There is lots of debate about how Rachel Reeves can find the money that she needs to invest in the UK economy. I’m pleased about that because I know that there is an enormous need for investment in the UK economy.
For it is odd. The one solution never considered is that folk get to keep their own money which they then invest. What’s odder is that the rich people – the people with an excess over their current consumption levels and thus those likely to invest any marginal income or amount – definitely can’t be allowed to keep their own money.
It’s just an odd gap in the thinking. That those most likely to invest cannot be allowed to keep the money they might invest when investment is needed.
The problem is, none of these people can ever say what. Like I have a couple of investments that would be worthwhile: the Heathrow to Great Western Main Line link, buying all the daft little toll bridges that remain, creating more training for nurses and doctors.
But most government stuff is better being about funding. Pay some company every month to do a thing. Don’t run your own car fleet at the council, lease them from a company. We build shitloads of health clinics for the NHS in places where there’s a glut of office space that would do fine for the job. You can’t do surgery in them, that needs a dedicated building. But you go to a private clinic in Oxford, it’ll be in a big old house along the Woodstock Road. A bit of the old call centre for Vodafone will do fine. So, just specify what you want and go to the market.
I’m also a fan of PFI because while everyone whines about the cost of adding a new light, they forget that covers all the employment costs to install and support it for the remaining term of the contract. It also encourages buildings to be designed around reducing cost, rather than doing some daft lefty nonsense that means it shuts down in 3 years. There’s a school near here done PFI and everything is designed for reduced maintenance.
I’ve decided to call her Rachel Riever. Unfortunately the joke will be lost on most people.
Would Rachel the Reever do any better? I doubt it.
As usual, the term “investment” is a misnomer.
An investment either gets you an ongoing income stream, or you buy it in the hope you can sell it later for more than you paid for it. Otherwise it’s not an investment.
There is no government “investment” where this holds true.
Person in Pictland,
Did they put the pax into the aircon at Labour HQ?
As an aside, I see Blakes 7 is coming to blu-ray, which is occurred to me like an earlier version of Firefly.
WB,
We build shitloads of health clinics for the NHS in places where there’s a glut of office space that would do fine for the job. You can’t do surgery in them, that needs a dedicated building.
A few years ago West Dorset council built a new office block in the middle of Dorchester and as always with these things not long after it was completed there was a reorganisation and West Dorset and North Dorset councils were merged in to the County Council.
There was talk of knocking the building down because no commercial organisation wanted it and then the NHS stepped in and took it over as part of the County Hospital. They now do a lot of outpatient stuff their, including some X-Rays. It works well because its close to the main town centre car park and even attracts a few people back in to the town as they wait for people.
Its probably a pain for some staff who have to travel between the two sites, but it was a better solution than a purpose built site as they did in Poundbury when the needed more space.
@M
Well, nationalisation is supposed to give the government an income stream so you could call it investment, except that the income stream ends up almost always from the government to the nationalised entity and not vice-versa.
So, I suppose you could say that the workers in that nationalised entity have made an investment – in taxpayer subsidy. Excellent. At what point does the expansion of nationalised industry surviving on government subsidy become a collapsing Ponzi scheme? Around late 1979? And our current public sector/benefits industrial complex?
Rachel Thieves works for me.
@ Norman
I don’t know if you are being deliberately dense or it’s a parody question. The point of nationalisation isn’t to give the government an income stream, it’s to get a liability off the books.
And when does the taxpayer get a choice in any subsidy? Once every 4 years, on a general manifesto, hardly seems sufficient to approve the many and varied ways the public sector pisses away money.
@Person in Pictland.
Rachel the Reiver? As in she’ll steal anything that’s not nailed down or hidden? I suggest shipping her and her family off to Ireland like we did with the Armstrongs.
@Joe Smith
Of course nationalisation is supposed to be an investment. Its ostensible purpose is to remove private owners and their profit motive from the means of production, thereby theoretically both lowering prices (no profits to pay) and redirecting the proceeds of value creation as an income stream to the State, which can then redistribute it “equitably”.
Apart from the lowered prices bit, which never happens, this works in theory if the enterprise in question actually creates economic value above and beyond its cost of operation. It also means its workers are paying taxes out of value creation.
In practice, as we have seen ad nauseam, state owned industries almost never do this. Instead they absorb taxpayer’s money, so those state workers are not actually paying tax out of value creation. All they’re doing is getting their taxpayer-funded wages docked at source, and this docking is euphemistically called taxation. Those workers have got themselves a nice little income stream at the taxpayer’s expense, and if we’re going to call “investment” the establishment of income streams, then that’s what it is. It doesn’t matter if they had no democratic choice in this. I have no choice in how my tracker pension fund is invested.
@ Western Bloke: with the minor difference that Blake’s Seven was low-budget, no imagination rubbish, and Firefly was good, thought-through, and had production values. (I do not, however, believe that Inara would have worn her companion’s gear when off duty. Jeans and a sweater, more likely. Not that I’m complaining.)
Reeves is in a tight spot. She can change the accounting rules and nick money invested elsewhere to feed the projects her party claims will be investments because of the growth they “might” bring. In all probability those projects will just turn into money pits. The problem she will fail to address is that far too many people are paid to do jobs that have no tangible output that makes us richer. E.g. It doesn’t matter how many diversity consultants you hire. They might be worthwhile for the firm employing them if it reduces legal costs, but they do not create wealth. All they can do is dilute and redistribute it.
@Chris
You’re being too kind to Blake’s 7. It was made 10 years after the original Star Trek and looked like it was produced in 1959. Yes, I know the budgets didn’t match but there was no reason why B7 couldn’t have been better.
Chris,
“I do not, however, believe that Inara would have worn her companion’s gear when off duty. Jeans and a sweater, more likely. Not that I’m complaining.”
mmm. I’ll be in my bunk.
Sorry guys, don’t know anything about ‘Firefly’ and this ‘Inara’ bint, but she’d have be something bloody epic to beat Servalan (or Jenna if you prefer something a little less ‘dominatrix’).
Joe Smith @ 2.39. “The point of nationalisation isn’t to give the government an income stream, it’s to get a liability off the books”.
Are you sure you don’t mean privatisation…….?
Addolff said:
“Sorry guys, don’t know anything about ‘Firefly’ and this ‘Inara’ bint, but she’d have be something bloody epic to beat Servalan (or Jenna if you prefer something a little less ‘dominatrix’).”
Oh, she was. And more balls than either of them. Carried herself better than Servolan as well, who never seemed to be able to play up to her power-skirt costumes.
https://tenor.com/view/inara-inara-serra-firefly-serenity-gif-19811466
P.S. – PiP, very good!