, customer-choice mechanism just doesn’t function properly.

By: ejh

ejh — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:34:25 +0000

My view of Anthony Giddens is forever fixed by having worked briefly in the warehouse which stocked his Sociology, thousands and thousands of the bloody enormous things in picking bins and on pallets. There are surely people who still, when they hear the term “Tate Gallery”, think immediately “pile of bricks” – and that’s what I think of when I see the name Anthony Giddens.

By: Guano

Guano — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:21:25 +0000

Collective choices are the macro-level choices about, for example, how many hospitals are needed, where, in what size hospital with what services. Individual choices provide only weak signals to inform this kind of decision. If people are choosing Hospital A because Hospital B has a poor reputation, it is usually already known by decision-makers that there are problems at Hospital B and they don’t need to wait for the public to tell them. The result isn’t always that services are improved at Hospital B; what often happens is that Hospital B gets closed because nobody is using it. And for many places, and for many services, there aren’t realistic alternatives to choose from.

Individual choice isn’t the only way in which the public can influence the supply of services: there are the democratic methods of voice and direct influence. My concern is that peole like Purnell are talking about individual choice instead of voice and direct influence, rather than in addition.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:13:48 +0000

Forgive me if this is ignorant, but I thought that ISTCs were essentially wholesale elective surgery operations that subcontracted for the NHS, which doesn’t have any obvious consequences for “consumer choice”.

Regarding Benn, he also invented the automated distribution warehouse…

Regarding Birt, I have a feeling I systematically understated the importance of some of these people – didn’t everyone? I recall being astonished to find that my 68er professors at Vienna University actually quoted Anthony Giddens and apparently considered him a genuine thinker, as opposed to the vacuous media prof the Guardian Diary had taught me to believe he was.

By: Dr Zen

Dr Zen — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:56:36 +0000

I wish Bragg could avoid getting conned by centre-right turds who see “Left” and “Right” as nothing more than labels like the “Blues” and “Greens” of Byzantium.

By: Jock Bowden

Jock Bowden — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:45:43 +0000

Guano

What do you mean by “collective choices” and why can they only be made through state-provision?

By: Guano

Guano — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:33:23 +0000

My concern about this “power to choose between providers of public services” theory is that it focuses on individual choices but says nothing about collective choices and how they get made. The risk is that the important collective decisions get made by a managerial class with little transparency and accountability while giving the public the opportunity to make trivial individual choices.

By: mart

mart — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:46:55 +0000

@23: I suppose you’re right in that they’re not completely incompatible statements, but whilst I think the main argument here is the advisability of the “more choice” strategy in the first place, as this is politics we’re talking about here, the advisability is very much tied to how many people are persuaded by the policy.

Now I’m blagging the economics a bit here, but my understanding is that a market in which only a few people actually bother making choices is not necessarily functioning very well, and is unlikely to deliver great results for everyone else concerned.

By: Stigand

Stigand — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:51:42 +0000

#12: ” “My experience is that government normally works better when the individual has the power…to choose…between providers in public services.”
I don’t know how many members of the public these guys actually know, but very few people actually want to choose these things.”

At the risk of defending Purnell, aren’t you and he are saying slightly different things? Many of the advocates of choice in public services argued that only a few people had to be willing to make use of their right to choose for services to improve. (This line was widely used in the debate over NHS Independent Sector Treatment Centres.)

You may disagree with the argument, but it is compatible with your observation that most people don’t want choice.

By: bert

bert — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:18:41 +0000

B&W heat of technology!
If only all the unintended consequences of Tony Benn were that benign.

#21: I imagine the baseline will be some kind of a bailout for Channel 4, currently suffering from the biggest advertising recession in coke-addled memory. A slice of the licence fee, in return for which they’ll replace some repeats of Property Ladder with right-on religious programming. Beyond that, it’s not hard to imagine a Conservative government being forced to raise general taxation, and attempting to spin it with a cut in the licence fee. The World Service should also be worried about its direct grant from the Foreign Office.
How severely the BBC is trimmed I think depends how long it takes for the wheels to come off the Cameron government. A period of dominance a la post-Falklands Thatcher could be very good news for Murdoch. Thankfully I think the window before things turn is going to be quite narrow. Europe is a slow-motion multilane pileup we can already see starting to play out. I find it hard to credit the central role that’s been given to George Osborne, given that he’s a bleating nonentity. Give Cameron a small majority, and he’ll be found out in no time. And we’ll be on to the brave new dawn of Miliband and Purnell, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, criticising after dinner…

By: mart

mart — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:11:33 +0000

Slightly OT, but #19,#20, what are your views on the future of the licence fee?

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:45:10 +0000

Yes, very much so; and of course Birt could have eaten his own cooking and outsourced bbc.co.uk to a private sector portal but he didn’t.

(Interestingly, the “Golden Age” of the BBC came about as a result of a bit of unintended class warfare – Tony Benn, when he was Postmaster General, assumed that colour television would be a luxury good only bought by the super rich, so he set the colour licence fee very high in order to carry out a bit of redistribution. In fact, colour TV takeup was much faster than expected, leaving the BBC with a massive unexpected windfall.

By: bert

bert — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:17:53 +0000

Important point there, Daniel.
Where he saved money, he got to deploy it elsewhere.
Not a luxury other public sector managers tend to have.
It’s the advantage of a hypothecated income stream.
I remember ITV making some kind of an effort establishing an online presence. There were some interesting signs of life coming out of ITN. Then the dotcom crash happened and their budgets disappeared overnight. Subsequent efforts to catch up the ground they lost (buying Friends Reunited!) have been a bad joke.
By contrast, the BBC was able to plan their internet investment far more coherently, with a dependable multi-year timeframe. (Something that doesn’t seem to have been disrupted when BBC Technology got spun off – to Siemens? – and the contracts outsourced a few years ago.)
That kind of independence is something the incoming Tories – and, apparently, ex-BBC NuLabour archetype Ben Bradshaw – now seem determined to reverse.