Well we've seen some more of the nitty gritty on how half-witted politicans have afound a trendy way of wasting taxpayers money in order to make it seem as if the government is borrowing less money. I thought Liam Halligan's Channe 4 Dispatches effort extremely efficacious.

A month or so ago I had the opportunity to have a decko at Norfolk and Norwich. My friend, as I wrote in a previous post, had a small outpatient op. arranged, so I popped him down and waited around while he was done. I soon noticed that although he went in through a main entrance, he turned right and right again into a mobile spliced onto the side of the main building which was obviously one of these privat set-ups, probably South African.

A wierd, funny and ironic thing: popping into the shop right next door to the mobile for a cooling icecream, the headline in the local newspaper on the till desk shouted up to me all bout the rake-off the P of the PFI had made and which the hospital was getting no share of. Halligan gave us the basics. They re-finance at a lower interest rate than first arranged and 'agreed', once the thing is set up, and collect the difference. In The N & N's case this was about £120 million. Plus the companies are off-shore and pay little or no taxes, to add insult to injury.

I would earnestly ask Norfolk people to consider making waves on this one since 120 mil. could built another hospital or keep the wages paid at N & N for many years. As it is the hospital management are sacking people already to make ends meet on their side of the deal.

If push comes to shove we will have to adopt a revolutionary style approach to this: over-running th hospital, setting up ad-hoc committees to run the place and tear up the PFI contract, kicking out their reperetatives and running it as the Norfolk people's Hospital. Of course, this will only work as long as the staff would be preapred to endure hardship. the govt. would soon manage to strangle the 'revolution' by cutting off the wages. But once people in Norfolk realise they could remove a part of their council tax to account for this shortfall, things would soon be on the up.

Sources:

Documentary slams private finace initiatve

A Conspiracy of silence on PFI, written by Halligan in the Telegraph, 13 August 2006

Warning over PFI hospital schemes, Guardian

Bill Totten's Weblog - post 10 May 2006 , " An Easter egg Hunt"

weblog: Andy Meyer: Brown's PFI timebomb

Wiki: Private Finance Initiatives

Blast from the past: Amey, What Can the Matter Be? From SocialistReview.org, 2002