I’m going to break my promise not to comment on political threads on here by starting one instead.

These are two massive stories – hopefully they are going to continue to be high up the news agenda even with the ghastly prospect of red-faced **** getting all patriotic over an irrelevant wedding.

Firstly Carillion have been utterly rinsed today. Arrogant, crooked directors trousering totally unwarranted bonuses and salaries, shareholders demanding unsustainable dividend growth and both at the expense of honest businesses and the pension scheme. All rubber stamped by government. All of the big four auditing firms exposed as in the pocket of the firms that they are supposed to hold to account. A clearer example of an inbuilt conflict of interest you will not find. But the directors in particular won’t care. They’ve got the money in their offshore accounts and tied up in property no doubt. No way the public will get any of that back, so what to do? Unless a few go to jail they won’t care. Turn up at the inquiry. Bluff it out, get a bit embarrassed, but that’s an easy pill to swallow and you can always get over it back at the grand old pile in the country with the swimming pool. Someone needs to do some porridge, pour decourager les autres if nothing else.

Now LNER is to be resurrected as it turns out that private enterprise with an overriding self interest cannot run public services for the benefit of those who actually use them.

With any luck this is the beginning of the end for this utterly short termist and broken model. Fat cats rinsing the public purse with impunity. Figure this, of the 50 biggest individual political donors, only one doesn’t donate to the Tories. What does that tell you about how this country works?

Now, the outsourcing of public services to crooks is not just a Tory policy, but at least now Labour are starting to talk the right language when it comes to this type of thing.

I would bet a few quid that after the weekend’s festivities (ha!) there will be another reheating of the Labour antisemitism story, propagated by….yep, you guessed it……the Daily Mail.

Join the dots. Tories out.

I doubt a telling off will mean much to the directors.

Just exposes how toothless parliament is in comparison to businesspeople

Just exposes how toothless parliament is in comparison to businesspeople

I think it is actually more that they are in each others’ pockets.

Ahh the fabulous PFI farce, both labour and the conservatives are both as complicit in that fiasco so hope to see some heads on the block from both sides (unlikely, more likely extra publicity for huge U Turns and support from the very people who instigated the contracts)

Now all that need to happen is Southern Trains, they should be next.

Bent bastards, the effing lot of them.

Bent, lying unscrupulous bastards.

Shows the systems works doesn’t it, incompetent greedy businesses collapse. Same can’t be said for publically run services where politics gets in the way of delivering a service, incompetence and greed still abound but it gets glossed over as the tax payer sees ever increasing amounts of money disappear with an increasingly neglected infrastructure with no ultimate reckoning, like when the railways and utilities were run into the ground by the state,

Yep, can’t disagree with any of that. There have always been greedy and rogue directors and I can’t see that changing.

What must change is the ‘big four’ set-up who have, effectively, legitimised the actions and behaviours of carillion directors – to quote just one example.

Big four directors should be investigated by professional standards and regulatory bodies for incompetence and not reporting fraudulent – or potentially fraudulent – activities.

Politicians and governments will change in line with the will of the people.

Our local council works team lost the contract for grass cutting because it was required to make a profit of a set % on contracted jobs.

So they lost a contract to themselves because they have to make a profit for the tax payer from the tax payer.

Shows the systems works doesn’t it, incompetent greedy businesses collapse. Same can’t be said for publically run services where politics gets in the way of delivering a service, incompetence and greed still abound but it gets glossed over as the tax payer sees ever increasing amounts of money disappear with an increasingly neglected infrastructure with no ultimate reckoning, like when the railways and utilities were run into the ground by the state,

I think it shows the exact opposite which is that some things simply shouldn’t be left to the market.

Three strikes and you’re very much out.

As for utilities being run into the ground – yeah when they’re being lined up for public sell off.

A few heads on pikes might help concentrate minds.

Rone, utter rubbish, failing public run services dont get found out, they dont go bust, they just get more subsidies and reorganisation.

As for being lined up for sell off, that started in the 60s and 70s did it? When unions ran them at the expense of the service users and benefit of their members, just a different side of the greed coin. The lack of investment in infrastructure is an on going public problem, look at our road infrastructure today. The improvements in the water industry and the railways was delivered by private money forced to do it through legislation. No government is going to pass legislation to force themselves to invest.

I’m no fan of Carrillion board members or any other greedy valueless top management but there are even fewer real checks and balances in the public sector.

Rone, utter rubbish, failing public run services dont get found out, they dont go bust, they just get more subsidies and reorganisation.

It’s quite the opposite – failing private companies are put back into the public sector to make them work properly again. That’s exactly what happened to the banks and is what is a happening now to the railway service.

Public services are accountable to the public by virtue of democracy . You can’t say that about your Carillion buddies.

 The lack of investment in infrastructure is an on going public problem, look at our road infrastructure today

Yep and which private companies are going to facilitate that? You are supporting my point of view that neo-liberal parties are not and have not invested enough into the infrastructure.

