Jumping on someone else’s gravy train

OK gang, you know how much you love your mates at CT, now it’s time for you lot to do something for us. We need to get the Wisdom of Crowds to work to come up with an idea that will make us[1] all rich. There’s quite likely to be an election in the UK within the next twelve months, which means that anyone who wants big and lucrative government contracts needs to start donating to the Labour Party now.

Footnote:
[1]In case it’s unclear, I am not using “us” here in any sense that might include you lot.

I’m not joking. There are two great things about UK politics for a young chap who wants to get rich, as opposed to the USA. In the first place, we’re going through an ongoing process of privatising the public sphere, with very poor control over the terms on which the government assumes massive liabilities for the future. In the USA, you really have to be in the defence industry (or at a pinch running a prison) if you want to look forward to a lifetime of risk-free suckling at the government teat. In the UK, you can run schools, go into waste management, clean hospitals not very well, basically anything you like, all at surprisingly attractive prices. It’s the happy hunting grounds.

Second, thanks to our bans on political advertising, UK politics is not such a big-money game as US; you get a much bigger bang for your buck. Consider that $50,000 would barely get you a place on the ladder of fundraisers for the Republican party (specifically, you’d be a “maverick” rather than a “ranger” or “pioneer”, and be honest, “maverick” sounds pretty crappy). In the UK, however, at the going rate of £2,000 a pop, the same money that would make you a “Maverick” would allow you have eleven separate questions asked in the House of Commons.

Furthermore it appears to the cynical mind that the price list for more tangible government benefits is equally reasonable:

• £50,000 buys you a £32m contract for smallpox vaccine
• £125,000 buys you a letter of recommendation to the Romanian government for a steel mill auction
• A couple of accountants’ time for two years buys you out of a multimillion dollar lawsuit and back on the list of approved firms for government work
• And at the top of the menu, a cool £1m buys you an exemption from a tobacco advertising ban for Formula One

These returns on investment are absolutely fantastic! And the great thing is that while this sort of thing is obviously not exactly a poor man’s game, neither are the amounts entirely out of the ballpark for a small syndicate. Most of the CT staff are starving scholars or impoverished academics, but I’ve got a small bonus coming, John Q’s got his Federation Fellowship and a few of the others have probably got a bob or two they can scrape up. I reckon that we could easily come up with a £500,000 donation to the Labour Party once we’d convinced ourself that this was a better use for the money than bringing democracy to Gabon.

My guess is that we ought to get CT some sort of official status as “People’s Blog Laureate” with a budget of around £10m a year. Or possibly we could take on a couple of underprivileged kids under the terms of their anti-social behaviour orders and get City Technology Status. Maybe the four or five posts we wrote on Najaf would give us sufficient expertise to bid for a PFI contract to manage urban warfare for the Army. I’m not that fussed what we do as long as it’s under a long-dated contract with easy performance criteria and plenty of scope for us to renegotiate the contract once all the other bidders have dropped out and we suddenly discover it’s going to cost five times as much as we tendered.

Ideas, please?