Jock's Place - Labour - Comments

Parish Council Headington

nicholas fell — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:49:52 +0100

Hey Jock why don't we arrange to meet and talk shop about a Civil Parish Council for Headington.
Call me on 07517479233. We seem to want to achieve the same political objective.
Area Committees are a waste of space!!!.

It could be worse ...

David Gerard — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:33:26 +0100

... maybe. http://notnews.today.com/?p=36

Thanks for all that...

Jock — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:16:57 +0100

...if you don't mind I'll have a think about your comments - I've actually just got stuck into rebuilding a server onto which I need to move this blog before next weekend so my head is in Linux virtualization land!

My first *impression* though is that you are being unduly pessimistic about the ingenuity of innovations and overly protective of the need for the state to mandate things "by force of law" so to speak.

You are right that there is a tension between liberalism and democracy. Personally I don't like being ruled by the "tyranny of the 22%" if that's what we are calling democracy - I realise of course there are routes to reform to make that less of a problem, but whilst there seems no appetite to change a very broken system I'd rather see how much we can do outside that system.

I am a mutualist. Monopoly is anathema to me too. And what you seem to be describing is how monopolies are enabled and protected by the state mandating things.

But let me get back to you on the specific issues you raised with my two examples.

Than the former, even.

Miller 2.0 — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:04:38 +0100

Than the former, even.

My view, I suppose, is that

Miller 2.0 — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:03:51 +0100

My view, I suppose, is that liberalism often conflicts with democracy, and that I find the latter, despite its many failures, to be less flawed than the latter.

Corporatisation v privatisation

Miller 2.0 — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:02:35 +0100

Hi Jock, firstly, thanks for your comment at my place.

I would like to take you up on this admittedly rather unclipped argument:

"real privatisation, so called "liberalisation" of government functions, should mean the state divesting themselves completely from interference in that policy area. For example, just because DVLA contracts out its computer systems and administration does not mean the registration and licensing of vehicles and drivers has been "privatised". Not bothering with a DVLA at all and allowing insurance companies to work out ways of ensuring the drivers and vehicles they are prepared to insure comply with what they consider to be safe would be. i.e. a different way of working, free from government entirely, and open to proper competition where new ideas and ways of achieving similar ends can be developed. Finding new structures, free from the dead hand of government to do the things we need, rather than what politicians think we ought to need."

Firstly, I'd like to ask why private provision of services formerly provided by public institutions is not privatisation if it happens to be a monopoly? Surely the passing from public to private makes this a privatising process regardless of whether the outcome is monopolistic or not? Isn't privatisation about whether property and services are owned privately or not, rather than on the basis of whether or not they truly compete? In any event, this argument is largely a semantic one.

You make the point that the state should completely divest itself of responsibility for given policy areas, rather than just 'outsourcing' them. But at the end of the day, competing DVLA type providers would, competing or not, still have to provide a service which is both mandated and required by force of law. Competing or not, they still perform a politically necessary public function.

For me, the argument is not about whether privatisation or 'corporatisation' will provide a 'better' service, but which will provide a better service within the constraints of what people actually want from it. At this level, the debate, rather than being about ownership, is in fact about control, and is essential to the understanding of contemporary socialist argument. Do we, the public, and/or stakeholders involved, seek to control a measure democratically, or do we seek to do so as individual and isolated customers? Especially, given the nature of this function, when the safety of the public and civil society (rather than exclusively isolated individuals) is at stake, and when market mechanisms cannot necessarily provide wider social imperatives which may exist of be politically desirous, such as progressive pricing mechanisms for driving licenses?

Public or private, these remain important questions, because of the possible different outcomes. In my view, more often than not, market mechanisms put users of services into 'prisoners dilemma' type situations; take selection of schools by families, and selection of families by schools.

Your passport idea seems to me to be a good example of why this would have to fail. The state would only be able to recognise a given set of ideas that conform to publicly acceptable standards; some competing passports would immediately be eliminated from the game, and those which survive would have a strong incentive, and perhaps the revenue, to lobby government to further deregulate, removing public accountability from a process which only existed in the first place to provide a public benefit. Further, there would be collapses, which would disbenefit many ID holders, and where there were not collapses, there would be takeovers, allowing a monopoly to eventually build up.