You are first hand witness to the economics of austerity and you think more private ownership is the solution?

being the devils advocate you could always say the whole bidding process for the rail networks is flawed

in the fact that those in charge allowed companies to massively overbid to win the franchise and then cannot afford to run it and make license payments. the due dilligence process was lacking on both sides.

i think the virgin east coast had been doing ok recently, i get the train once or twice a month, and fairly happy with the service

We live in a corporatist state, stuffed with private monopolies and cartels, where our politicians are in the pockets of the boardrooms.

They operate a revolving door policy of giving those very same politicians ludicrously paid jobs once they’ve finished playing politics.

I’d love To just blame the Tories, but check out what Blair and his buddies have been doing since being voted out. Same shit, different colour. All with their snouts in the trough

Hence there being no will whatsoever to do anything about it

What also needs addressing is the names that keep coming up over and over again….

Delloitte, KPMG, Ernst and Young and PWC

Take a look at every corporate collapse and look who signed off all their accounts

they’re either utterly incompetent, or being paid megabucks to be absolutely complicit in what is essentially corporate fraud on an industrial scale

I wonder which?

But, like the banking crisis, it’s only the ‘little people’ who lose their jobs/businesses/houses/pensions, so who cares?

Certainly not our politicians

Their mates just trouser their obscene, totally unjustified pay and bonuses,, shrug, then stick two fingers up to the taxpayer who is, once again, picking up the tab for their apparently limitless greed

Complicit all the way. And yet our choices for meaningful change to and of the system are very much limited.

Complicity also extends to include law enforcement and media. A cute little ménage a quatre.

I’d love To just blame the Tories, but check out what Blair and his buddies have been doing since being voted out.

But doesn’t this strengthen the case for new old Labour’s idealogy?

Random having one thread on two unrelated topics, but anyway…

VTEC are the 3rd (out of 3) franchisees to hand back the ECML franchise after failing to make it work. All of them have grossly overestimated passenger numbers and thus over paid the government in the bidding.

East Coast Trains did very well, but obviously it didn’t pay itself subsidies, so comparisons to the private franchisees are moot, and revenues are likely less than the subsidies that were being paid (hence the failure).

I’ve just read in the Guardian that KPMG were paid £72 million in fees to sign off Carillions, what the parliamentary committee refered to as ‘increasingly Fantastical’ accounts

Carillion is scandalous. The amount of people directly and indirectly left in the shit is an outrage. They should jail the whole of the board and upper management.

ECML/VTEC/LNER is neither here nor there. The same passengers will ride the same trains on the same route driven by the same drivers. Menus will change and we might get some more snazzy seats before the last lot have worn out (but they’ll still have the bogs that drop turds all over the tracks). Sure it’s an indictment of poor bid management but the service itself has been good. Gov owners may go up or down a few points in the passenger surveys and at the first sign of profit (like it was when VTEC took over) it will be dangled back in the faces of the usual suspects.

The Carillion farce is an indictment on greed and poor management, actually PFI has protected the taxpayer from a he effects as the costs will fall to the co-parties.

the greed and complicity of the directors is shameful they have stolen from their employees, shareholders, suppliers and from anyone working in the sectors that they operated in.

they have driven down employment terms and conditions across the sectors they operated in, which will not recover even if the gluttons get banned from holding directorships.

Amongst other measures it’s time government funded projects or services are restricted to companies that do not run pension deficits at the expense of employees, the public or falsely promise dividends to justify paying themselves high salaries or bonuses!

Well with Brexit approaching we can rest safe in the knowledge that everything will be so much better once we’ve had ‘a bonfire of red tape’ because what’s clear is that the UK’s boardrooms are presently over-regulated

The whole outsourcing to private companies thing is a scam.

My wife works in the NHS. When she asked about getting a coat hook put up in their office space in a provincial hospital she was told it would have to be done by Serco at a callout charge in excess of £150. When she then said that she would just take our drill from home into work with some screws and rawl plugs she was told that she couldn’t because her job is to treat patients. When she said she would do it in her own time, out of hours, they said that it could result in damage to the building etc and that she could be liable as a result. They all still put their coats on a spare chair.

It’s a kleptocracy.

Public sector services being outsourced to the private sector costs taxpayers for director salaries and divis, but the public sector running itself costs taxpayers more in complete inefficiency and incompetence.

Choose your poison.

Which poison? The first, followed by the second …. after the bailout.

Now, who wants to add provision of social and affordable housing into this thread…

Stumpyon wrote,

Shows the systems works doesn’t it, incompetent greedy businesses collapse.

If the purpose of the system was to sort good companies from bad, sure. But the point of the system is to run trains.

Robowns wrote,

the public sector running itself costs taxpayers more in complete inefficiency and incompetence.

Except it didn’t, did it? East Coast in public sector hands was a great success and returned money to the taxpayer. That’s part of the reason it got rushed back into the private sector.

Some of the discussion around this is demented- frinstance I see Sky criticising “lack of investment” under DOT. Yep, because it received a reduced network grant- East Coast under Virgin/Stagecoach received 3 times the government investment than it did under DOT. But that mysteriously doesn’t get taken into account when they talk about “money returned to the government.”

And over and over people talk about the last days of run down british rail as if that’s the only logical example of a nationalised railway, rather than literally the same rail line, 3 years ago.