Meanwhile the government’s mood music in the preparation for the budget (expected for October) is to soften us up for what anyone with common sense already understood to be inevitable:
(We should know tonight who’s got enough nominations to go forward in the Tory leadership election)
The problem there appears to be not only that, in one case, there is a requirement to generate profit (as in staying in the black), but that the profits in a publicly-traded company tend to take priority over expenditure necessary to complete the job. Ultimately, in the case of public-gone-private industries, profit is generated by simply not even trying to do the job properly.
And as already noted, the penalties for not even trying to do the job properly are significantly less than the costs for doing the job properly.
As the water companies are currently amply demonstrating.
Yeah, I was talking to someone the other day who had doubts that it would be legally possible to suspend bonuses and dividend payouts of a public traded company, to create a consequence for failure to perform a requirement, but I think the solution might just be to make the penalties sufficiently severe.
Almost certainly not, we don’t take much notice of Canadian politics these days.
Retrospectively not, that horse has bolted; but if the regulator has powers over other aspects of a provider company’s finances, they could be given the duty to ensure that executive remuneration policies and decisions on actual payments reflect the performance in service delivery.
Meanwhile, the government’s getting its bad fiscal news in straight away:
And the nominated candidates for the Tory leadership are confirmed:
I used to work for the NHS. NHS employees have much better pay and benefits than contractors and are much harder to fire.
Nursing staff had many complaints about the employed cleaners and little was done to resolve the problems. Contracts have to be periodically renewed and if hospital managers are not enforcing the standards set out for contractors, why would you expect them to do better with employed cleaners?
Starmer seems to be facing the first big test of his leadership with riots led by the far right and fueled by social media misinformation erupting. I won’t pretend to have any insight on what’s going on here but welcome any perspective from our British Dopers.
I’m getting texts and video clips from one of my Muslim work colleagues in Walthamstow/Leyton area (NE London) right now.
Earlier she said
But a little while ago she sent a video of a counterprotest and it was HUGE. So that is small ray of sunshine in all this gloom.
Other affected areas are likewise closed/boarded up; I don’t yet know how widespread the counterprotests are.
And the usual far-right suspects (Farage, Fox, Yaxley-Lennon, etc) are still spouting the same bigoted bullshit that caused this mess in the first place.
Thank you. The reporting over her in the U.S. ranges from these riots not being reported at all to the entirety of England being on fire.
Nothing happened tonight. We were told to go home early, but I didn’t. I went into Central London for a meeting. Traffic was light.
The Guardian has gone big on last night’s counter-rallies, but so have the papers of other political tendencies.
There was some rain on Tuesday, and the first few prison sentences will have had some effect, no doubt.
I’m not sure if it’s quite soon enough to point and laugh, but some of the troublemakers bring it on themselves:
Wondering who the brick magnet in that clip was.
So’s he, I should think.
“No, no, you twits, I said I’ll stand close to the line, aim the bricks over me, not at me!”
“Terribly sorry!”
Okay, the dude getting hit by two bricks is hilarious. The first brick- well, not funny, but the shot to the groin- comedy genius.
Cut spending? I don’t understand: I thought a major Labour argument was that government services such as the NHS were being starved of funding. I expected major spending increases in a lot of areas while other areas maintain funding as previously.