I was referring to this article on Open Democracy. I’m in no position to know how significant the young Pakistani vote was in Galloway’s constituency, as against any wider perceptions about his simply not being much in the constituency, but it’s an interesting light through which to look at this. (I live in Tower Hamlets, which is why this aspect interests me…!)
www.opendemocracy.net/parveen-akhtar/bradford-west-democracy-in-technicolour
Thanks for the link.
He barely voted in the House at all while he was my MP. He didn’t even vote on Crossrail, which runs right through Tower Hamlets. He was an MP who had no interest in performing the role of an MP.
It was also while he was MP that he went into the Big Brother house; he was paid by the government for being an MP at a time when he had chosen to not have any contact with the outside world. We paid him to pretend to be a cat.
And yup, clientalism. He filmed a voxpop outside my daughter’s school and only spoke to the Muslim parents. My daughter’s school had six different religions in one class but he wasn’t interested in the rest.
Well, at least he voted more than the Sinn Fein deputies who abstain on principle, and a couple of dead guys:
“Following the 2005 election, his participation rate remained low, and at the end of the year he had participated in only 15% of Divisions in the House of Commons since the general election, placing him 634th of 645 MPs. Of the eleven MPs below him in the rankings, one was the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, five were Sinn Féin members who have an abstentionist policy toward taking their seats, three were the speaker and deputy speakers and therefore ineligible to vote, and two had died since the election.”
I like his far-left worldview in general, but his conduct of this last campaign seems to have been pretty gross, so I won’t defend it. Especially this bit:
“ You have only a passing acquaintance with the truth. You claimed – and gullible journalists believed you – that you were subject to a forced marriage at the age of 15. But you were not 15, you were 16 and a half. I have your nikah [Muslim marriage certificate] in my pocket."
Ugh.
Steophan, one problem with privatising some parts of the NHS is that it fragments responsibility; it’s difficult for doctors and nurses to tell porters what they need to do when they are not the line manager of the porter in any way, have no hiring or firing rights (and neither does anyone else in the hospital), have no way of checking if the porter is trained properly, and have probably not even met the porter before the agency sends him into the hospital that day.
PFI was private too, but I wouldn’t say it’s succeeded. PFI hospitals cost more because the NHS has to pay for them and their maintenance but doesn’t own the buildings. Once the contracts are up, the NHS will end up paying more to the company that owns them because where else are they going to move to?
That makes him sound even worse! The only ones below him don’t vote by tradition and everyone who could vote for them knows that knows that (Sinn Fein and the Speaker and his deputies), busy being PM, or dead. Galloway spent a lot of his elected time in Bangladesh doing something or other or in Big Brother being a cat.
And yeah, that was pretty vile (and he was lying). He is a vile man who has done nothing but damage his cause.
That’s not an intrinsic problem with privatisation, it’s a problem with bad management, and no different to a public sector organisation with overly strong unions, where it’s impossible to discipline or fire people.
So there’s no intrinsic benefit in cost or quality to private management. Good to know.
It’s an intrinsic problem with having different parts of the same organisation be run by different companies.
One of my 48-hour ECGs was performed by a private company who took weeks to send the results to the hospital, who then had to spend extra time chasing it up. ECGs performed at the hospital are available to the doctor within minutes.
I also had to go to two different locations in different parts of London to pick the monitor up and then drop it back, rather than just going to the hospital; making things more difficult for the service user should also be taken into account.
The loss of economies of scale is another problem with selling parts of a company off piecemeal. When ambulances are run by private organisations (most in London now are) they don’t get the same economies of scale as the NHS when buying their essential equipment, so it costs more even without taking profit into account.
If you’re going to sell off parts of a company you should have a good reason for doing it, not just “well, it’d be bad anyway.” You should be able to show that selling it off leads to improvements. It’s difficult to do that with selling off parts of the NHS, especially when they tend to be the cheapest, easiest parts.
Heh. That’s a pretty elite crowd to be in!
George Galloway seems to have got over his election disappointment and is singing for Montenegro in the Eurovision Song Contest…