|
Post by aubrey on Sept 12, 2017 18:16:45 GMT
Oh, I didn't know it was that easy.
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 12, 2017 18:18:28 GMT
Parliament is sovereign. They can do what they like.
|
|
|
Post by aubrey on Sept 12, 2017 19:24:59 GMT
Why doesn't he do it, then?
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 12, 2017 21:23:09 GMT
He might well do once he's in power!
|
|
jean
Madrigal Member
Posts: 8,546
|
Post by jean on Sept 25, 2017 12:22:52 GMT
Latest from the Labour Party conference.
It’s not just students and households with credit cards who are being ripped off. The scandal of the Private Finance Initiative, launched by John Major, has resulted in huge, long-term costs for tax payers, whilst handing out enormous profits for some companies. Profits which are coming out of the budgets of our public services.
Over the next few decades, nearly two hundred billion is scheduled to be paid out of public sector budgets in PFI deals. In the NHS alone, £831m in pre-tax profits have been made over the past six years. As early as 2002 this conference regretted the use of PFI.
Jeremy Corbyn has made it clear that, under his leadership, never again will this waste of taxpayer money be used to subsidise the profits of shareholders, often based in offshore tax havens. The government could intervene immediately to ensure that companies in tax havens can’t own shares in PFI companies, and their profits aren’t hidden from HMRC.
We’ll put an end to this scandal and reduce the cost to the taxpayers. How? We have already pledged that there will be no new PFI deals signed by us. But we will go further. I can tell you today, it’s what you’ve been calling for.
We’ll bring existing PFI contracts back in-house.He somehow forgets the bit about how Labour picked up the Major government's big idea and ran with it just as fast as the Tories ever could.
|
|
jonjel
Madrigal Member
Posts: 3,931
|
Post by jonjel on Sept 25, 2017 13:29:57 GMT
I heard McDonnell at lunchtime. Not only will they bring back current PFI's into public ownership, they will electrify the railway all the way to Cornwall, bring water electricity and other utilities back into public ownership and re-nationalise the railways. I think he forgot the previous promise of a minimum wage of £10. How will he pay for it? Easy, he has asked Dianne Abbot to do the maths so it will be with the £350 million a day we will have under our control when we leave the EU.
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 25, 2017 14:18:36 GMT
I would point out - ONCE AGAIN - that in 1945 the country was shattered after the war, millions of servicemen were demobbed with no work for them, and the country owed 250% of its GDP.
The labour government responded by setting up the NHS, The welfare state, and nationalising vast swathes of industry, gas, water, electricity, railways etc. All vastly more expensive than what is now being proposed.
The result was not catastrophe, as people like you warned, but a sustained period of growth that put the country back on its feet and caused McMillan to tell us within fifteen years that "We'd never had it so good!"
Contrast that with the 'sensible' austerity policy carried out by the bluarses after their friends in the city had crashed the economy. Here we are nearly ten years later, depressed growth, frozen wages, low investmet, cuts everywhere.
Macroeconomics doesn't work on the Micawber principle. Running a country like you run a household budget is precisely the wrong thing to do.
|
|
jean
Madrigal Member
Posts: 8,546
|
Post by jean on Sept 25, 2017 15:04:05 GMT
May I remind you that this thread is about PFI and the idiocies of the last Labour govt. - nothing to do with Attlee.
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 25, 2017 15:16:14 GMT
May I remind you that this is about whether we can afford to nationalise the PFI contracts, and the point that lack of hard cash is not a problem as Atlee demonstrated.
|
|
jean
Madrigal Member
Posts: 8,546
|
Post by jean on Sept 25, 2017 15:30:45 GMT
The point is that Attlee never mortgaged the NHS or any other of his new public services to offshore hedge funds.
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 25, 2017 15:37:21 GMT
He would have if there had been no alternative.
|
|
jean
Madrigal Member
Posts: 8,546
|
Post by jean on Sept 25, 2017 15:56:06 GMT
Don't be ridiculous!
There was an 'alternative' available to the last Labour Government too; they just chose to follow a method of book-cooking invented by the Tories instead.
I find your stance on this quite strange. Isn't this sort of Tory-lite behaviour the very reason why you have no time for Blair and his cronies within the Labour Party?
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 25, 2017 21:29:14 GMT
I think what Blair/Brown did was to get these schools and hospitals built regardless. To do this they used a device invented by the tories - PFI, this making any criticism of it from them rather muted.
It also had the advantage that - being very profitable to the builders and operators, the tories would also be attacked by their financiers were they to scupper it.
Clever, if expensive. But what it boils down to is whether you give these new and much-needed facilities higher priority than balancing the books. You seem to prefer the latter. I think the former is more important. As the PFI arrangements can always be bought out by a labour government or lands a bluarses government with a big problem in paying their paymasters.
|
|
jean
Madrigal Member
Posts: 8,546
|
Post by jean on Sept 25, 2017 21:58:43 GMT
Expensive, but very, very stupid.
|
|
excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
|
Post by excoriator on Sept 25, 2017 22:08:33 GMT
No. It worked. We have a lot of decent schools and buildings that we would otherwise have been denied.
You can worry about the money if you like. I have no intention of doing so. Decent hospitals and schools are far more important.
|
|