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There is a news story today about Virgin Media’s lack of broadband provision in the countryside.  It just seems crazy that all providers do not share the same cabling – what could be more calculated to waste resources and slow provision.  At the same time BT is being subsidized by the government by being give exclusive contracts to provide broadband in large areas – giving it little incentive to do a good or speedy job while it pursues their apparent goal of being a TV football channel!

The recent revelations in the Guardian and on BBC’s Panorama about the help given to clients of its Swiss subsidiary to apparently avoid paying legally owed tax have again brought up discussion of banking behaviour.  These observations regularly expand into a discussion of the imbalance in the UK economy towards financial services and the apparent increasing concentration of wealth with the super-rich.

Since Margaret Thatcher decided, along with there being no such thing as society, that it was viable to have an economy without significant manufacturing but instead based entirely on ‘services’.  I suspect at the time most people, like me, struggled with how you could have services without having anyone around capable of consuming them and wondered what these services were going to be.  With the gradual dawning of awareness over the last 20 or so years of precisely what this did mean has come a realization that this is not the kind of business it is honourable to be engaged in, nor is it in the UK’s interests.

For UK bank customers ‘financial services’ appear to have consisted almost entirely of a series of wheezes designed to swindle customers out of their own money: PPI, ruinous investments, payday loans and even worse treatment for small business customers with policies like interest rate swaps apparently designed to ruin clients so the bank can asset strip them.  At the same time financial institutions ‘advise’ government at exorbitant consultancy rates while profiting themselves from deals such as the post office privatization. And then to add insult to injury these institutions help rich companies and individuals to avoid tax, often with the connivance of the government either directly in the form of hmrc sweetheart deals (Goldman Sachs) or indirectly by helping privatized services such as the water companies game whatever regulatory scheme they come under with complex financial arrangements that maximize the drain on the public purse.

And how has all this resulted in the oft claimed benefit to the UK?  These activities do not in anyway ‘generate wealth’ any more than they transfer money from one group to another, which in other contexts would be referred to as swindling.  As became clear in 2008 much of the success of these institutions ultimately relied on being able to privatize profit in the form of enormous salaries and bonuses while socializing losses in the form of an astronomical bailout – none of which was then collected from the perpetrators.  As has been noted, the moral hazard of being too big to fail meant that institutions could take on monumental risks with impunity.  If we’d had the courage to allow some of these institutions to go bust in 2008, while just bailing out the legitimate depositors, the investors would have lost their shirts and been reluctant to support such speculative activity again.  Instead George Osborne has fought tooth send nail on their behalf to prevent separating the investment activities into separate companies because then we really could let them go bust.

I created this blog to explore whether I can frame my thoughts accurately enough for wide consumption.

Today I was thinking about what would prevent me voting for various political parties,  For the Liberal Democrats it would be their support for fracking and TTIP.  For the Green Party it be their failure to include the issue of population and their silly plan to disband the army which just makes them unelectable. For the Conservatives it starts with the ridiculous neo-liberal dogma that technology will always come up with a solution to the destruction brought about by excessive greed.