Labour leadership contest 2020

Got to be easier than managing Valencia.

More giant skyscrapers for rich people?

Was on the verge of defending G Nev's record but remembered my suggestion was tongue in cheek.

I am gladdened by the appearance of some debate on the issues of public vs private ownership, the role of the state etc. At the same time I am saddened that this is only happening now. One of the immense failures of the recent Labour party leadership was to assume that people understood the issues or were engaged at all. They produced a manifesto that resonated strongly within their own echo chamber but meant little to the bulk of the population who had not been engaged in the policy discussion.

I wish I had time to engage with all the arguments in recent posts, but that would mean cancelling Christmas. One caught my eye

I'd chop all bus passes as all they mean is buses are more expensive for working age people.

Simply not true. Bus passes provide financial support for bus operators, they make it possible to run more services and give a social and environmental benefit to everyone. London Buses is a nationalised industry with physical services provided by private contractors. It is one of the most successful transport undertakings in the world. The wholesale privatisation of buses outside London has been a failure with high fares and hopeless service.
The highest profile privatisation disaster was Railtrack. Investors made a fortune while service levels dropped. The result was at least four major fatal rail crashes with dozens killed and hundreds injured. That is why Network rail has since been re-nationalised.

I think Labour should have targeted things that were clearly not working- public transport, water distribution, power generation and distribution. People have a constant poor experience of these things either not working or failing at critical times.

Broadband, on the other hand, tends to work.

The backhaul and core network operated by Openreach maybe would benefit, but with that said I’ve worked directly with some of BT’s senior engineering management and many of them are thick cunts, which might be the problem.

https://www.dataprax.is/tory-landslide-progressives-split

Broadband, on the other hand, tends to work.

I don’t know where to start with this statement.

Broadband does not work outside a small urban bubble and even in that bubble it is considerably worse than most of India and many African countries and just about every European country.

The Broadband thing..I’ve said it here before.

The government gave BT £1.2billion to roll out fibre broadband to rural areas and improve national coverage. BT spent the £1.2billion on launching BT sport instead. The nationalisation if Openreach would be the next logical step if BT can’t be trusted.

Let's be honest though, that eg is a failure of the civil service.

In what world do you give money for a specific purpose and then not create a solid contract combined with a roadmap that can be enforced?

But yet we think that the same cohort of people would properly run Open Reach.

The one thing BT is very good at is contractual pissing contests. Good point

It’s dreadful in comparison to other countries, yes, but I’m talking about basic ADSL- 8 Mb/sec theoretical stuff, which is all I can get in London’s famous London.

96.4% of the UK can get over 24 Mbps broadband apparently- I’m in the 3.6 it would appear.

Anyway, I think the 3.6% didn’t manage to convince the 96.4% to vote Labour.

I'm using 5G mobile internet in Southwark provided by Huawei. It's variable, but usually somewhere between 20 and 200mb.

Investing in the 5G network was not top of any government lists.

Test ran just now.

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Broadband, on the other hand, tends to work.

Not for everyone. Kids of families in poverty, the elderly and disabled are at an increasing disadvantage. £25 a month isn't a good choice for everyone if food and shelter is dicey.

Good policy, but still an incoherent campaign.

I'm not sure nationalisation is really that high on voters agenda. People aren't sure it's going to be any better. I'd expect housing costs, under-regulation of the gig-economy and policing are more pressing for a higher number of people.

Congratulations. You live in a city for which the government gives a fuck.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn-agenda-candidates-latest-starmer-thornberry-nandy-lammy-a9256491.html

Whereas I can't get working 4g in my Southwark flat and the fastest broadband is 11 Mbps

I was on 4g for broadband until very recently. We now have fibre to the house

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But yet we think that the same cohort of people would properly run Open Reach.

Civil servants do not directly run nationalised companies or public sector organisations. They do make it slightly harder to work in them, but they don't run them.

There are hundreds, probably thousands of examples of well run public service organisations.

As an aside, ever been a school governor? Or an NHS trust governor? Maybe consider giving it a try.

It is not a free market tho is it, it is an oligopoly at best.

One of the most important points in this debate, imo - it absolutely isn't a free market. Free marketeers need to address this point.

.

(In case the free marketeers haven't been paying attention, a nice chap called Piketty has done the research for you)

Must be nice, I am outside London in the midlands in a red wall city and get a 5mb/s down and 0.5mb/s up, this is on an estate less than a decade old, really makes working from home a painfull experience some days, also only get 4g signal in the windowsill of one room.

This anti civil servant thing.

Why?

The free market - yeah it is great.

Let's have a look at Persimmon, for example. So Jeff Fairburn walks off with £75M. Yeah, £75M for a year's work. How great! This is what the "free market" can do for you. How did he do it? Well, he had a nuts performance bonus based on share price that should never have been signed off, but hey, this is the “free market”, this stuff is f*ckin brilliant, we can all be millionaires.

Anyway, so how does he max out the share price and make his crazy bonus? Well, he happens to be running a house builder at the time of need for houses. So much need, that the govt not only relax planning rules, they also introduce a taxpayer funded “help to buy scheme”. Man, this Fairburn fellow was really clever to do that.

So what else does he do? Not content with taxpayer funded hyper profitability, he also incentivises his regional managers to maximise returns, seemingly without paying too much attention to how they actually do this. But don’t worry, many of these regional managers become millionaires themselves, through their own “free market” incentive schemes.

The only slight problem was that in this dash to become millionaires, the quality of the actual product seems to have become very secondary to the management’s prime objective. To the point where regulations were not met and building standards not adhered to.

tl/dr: “free market” transfers taxpayers money to private sector executives in return for sub standard products.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/21/persimmons-former-ceo-jeff-fairburn-fails-to-set-up-charity-after-pledging-portion-of-75-million-bonus