Second, will he now realise that supply side reform simply does not work? It has not with the banks.
Supply side reform doesn\’t work? You mean privatising BT didn\’t, allowing telecoms competition didn\’t, allowing airline competition didn\’t? All these are supply side changes. Allowing a private company to run an NHS hospital did not uncover a £1.6 million overspend on stationery? Allowing competition within NHS England did not drive up outcomes while lowering costs in a way that no competition NHS Wales and Scotland did not gain from?
Seriously, supply side does not work? Doesn\’t he realise that all this bleating he does about training unemployed workers is a supply side reform? That, erm, having a state owned investment bank would be a supply side reform?
Third, will he now admit the state can and must pick winners? The Olympics is clear evidence of that.
Crippled Jesu C on a pogo stick. £20 billion on sports day for druggies is an example of government picking winners? The Lord save us all.
Of course money floods to the UK – but that is because our domicile rule makes the UK a perfect tax haven. But these people who come do not add value
Foreigners investing money in the UK does not add value. Discuss.
This will be difficult:
Richard Murphy, a tax campaigner, said: “The single biggest problem our government faces is not having enough tax revenue to fund essential spending.
“One obvious solution is to change the rules on government procurement. As a minimum, anyone offered a government contract must be able to show they’ll pay tax on it in full in the UK and to make sure they do not use tax havens.”
For as Ritchie tells us today:
I and the Tax Justice Network have long argued there is an economy within an economy n the UK – which is that of tax haven UK.
If the UK is a tax haven and you cannot use tax havens then how can you pay tax in the UK?
Y’know, there was a temptation to tie together the Obama beer, the meat consumption & the R&D posts & make a comment about folk writing on subjects they seem to know bugger all about. Then along comes the master to make the whole idea superfluous.
The Olympics would only have been worth it if Jess Ennis had personally called round and blown me.
“Third, will he now admit the state can and must pick winners? The Olympics is clear evidence of that.”
The state picked the winners? I assumed the winners picked themselves by … errr … winning, and possibly at some point the state joined in by subsidising training, offering allowances, or some such thing.
‘I and the Tax Justice Network ….’
Tells you everything you need to know. Illiterate egomanic.
He getting close to jumping the shark!
“can and must pick winners?”
How many of the state-funded athletes at the Olympics didn’t win?
One aspect of Ritchie’s output that has always struck me most of all is that he seems:
A/ Utterly ignorant of history, most specifically that of the UK between 1945 and 1979
B/ either is ignorant of or wilfully ignores the economic data of or Political history of the USSR/ COMECON bloc
The whole idea of ‘picking winners’ would be anathema to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the 1970s. I can only assume his reading of the decade comes from listening to Polly Toynbee, who regularly praises it as a decade where ‘equality’ (in the North Korean sense of the term) came ‘closer than ever’
The terrifying thing for anyone unable to get out of the UK by 2015 is that he will be running the UK economy after Miliballs’ 2015 victory….
Tanganyika groundnut scheme.
No of course it didn’t. The claim may have appeared in Tim’s favourite newspaper, but that doesn’t make it any less absurd.
In fact, £1.6 is the total sum for all procurement savings identified at Hinchingbrooke Hospital.
PaulB> Love the way your ‘in fact’ links to someone saying ‘I don’t know anything about this, but it seems implausible to me.’
Dave, PaulB’s link was to PaulB saying that, which is even better.
I realise that reading is an exhausting business, but if you struggle on to the second paragraph, you’ll find that £1.6m is the total for all the procurement savings Circle say they’ve identified.
I posed a question to the font of all knowledge earlier today on one of his wealth tax posts. According to the government the 1% account for 25% of the income tax revenue. If as he tells us constantly, the 1% are mobile and can move their assests around, what happens if we impose a wealth tax on the 1% to the tax take if they then decide to live elswhere? In turn what happens then to state services – NHS, education etc and the state handouts that the Left love so much? He’s not posted the comment or responded to it.
Well its not clear from the Circle press release whether they have already saved £1.1m, and there’s another £1.6m identified for the future, or its £1.6m in total of which they have got £1.1m so far.
Either way it mean that they have identified budget savings of somewhere between 1.5% and 2.5% from procurement alone, which the previous management failed entirely to do despite being in charge for decades. And presumably there is scope for further savings elsewhere in the budget too.
I still fail to see how this is a bad thing, even if it has been misreported as a saving purely on stationery.
PaulB is doubtless correct, as far his analysis goes, but:
Firstly, £1.6m *per annum*
Secondly Hitchingbrooke’s overspend was around £5m per annum [It was recognised in 2006 that Hitchingbrooke had run up unsustainable debts so presumably this had been going on since 2004, *at least*.] The £1.6m is *not* the total that Circle must save every year – in fact if it is to pay back the debt over 10 years it needs to save £9million per annum (to swing from a £5m deficit to a £4m surplus).
So Tim may be using a misquotation, but his example of Circle sorting out the financial mess at Hitchingbrooke is a valid one.
As a minimum, anyone offered a government contract must be able to show they’ll pay tax on it in full in the UK and to make sure they do not use tax havens.”
Restrictive conditions on tenderers? Aye, that’ll bring down the cost of government spending.
[…] I know Worstall got to the UK point first. […]
[…] curse him, Worstall got to this first too. But Ritchie's point is dafter even than Tim makes out. Because if governments really could […]
always takes “procurement savings” claims with a shovel of salt – they tend to be the incoming CEO’s claim about how disastrous the previous admin was. What actually counts is the published p&l, rather than vacuous comments about what the buyers -invariably the most corupt and useless employees – have achieved.