Mr Corbyn's Rail Journey

Shock! Jeremy Corbyn may have found a seat on a Virgin rail service after calling for railways to be re-nationalised while being filmed on the floor outside the toilet on one of Branson's specials up to the Tyne.

Well good on him! For in spite of the privatised rail firm's best endeavours to pour scorn on his claims of not being able to find a seat, anyone unfortunate enough to use their service on any regular basis will know that they are frequently crowded or the seats are all booked up even if unoccupied, which was precisely the problem Jezzer faced on his odyssey to the Tyne.

Try the morning service from Leeds to Birmingham (it goes on to Plymouth) if you want to stretch your legs for a couple of hours, or the ones in the opposite direction anytime after 4pm if you want to get acquainted with the acrid mixture of post-workday body odour and the obstacle course of luggage that stands in the way of the dozen or so people irritably vying for the last unbooked seat.

Indeed, sometimes, even if you manage to get a seat, a little electric panel above will inform you in a less-than-unmenacing manner "Seat may be reserved en route". Yes, even although you've got an unbooked seat, Jezzer, if he finds out where you are, Owen Smith might try to book it out from right under the seat of your pants. Now, doesn't that sound familair?

Of course, Corbyn's biggest mistake wasn't his video. It was boarding a Virgin train in the first place. As a rule, while the staff are usually perfectly nice, the environment is claustrophobic. Quite aside from fitting in other people, there's usually no space for luggage beyond something the size of a toilet bag. This is an item the average Virgin user might struggle to avail themselves of as the bathrooms in turn often don't work and, in my humble opinion, more than rarely fill the whole carriage with a certain all-embracing odeur d'ordure. Indeed, any regular tripper on one of these Shareholder Expresses might have seen Mr Corbyn, sprawled out on the lobby floor with his stuff around him, and reasonably wondered if in fact he had passed out from the stench of Branson's predatory capitalism.

How ironic that this was on what was once the last publicly owned, very well run and profitable state railway service, East Coast. This was popular and efficient so consequently was to be temptingly easy meat for a predatory combo headed by the private island-dwelling magnate. How chompingly easily they grabbed it a couple of years ago as the Lib Dems and Tories had a fire-sale of the few remaining state assets.

So, as Mr Branson luxuriates on the shores of his sun-kissed, private tropical island, issuing missives to take Corbyn down, spare a thought for the real truth that is being betrayed. And that is that, with public subsidies now more than double what they were, in real terms, when the railways were in public hands, whether he was on the floor or in a seat, Jeremy Corbyn spoke the truth.

Pennies from the Heavens

The Weather Forecast is being put out to tender.

So the Meteorological Office has lost its contract with the BBC to provide and present the weather forecast. After 96 years, it seems it isn't cheap enough so the BBC are "going out to tender" to get better value for money.

Now, there have been a few spectacular mistakes over the years - viz of course Michael Fish's infamous reassurance that there was no hurricane coming in 1987, just before half the country was submerged in gales and floods of supposedly biblical proportions. But the science of weather has improved massively over the decades and the Met, itself a public body, has a global reputation as a paragon of good practice.

However, we live in Neoliberal Land, so, as with nearly everything now, even the weather has to be outsourced. Given that most public service contracts have a supposed split of 60% of the decision being made on quality of service and 40% on price (no one seems able to explain quite how that works in practice), the bids put against the tender may make interesting reading. Who will be putting them in? After all, there's not another Met Office out there and we are more likely to see some commercial organisation take it over. Indeed, on the ITV channels we already see that "the weather is sponsored by" a whole range of private companies - none of whom seem to be very successful at improving the climate.

What might we have ahead of us?

The Sun would be an obvious sponsor for the weather - but in Britain, could they deliver? Amazon could provide us a forecast of warm winds offshore, while the ubiquitous Crapita could give up half way through the shipping forecast when it turns out to be just a bit too difficult for the guy with the tea leaves to be sure if millions of tons of maritime capital should set sail or not.

Typically, when there was no public weather forecast, in 1854, the Government's Board of Trade established the Met as a public service to private maritime companies. Now, with the entire nation benefiting, it is time to sell it off, except that, as has been the case with most privatisation, privately outsourced weather forecasting is highly unlikely to match the Met. This has already been signalled by the fact that when it really counts, the BBC has given up on its new franchisees before they are even known. For severe weather events, it seems, the Corporation will still use the Met forecasts.

However, a concering coda, highlighted by Green Party Energy Speaker Cllr Andrew Cooper, is whether the BBC, now under massive pressure from the Tory Government on a range of issues from funding to editorial, will continue to look to the Met's global leadership on global warming. With a recent programme by rightwing commentator Quentin Letts controversially subverting the Met Office on this very issue with, to say the least, a questionable range of "information", there is a real concern that this major step will undermine the struggle for our planet's future.