In my view, the building of such monopolies must be the ends of the competitive process from a director's point of view.

The result, of course, is extortion, which could be circumvented by letting the state fulfil the function under the control of publicly raised political imperative.

One may as well privatise policing (which is in my view consistent with the logic of libertarianism, but capitalism in any sensible guise would not allow itself to become incapable of effective authoritarianism, despite its urge to deregulate and privatise things not totally necessary to guarantee its own continued survival).

Interesting...

Jock — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:41:15 +0100

...we'll have to just disagree on planning and area committees. As you can gather anyway I'd much rather reparish. We have one of the highest ratios of representation on average that most of the rest of the democratic world in Britain I believe.

Personally I'd prefer to go much further . But you raise an interesting point about parishes and inequalities. Just thinking about the current North East Area, if that happened to be a town council in its own right, it would probably justify a full 25 town councillors, and instead of with the current city wards which all seem to be made up, crudely in places, of a wealthy part and a less well off part, these would all get their own representatives, and I'll bet even in the North East Area the "not so well off" areas' representatives would be in the majority. At the moment the wards are big enough to be multiple neighbourhoods

With my experiences of two of Oxford's four parishes, I'd trust them much more to eke out their income more efficiently and be much more reactive to local needs and requests. Case in point; the city is large enough to need to set an annual timetable for grants applications and so on, the parishes react whenever an application comes in mainly. That time difference could be make or break for local initiatives.

Hi Jock, I haven't been

donpaskini — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:40:13 +0100

Hi Jock,

I haven't been following the developments in Oxford about this, but area committees are a terrible idea which haven't worked anywhere in the country and if they are being scrapped in Oxford then that seems entirely sensible. I'd have thought that with your politics you wouldn't have supported a system imposed top down from central government and based on dividing up an area solely according to administrative boundaries rather than actual communities.

As for planning, people in other authorities thought I was making it up when I said that we did development control at area committees, there were so many obvious problems with this approach that a change is long overdue. Because planning decisions are, rightly or wrongly, quasi-judicial, they should never have been part of the same meetings as those intended to encourage community involvement at a local level.

The question about new ways of devolving decision-making is how they avoid reinforcing already existing inequalities. Having more local committee meetings with more power, for example, gives greater power to people who are able and willing to turn up to meetings. Just because something is more local doesn't automatically mean that all different voices in the community are going to be heard, sometimes quite the opposite. I'd like to hear more about how re-parishing Oxford would deal with this problem.

LPUK

Richard Allan — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:14:43 +0100

"Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change?"

Yes. The others will never listen to you until you show them you're ready to "throw your vote away" in order to hurt them!

Good stuff

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:25:11 +0100

I've sent a letter to my MP, Doug Naysmith, but as yet no reply. Doubt it'll make much difference but like you say..can't say he wasn't lobbied.

Patronising sod! In the

Jock — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:28:48 +0100

Patronising sod!

In the real world one expects one's opponents to play the ball not the man. I've seen innumerable complaints to police about election literature far less distorted than they put out against me. If there was the remotest chance that they won by unfair tactics then I should have that tested, which it now has been and ruled "fair play" (though it still breaches my copyright, which I see has become an issue again in Crewe). Such tactics only serve to prevent honest and open debate amongst opinion formers,

I don't particularly care actually. As a libertarian I'm much more enthused by the idea of delivering social and public goods without the dead hand of government at any level.

Greet, greet, greet. What a

Anonymous — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:12:35 +0100

Greet, greet, greet. What a poor loser. If you think the words did you harm you shouldn't have used them. Welcome to the real world.

If I was in your ward, you

Citizen Stuart — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:22:24 +0100

If I was in your ward, you wouldn't have needed to knock on my door - that Labour leaflet would have persuaded me to vote for you! Give it another go next time, either as a Lib Dem or a member of the Libertarian Party. We need more real liberals in political office.

tow = toe. I'm ill today so

Philip Thomas — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:17:13 +0100

tow = toe. I'm ill today so that's my excuse. Betty has none.

A sorry affair

Philip Thomas — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:14:27 +0100

God, I hate the leaflet that was put out against you. Hopefully, some people read it and realised how much sense you were talking. I worried a bit about the same thing during my campaign. It is something any politician that doesn't tow the route of conventional ignorance risks.