PFI is bankrupting Britain's public services

The plight of my local hospital trust in Walthamstow shows just how debt is holding our country back. Could this be the time for a windfall tax?


Stella Creasey in The Guardian

Next time you have an appointment cancelled at hospital, or a headteacher tells you their school will be losing staff because of budget cuts, ask how much PFI debt they have – the answer may surprise you. My hospital trust, in north-east London, spends nearly £150m a year repaying its PFI debt – nearly half of which is on interest payments. If Theresa May is serious about taking on the unacceptable face of capitalism, she could save Britain a fortune if she goes after the legal loan sharks of the public sector.

New research from the Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) shows just how much these debts are hurting our NHS. Over the next five years, almost £1bn of taxpayer funds will go to PFI companies in the form of pre-tax profits. That’s 22% of the extra £4.5bn given to the Department of Health in the 2015 spending review, and money that would otherwise have been available for patient care.

The company that holds the contract for University College London hospital has made pre-tax profits of £190m over the past decade, out of the £725m the NHS has paid out. This alone could have built a whole new hospital as 80% of PFI hospitals cost less than this to construct. This is not just about poor financial control in the NHS – UK PFI debt now stands at over £300bn for projects with an original capital cost of £55bn.


It’s time to grasp the nettle and get Britain a better line of credit

Private finance initiatives are like hire-purchase agreements – superficially a cheap way to buy something, but the costs quickly add up, and before you know it the debt is crippling.

For decades, governments of both main parties have used them for the simple but ultimately short-sighted view that it keeps borrowing off the books – helping reduce the amount of debt the country appears to have, but at great longer-term expense. Its now painfully clear that the intended benefits of private sector skills to help manage projects have been subsumed in the one-sided nature of these contracts, to devastating effect on budgets.

No political party can claim the moral high ground. The Tories conveniently ignore the fact that these contracts started under the John Major government – and are expanding again under Theresa May, with the PF2 scheme. Labour veers between defensive rhetoric that PFI was the best way to fund the investment our public sector so desperately needed during its last government, and angrily demanding such contracts be cancelled outright, wilfully ignoring what damage this would do to any government’s ability to ever borrow again.

It’s time to grasp the nettle and get Britain a better line of credit. That requires both tough action on the existing contracts to protect taxpayers’ interests, and getting a better deal on future borrowing. Some have already bought out contracts – Northumbria council took out a loan to buy out Hexham hospital’s PFI, and in doing so saved £3.5m every year over the remaining 19-year term. But as the National Audit Office has shown, gains from renegotiating individual contracts are likely to be minimal – what is saved in costs is paid out in fees to arrange.

However, the CHPI research also shows up another interesting facet of PFI. Just eight companies own or appear to have equity stakes in 92% of all the PFI companies in the NHS. Renegotiating not the individual deals done for hospitals or schools, but across the portfolios of the companies themselves could realise substantial gains. Innisfree, which manages my local hospital’s PFI and others across the country and has just 25 staff, stands to make £18bn alone over the coming years. If these companies are resistant to consolidating these loans into a more realistic cost, then it’s time to look again at their tax reliefs, or – given the evidence of excessive profits in this industry that shareholders have received – resurrect one of New Labour’s early hits with a windfall tax on the returns made.

Longer term, we need to ensure there is much more competition for the business of the state. Despite interest rates being low for over a decade, these loans have stayed stubbornly expensive. The lack of viable alternatives – whether public borrowing or bonds – gives these companies a captive market. If the government wants better rates, it needs to ensure there are more options to choose between, whether by allowing local authorities to issue bonds, or reforming Treasury rules that penalise public sector borrowing in the first place.

As our public services struggle under the pressure of PFI, Labour must lead this debate to show how we can not only learn from our past, but also provide answers for the future too. The government has already spent £100bn buying the debt of banks through quantitative easing. With Brexit expected not only to add £60bn to our country’s debt but also affect our access to European central bank funds, taking on our expensive creditors is a battle no prime minister can ignore in the fight to stop Britain going bust.

Spin Bowlers - Going through life as an individual

Suresh Menon in The Hindu


Spin bowlers tend to be like French verbs — they follow rules peculiar to their type, and the exceptions to the rule are fascinating. Often exceptions have rules too. Shane Warne didn’t need to bowl an off-break; Graeme Swann didn’t bowl the leg-break, not even the fashionable doosra. Yet cricket’s great mystery bowlers have been the spinners, not the fast men who might threaten life and limb, but seldom leave the batsman feeling foolish.

It would have been nice to get into the heads of India’s leading batsmen Virat Kohli and K.L. Rahul after they were beaten and bowled in one magical over by Sri Lanka’s latest mystery spinner, Mahamarakkala Kurukulasooriya Patabendige Akila Dananjaya Perera.

It wasn’t the classical duel where the bowler teases and tantalises, torments and mocks over a period before the kill. There isn’t time for that in a limited overs game. Here, speed of execution is of the essence, and both batsmen were fooled by an apparently innocuous delivery. There was something gentle about it all. A slight drift, a final dip, and batsmen with a reputation for dominating spin bowling were done in, playing the wrong line.

Perhaps ‘mystery’ applies to spin bowlers in general. The flighted delivery bowled above the eye line works against the steady head and tricks the batsman into believing the ball will pitch closer to him than it actually does. Then there is the problem of figuring out which way it will turn.

To those watching from the outside it is a cause for wonder that a slow delivery, sometimes spinning, often not, hits the stumps ignoring the bat and pads. It is one of the most satisfying sights in cricket, to watch a Goliath, complete with protective gear fall prey to a bowler whose greatest deception sometimes is that there is no deception at all.

