thoughts

In the 21st century, are joint stock companies the best form of corporate governance. There’s a lot of justice in arguing for either worker or consumer co-ops. The arguments for consumer co-ops being the dominate form of governance in financial services seem overwhelming to me. Thatcher of course created laws where the previous generation of mutual’s de-mutualised; they have since been bought by banks and in several cases caused them fatal damage. …

Nationalisation without compensation, remember the eighties.  It’s a bit trickier now since Thatcher privatised the pension funds; we don’t know who owns these companies now. …

The Tories have resurrected the phrase the magic money tree which has been commented on by me, and Edward Snowden. But for the thick, Damien Green, that’s you that is, here’s how the financial markets work and how Labour will pay for those nationalisations that require compensation.

They borrow a wodge of money at the current rate about 1% for say 25 years, and buy some companies currently returning 5% (or more) ROI.

When I was doing sums at school, 4% is higher than 1%. Perhaps we should buy some more stuff because it’s such a good deal. …

The Independent and the Canary both report that not only will Labour abolish Higher Education tuition fees, and reintroduce grants but will also consider how to give some form of relief on the current debt already held by students. This is about £76 bn, which is quite a bit, but if you consider it an investment in the nation’s human capital, it’s something that is worth borrowing for and can be paid through the capital borrowing account. …

There is a magic money tree, or at least shrubs ….

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The Register has published it’s take on the polls and the election. It’s probably a balanced view, quoting Nate Silver as needing to be suspicious of outliers e.g. YouGov.  They do take a guess, ranging from a hung parliament, to a 50 vote majority. They also point at Electoral Calculus’s prediction tool, which is not as pretty as the old BBC one but fun. …

I watched the debate last night. I think Rudd was brave but it was always going to be a tough sell and Craig Murray can’t have helped her by writing his own pen picture of her, detailing her wealth, her attempts to hide it and contempt for the poor, a point exposed by Jeremy Corbyn’s question about if she’d visited a food bank. In my opinion, it did the Tories no good, and Angus Robertson (SNP) & Caroline Lucas (Green) came out of it well. Jeremy held his own. …

I wrote this, provoked in a good way by an article by Sacha Ismail in Worker’s Liberty about the Police, Intelligence Services and accountability. It’s a bit of a segue, but I hope relevant.

Criticisms by the Police, their Union, and recently retired serving officers is based on the fact that the cuts in police numbers have turned them from a proactive force into reactive and they no longer know who to talk to and they don’t know their community and their communities don’t know them. Intelligence is drying up.

I agree with your comments on accountability and the introduction of one man management in the establishment of the Police and Crime Commissioners is another step to minimising any democratic control over the police. We note that the City of London Police, now inheriting national responsibilities and the National Crime Agency do not have elected Commissioners and that large elements of the Met. Police control is shared between the Mayor and Home Secretary. The successor organisation to Special Branch still sits in the Met.

The intelligence services need better democratic supervision; I suspect that the demands for this to grow as we discover more about how the Manchester attack was organised. Recent legislative developments such as the passing of the Investigatory Powers Act, the legalisation of mass surveillance and the powers to decrypt secure communications are all related to the issues you raise. It’s about control, not security. Mass surveillance does not make us safer.

We should remember MI5’s profoundly anti-democratic history, organising against Wilson’s Labour Government, the NCCL (Liberty’s predecessor), the Unions, the Labour Party and more recently the Greens. Technically the definition of economic security as grounds for intelligence agency action be removed but the agencies’ traditional contempt for legal restraint would make little difference. The new laws and the new technology make GCHQ spies on us, not our national security enemies and of course they were compulsorily de-unionised in the ‘80s, so the collective brake on illegal behaviour was removed.

I agree, it’s not just about numbers, it is about governance and accountability. Also Digital Liberty issues matter. A surveillance society is not a safer society.

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I was wondering how much of the Army had been deployed on the streets during the period  of the state of critical threat. The papers said 5,000 on the street, this site states that there are 92,000 regular soldiers (including 2700) Gurkas, that’s over 5%. …