Free Market Socialism in public services

Procurement eh? Sexy stuff. For some reason, TV execs have overlooked the potential for a hit series on this aspect of government. Sheer tedious boredom aside however, it’s a hugely important aspect of getting decent services from taxation, and whilst public services did improve significantly under Labour, few seriously believe that the oceans of extra money was well spent, as anyone who’s read David Craig's 'Plundering the Public Sector' and 'Squandered' can testify. Nor is this a right-wing argument. Getting value for money is central to having public services; if every critique of public sector waste is dismissed as Thatcherite propaganda, the public will eventually, and inevitably, turn their back on them.

Which is why Francis Maude’s decision to centralise procurement is important. He’s found that prices paid for the same items ranging from £350 to £2000, and his solution – in quite a socialist way – is to centralise the buying process.

This centralisation is good news, though it could be made even more efficient. One of the problems of public sector buying (as in most purchases really), is that the sellers know the true price better than the buyers, because of their superior knowledge of the product. In a market with comparatively few suppliers (at least of sufficient size), competition is ‘oligopolistic’ – or in other words, close to monopoly, as all the suppliers know that by competing against each other, they’re only reducing their eventual price.

Injecting competition into the process is key to getting the best deal. A good way of doing that is by having an auction. Britain actually did this when we were selling our 3G network, and we’ll do it again with 4G network. It raised far more money than expected and it’s a model we should replicate.

The way it would work is by deciding what we want to buy centrally, and then get the suppliers to pay a nominal fee to be in the auction. Start by having a price which they all will sign up to provide the goods, and then gradually reduce it round-by-round where one-by-one, each supplier drop out. The last remaining supplier in the auction is then legally bound to provide precisely what was ordered to that price. It could be done the opposite way – with price starting low, and then rising, but behavioural psychology suggests that people (including businesses) are more reluctant to lose what they think they already have (in this case, a massive order) than gain what they do not. The nominal fee for being part of the auction will also cement their commitment to keeping in the auction for as long as possible, as no one likes spending money with nothing to show for it.

It might not be sexy, but its definitely worth a shot.

Giving Amnesty to its enemies

 Amnesty International is 50 years old. In that time of writing human wrongs, it has acquired an outstanding moral reputation matched by few. Criticising it is akin to condemning Mother Teresa. That said, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out (in his excellent, and excellently entitled, treatise, ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice’), reputations deserve to assessed as much as they are valorised, and as Orwell said, saints are to be considered guilty until proven innocent. Being an unquestionable ‘good’ in the world does not mean they should avoid judgement.

When I joined Amnesty over a decade ago, it highlighted the unfairness that it was not treated as a charity (as Churches and Public Schools were), but as a political organisation. I too thought this bizarre as well as unfair. However, shortly afterwards, instead of insisting on its charitable status, it reversed course and explicitly declared itself as pursuing a political agenda, which effectively amounted to pitting itself against the Bush administration.

In condemning the outrageous abuse of a few hundred Guantanamo Bay detainees and the rendition programme, they declared it the ‘gulag of ourtimes’. The comparative hyperbole not only inflated the abuses far beyond reason and historical reality, but diminished the suffering of millions of Stalin’s victims.

The counter-argument here could be that human rights are the fundamental principles which guide us. Overstating the extent of their violation may be tactless, but forgivable in serving that ultimate good. Would that it were so.

In outlining Amnesty’s new explicitly political agenda, its Secretary General Irene Khan (who since accepted a golden-goodbye worth £533,103 – money its donators thought would be spent defending human rights) stated:

'If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues.'

Read that paragraph again, and let it’s meaning sink in. ‘Freedom of speech won’t feed the children’ has been the standard defence of every crypto-leftist dictator for the past half century', and it's as wrong today as it was then. It is not an either/or choice.

Nick Cohen was rightly aghast that:

‘This clunking and faintly sinister statement did not come from a colonial administrator explaining that liberty was all well and good for freeborn Englishmen but the half-savage natives needed order. Nor was it a communist apparatchik saying that there was no need for bourgeois freedoms in the proletarian paradise of the Soviet Union. Nor was it Edward Heath or Henry Kissinger announcing that the Chinese liked autocracy or Abu Musab Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden denouncing democracy as a Greek heresy. [It came from] Amnesty International, an organisation which used to believe that human rights meant everything.’

It now proudly declared that they were of secondary importance.

This antipathy to the Bush administration extended not just to obscene hyperbole, but open collaboration with supporters of theocratic totalitarianism. Amnesty rightly defended the human rights of Moazzam Begg whilst he was illegally detained in Guantanamo Bay, yet well after his release, and his continuing advocacy of the Taliban, they shared a platform with him as a promoter of human rights. When its head of Gender Division Gita Sahgal pointed out that one cannot support human rights and the Taliban, Amnesty reacted swiftly – against Sahgal, and ultimately fired her. When her supporters argued that a life-long feminist human rights campaigner was more in keeping with Amnesty’s founding principles than a theocracy-supporter, they responded by smearing her, claiming she was an American stooge who denied Begg’s human rights, when she did nothing of the sort.

More recently, it announced it was giving space to Middle East Monitor Online, established by the jihadi-supporting Dr Daud Abdullah, with one of its most regular contributors denounces ‘Kikes’, and argues that ‘millions need to be sacrificed in order to redeem and deliver the Aqsa Mosque form (sic) the sinful hands of Zionism’.

Was Amnesty really established to provide a respectable platform to such ideals?

Amnesty’s supreme moral legitimacy stemmed from a core belief that human rights should not be relegated by other political aims, yet recently its leadership has proudly abandoned that principle. If it is to retain its moral supremacy for another half century, it needs to return to the noble principles of its birth, not the bankrupt pretensions of its recent custodians.