Dananjaya is an off-break bowler who also bowls leg-breaks, doosras and the carom ball. He will be studied with great care by batsmen who will work out where his shoulder and feet and hands are at the time of delivery.

In modern cricket, mystery spinners need to be able to beat both the batsmen and the coaches armed with their computers. The most artistic of deliveries can be reduced to their mathematical specifics. Before the advent of technology, the average spinner sometimes needed to develop ‘mystery’ deliveries to be successful. Now the ‘mystery’ spinner needs to get back to the roots of his craft, focusing on the traditional.

It is a lesson the phenomenally successful Test off-spinner R. Ashwin has to absorb if he hopes to be a permanent fixture in the one-day side.

‘Mystery’ spinners through history, from Jack Iverson to Johnny Gleeson to Ajantha Mendis have tended to have early success, and then faded out. Once the opposition worked them out, they lacked the control over their basic craft to take wickets.

Iverson’s bowling action was characterised as that of a man flicking out a burnt cigarette. That might have been the original carom ball, except that using his long middle finger and thumb he could turn the ball from off to leg. Some batsmen began to play him as an off spinner although he took wickets with his leg break and top spinner. He was sorted out in the inter-state matches in Australia by Arthur Morris and Keith Miller — in the days when players had to think for themselves, who recognised the top spinner as the one tossed up higher and went hard at the bowler.

Gleeson, who also had a long middle finger and could bowl the Iverson delivery in the 1960s, strengthened his fingers by milking cows. Despite their short stints, the game has been the richer for their presence.

Increasingly, cookie-cutter coaching tends to convert the unorthodox spinner into something more comprehensible. As David Frith says, “Every young spinner turned into a colourless medium-pacer constitutes a crime against a beautiful game.”

The one country where the unorthodox is not just accepted but actively encouraged is Sri Lanka. Think Muttiah Muralitharan, or Lasith Malinga or Mendis, bowlers who were allowed to remain themselves with no coach attempting to iron out so-called deficiencies.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but spinners with too many variations tend not to be as successful as those with a few, of which they are the masters. It is the fox versus the hedgehog theory all over again. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Sometimes in cricket, it is smarter to be the hedgehog.

“There seemed to be an absence of orthodoxy about them, and they were able to meander through life as individuals, not civil servants.” That is a line from the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey. He was speaking about spinners in general. It applies equally to Dananjaya and his special kind.

'I am drowning and you are describing the water' - A critique of India's liberals

Javed Naqvi in The Dawn

“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.

Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?

There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.

Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.


Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.

Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.

Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.

Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.

Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.

One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.

Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.

In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.

Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.

A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.

Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.

We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.

Labour's new clarity on Brexit

The Independent


After months of confusion, contradictory statements and embarrassing media interviews, Labour has finally brought some clarity to its opaque policy on Brexit.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Shadow Brexit Secretary, has announced that the Opposition wants the UK to remain in the single market and customs union during a transitional phase after it leaves the EU in March 2019. During that period, Labour would accept the rules of both arrangements, including free movement – a departure from the party’s manifesto at the June election, which said “freedom of movement will end when we leave the EU”.

Significantly, Starmer does not rule out permanent membership of the single market and customs union after the transitional phase, if the EU agreed reforms on issues such as migration.

Labour’s move is overdue but welcome. Remaining in the EU’s main institutions for the transition is common sense. Such an “off the shelf” arrangement would provide the certainty and stability that business desperately needs, probably reducing the loss of investment and jobs. Despite that, Theresa May seeks a more complicated “bespoke” transitional deal, and insists the UK must leave the single market and customs union in 2019. The time and energy wasted on securing such an agreement would be much better spent on forging a long-term UK-EU partnership.

Although the Chancellor Philip Hammond would probably support an “off the shelf” transitional deal, Ms May seems worried that hardline Brexiteers would then accuse her of not implementing last year’s referendum decision. The Prime Minister should start to do what is right for her country rather than her party.

If she does not, it will fall to Parliament to ensure a sensible transition in line with Labour’s new approach. House of Commons arithmetic means that several of the 20 pro-European Conservatives would need to vote with opposition parties to secure single market and customs union membership for the transition. When MPs return to Westminster next month, these Tories will come under enormous pressure not to hand Jeremy Corbyn a landmark victory. But they should act in the national interest, even if Ms May does not.

Mr Corbyn, a long-standing Eurosceptic, should be applauded for his pragmatism. Although many working-class people in the North and Midlands voted Leave last year, voters did not endorse Ms May's hard Brexit vision in June. Labour is now unmistakably the party of soft Brexit.

Mr Corbyn has also acknowledged the support for close EU links among his MPs, party members and the trade unions – not to mention the adoring crowds at Glastonbury. Probably he senses that Labour’s new stance will enable it to make trouble for Ms May in Parliament. What he wants above all is another election; after his performance in June, who can blame him?

The Opposition now offers more clarity on the biggest issue facing the country than the Government. In a series of position papers in the past two weeks, ministers have set out to replicate much of what the UK currently enjoys after Brexit – on issues including customs, the Northern Ireland border, civil judicial cooperation and data protection. Which, of course, begs the question: why not stay in the single market and customs union, at least during the transitional phase?

Although Boris Johnson has been virtually silent on Brexit over the summer, the Government’s papers show that it has adopted his totally unrealistic “have-cake-and-eat-it” approach. This has naturally gone down badly with the 27 EU members. They have not fallen for a naked attempt to switch the focus on to a trade deal before “first round” matters are settled on citizens’ rights, Northern Ireland and an inevitable divorce payment on which the UK refuses to engage.

When negotiations resume in Brussels on Monday, David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, will urge his counterpart Michel Barnier to show more flexibility. Yet it is time for the Government to do just that. It would also do well to display the same clarity and pragmatism as Labour.