Breaking the bullshit

http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2014/02/07/breaking-the-silence/

I have taken to shopping at Aldi rather more than Sainsbury's because you can get stuff that's just as good but it's cheaper. That's a sensible basis on which to choose a supermarket - but I wouldn't apply it to the planning and provision of public services.

The right-wing "Progress" faction within the Labour Party is pretty much funded by Sainsbury's - but they don't give little vouchers you can redeem on your next visit when you find they've said something stupid and you wish you'd listened instead to Compass or the LRC.

The link above shows the laughably poor quality of the politics (and "thinking") on which Lord Sainsbury is squandering the money extracted from his staff and customers.

In a thinly disguised defence of privatisation the author (whose name escapes me less than five minutes after I finished reading his drivel) promotes the idea of mutuals and cooperatives delivering public services.

Oh dear.

These post-Blair Blairites are a sorry shower.

At least their master knew how to make ideologically motivated reactionary nonsense look like "evidence-based" policy formulation (sometimes).

Progress appear to be ignorant of the fact that the most energetic approach to date to promote mutuals in the delivery of local government services has run into the sand.

‎They are reduced to promoting ideas of which the Adam Smith institute would be proud (that there should be "competition" to - for example - run local schools). Progress are a distorted mirror image of those ultra-leftists who will never permit experience and understanding to get in the way of what they "know" to be true.

If I were Lord Sainsbury, I'd find a better use for my money.

Public services cannot be improved by silly gimmicks, or "competition", or "new providers". What is required is the unglamorous reality of better management informed by hands-on experience and guided by the public service ethos (which the likes of Progress will never understand because it isn't driven by the profit motive).

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