Administrative justice: Gordon Brown misbehaved in the same general way as Jeremy Hunt

A very large research laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute,  is being built on land behind the British Library in Kings Cross, London -  http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/objection-to-ukcmri-planning-application-for-a-research-centre-in-brill-place-london-nw1/. The land on which it being built was publicly owned. It was sold by ostensibly  public tender  by the Department of  Culture, Median and Sport (DCMS) in 2007 to  a consortium the [...]

What should be public and what should be private?

Robert Henderson Since 1979 every British government has perpetually tinkered with the balance  between private or state provision. Despite the Thatcherite cry for small government the state has has spent  a very large slice of GDP t throughout that time, In 1979 the percentage was 42.75% and in 2010 45.45% The lowest in the period was 34.25%  in 1989 (http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_20th_century_chart.html).  However, [...]

Housing and the Coalition’s dirty secret

Robert Henderson There is a dirty secret which none of the mainstream parties is willing to publicly reveal: those who are owner-occupiers with mortgages are being heavily subsidised at the expense of those who live in private rented accommodation. This is being done by  the supposedly independent Monetary Policy Committee (MPC)  of the Bank of [...]

The Great Charity Scam

Most people when faced with the word charity attached to an institution are inclined to be well disposed to the organisation regardless of what the charity is supposed to do.  If it is a popular area of work, such as medical research or the provision of services to disabled children, rationality goes out of the [...]

Why public service broadcasting (PSB) matters

We all know what comes from rampant and unrestrained commercial activity: a worship of Mammon to the exclusion of everything except the feeding of company directors’ and financiers egos and greed. In broadcasting, unrestrained commerce equals a low grade, populist cultural diet heavily polluted with advertising. Many supporters of PSB think that is a case [...]

How corruption entered public service

In modern times the British Civil Service has been remarkably free from corruption (local government is a different matter), a fact made all the more surprising because of the truly colossal amount of money it disposes of each year – government spending for the financial year 2011/12 will be around £700 billion. There are two [...]

Selling Britain by the pound: the immorality of privatisation

Does a British government have the moral and legal right to sell off industries and property owned by the state? In Britain the answer m is that it can legally do so. Barring restrictions agreed to in treaties, most particularly the Treaty of Rome and its successor treaties, a British government may legally do what [...]

How should we decide what public servants are paid?

Over the past twenty years a new problem has grown around  public service pay at both national and regional level. The introduction of so-called business-methods into public service has resulted in the employment of people who are not career public servants in senior public service jobs.  These people have been commonly employed on fixed term contracts [...]

Public service and private enterprise : what do we mean by efficiency?

 Private business ultimately judges that by profit. But is profit a good indicator of efficiency generally? More particularly, does it have any place in public service? Many a company does well for a period because it strikes lucky with a product and then plummets when the good luck runs out. Or a company may have [...]

Public ownership = public confidence

There is a further consideration with public services – safety. It may be that the public will have greater confidence in, for example, a state run railway simply because it is state run. The public’s confidence might be completely unfounded but that would not matter: the confidence itself is a valuable thing. The experience of all [...]