Finally did my first piece on pricing suppression in the UK the other day, just starting to get underway with the second. The second one is probably going to take me a fair amount of time, unfortunately.
Anyway, onto the links:
- A stunning piece about the British obsession with quangos / arms-length bodies as the most effective means to direct public spending, despite ample evidence of terrible results and near outright corruption
- A third of all government spending, £391 billion a year, is not spent by government departments. It is spent by 438 separate publicly funded bodies that ministers cannot direct, Parliament cannot easily scrutinise, and voters cannot remove. Within these 438 bodies, 315 people are paid more than the Prime Minister. The older term is quango. The government prefers “arm’s-length body”. The name is irrelevant. Public money, public power, no public control.
- The key fact that the author identifies is that Britain does not have safeguards for any of these quangos, unlike other nations like Sweden, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Instead, we seem to rely on Parliament being supreme, but when push comes to shove, Ministers and other officials point the blame elsewhere and sadly say there is nothing they can do.
- Furthermore, we don’t have a criminal offence for negligent mismanagement of public funds. In the news this week, we see Starmer as saying he didn’t know the full extent of the Mandelson appointment.
- Imagine a director of a UK company suggesting they are not to blame, as it was an underling who actually made the decision; we would rightly say the leadership of the organisation is clearly not fit for purpose and remove it. But somehow this is acceptable in politics today.
https://www.bartlettdata.co.uk/post/blog-coming-soon
- As usual, there is a huge amount of controversy around foreign firms, particularly scary US companies involved in ‘Our’ NHS, with the latest being Polanski from the Green Party declaring he will get them out of the NHS
- I came across this piece from Tony Bartlett, who, according to him, led a team of 150 engineers at NHS England on the Federated Data Platform, which provides some much needed context to the argument
- There’s a lot to unpack, and Bartlett clearly shows the benefits of the scheme, as well as addressing the criticism directed towards Palantir and the NHS for this contract.
- But I just want to emphasise this is an insane way to conduct a debate about our healthcare service. Because we have made it our new founding identity, we are unable to discuss potential reforms to it, or how to think about utilising firms from overseas to help it. I didn’t really make this point in my essay on the NHS previously, but a solid reason alone to move away from our WWII-era system might be to finally allow us to treat this as any other part of our public services.
- It is not something to be protected in its own right; it is there to improve the healthcare of the British people. Anything that furthers this goal should be considered first and foremost.
https://overcast.fm/+AAO30OCaVDc
- Turning internationally for the final link, with an interesting and nuanced episode on the United Nations, and if it still serves its purpose and America’s at that
- As an American podcast, naturally, it focuses on the United States, and how historically it mostly agreed to be constrained by rules and norms that it alone couldn’t decide on, to get wider participation in the international order it had built. The current administration has no desire to continue this, and it’s unclear if future administrations would be interested in returning to that constrained world.
- I can’t help but fear that it is, unfortunately, mostly dead in the water. The United Nations was established in the aftermath of World War II to prevent another global catastrophe, learning from the failures of the League of Nations and the instability that followed the First World War.
- It began with a degree of legitimacy, not least because the major victorious powers were embedded within its structure. If we look at today, what legitimacy does it have in the minds of the major powers? Perhaps some, but there are increasingly other avenues that can be used to supplant the UN (Belt and Road from China’s point of view, favourable tariff regimes from the USA). Ultimately the UN too was a reflection of a moment in time that has since passed.