What is more public than the weather and providing accurate information on its effects on everything from growing our food to what clothes to wear on a morning? And what should be less commodifiable by profit-seekers than our climate? But, in truth, who is surprised by this latest auctioning off of our society's assets?

So here is the Forecast -
Income swelling and heavy showers of profits expected in City areas. Dividends, good.
Severe public service failure across the UK. Imminent.


TAKE ACTION - PETITION THE BBC TO REVERSE THE DECISION TO GO OUT TENDER: PLEASE CLICK HERE

Keep East Coast Public - Protecting the People from Privatisation

The Coalition Government has published a shortlist of three contenders for the currently state-owned East Coast rail franchise, which carries passengers between London and Leeds/York and Glasgow/Edinburgh and points between.

East Coast came into being in 2009 when the previous private franchisee effectively collapsed. Since then, it has proven popular and more punctual than its private rivals, scored a significantly higher than average satisfaction rating and drawn on fewer subsidies than the profit-seekers who run all the other franchises in the UK.  

And there is the not inconsiderable point that it has earned over £800 millions for the taxpayer.

Green Party calls for renationalisation of Britain's railways.

But now it faces being sold of to one of First Group, Keolis/Eurostar or Stagecoach/Virgin, the very operators who are hoovering up public funds at nearly three times the rate in real terms that the former state owned national British Rail company required - indeed, the Green Party has estimated that the taxpayer would save over £1 billion a year if the franchises were all brought back into state hands as they expired. Little wonder many see the East Coast move as simply ideological on the part of the Tories and yet another demonstration of political vacuity on the part of their Lib Dem appendages.

The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who presented a rail nationalisation bill last summer, has now launched a Public Service Users Bill which aims to protect the public from privatisation of services in areas such as the NHS, education and transport. Devised in conjunction with the campaign group We Own It, Lucas's private members bill would:

• Make public ownership the default option before any services, national or local, are contracted out to the private sector
• Require there to be a realistic and thorough in-house bid whenever a service is put out to tender
• Ensure there is full consideration of public opinion before any service is privatised or outsourced
• Give the public a right to recall private companies running public services poorly
• Require private companies running public services to be transparent about their performance and financial data (as in the public sector)
• Make private companies running public services subject to Freedom of Information requests (as in the public sector)
• Give social enterprises and mutuals, as well as public sector organisations, priority in tendering processes

We Own It have cited examples of how public services function best in public hands, contrary to the mythology perpetrated by usually privately owned mass media whose owners have direct interests in privatisation. East Coast is a fine example in itself - sadly, it is unlikely in the extreme that the Government will not sell it off to private hands, ending a brief but successful return to a public rail service. And with the Royal Mail sold off last year and more and more NHS services tendered out to profit seeking organisations like Virgin, the privatisation of the few remaining state assets we have is drawing every closer.

But this makes it all the more important to not give up the campaign to protect the services that remain in public hands and return the ones we have lost at the first possible opportunity. As with others before, Yorkshire & the Humber Greens were recently campaigning against the East Coast sell off at York station, one of the hubs for the company, and across the progressive and socialist political spectrum, trade unions and civil societies, the challenge now is to tear down the corrupt notion that companies seeking to extract profit from people should play any part in our public services.

Thatcherism After Thatcher - Challenging the Legacy

Nelson Mandela is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral - but some of her supporters wanted him dead years ago.

The last week has seen a surge of controversy as Britain stands totally divided on how to mark the passing of former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

The Coalition Government recalled Parliament specially to eulogize her and in spite of our austere financial times has also found over £8 million to pay for her funeral (most of it on security arrangements, in itself a telling statistic of her ability to divide even after life). By contrast, the Left has been left somewhat bamboozled on how to respond. A few have taken to the streets in apparent celebration, with a handful of instances of violence; while others have preferred the option of downloading a song from the Wizard of Oz, Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, in such numbers it is expected to reach the top of the charts.

Most of the Left have been somewhat more restrained - Miliband, if he counts as left at all, unsurprisingly giving her qualified praise in the Commons debate, whist others have been rather subdued, cravenly overawed perhaps by the bullishness of the press in granting Thatcher a sort of Diana-esque beatification in death.

One in memoriam stands out, however, for being apposite in marking her passing not by gloating over the death of another human being, however flawed and unpleasant she was, but rather looking to the impact of her continuing legacy.

This was the statement issued by the National Union of Miners, the legitimate union which she once smeared as "The Enemy Within", ironically at the same time as criticising the Polish Government's suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement.

"To her family our condolences.

The legacy of what the Conservative Government did to British Industry under Thatcher is not one to be proud of if you really did want the best for the people. Of course Thatcher was the symbol of “free enterprise” and set out to serve those whose interests were profit for the few. The coal mining industry is not on its own in suffering the decimation of a world class industry in the name of the “free market”.

Thatcher lived long enough to see her beliefs demolished when the “free market” collapsed and came running to the State for support.  Unlike the Banks who gambled, cheated and were bailed out – Coal mines were closed and communities were left to suffer.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher is gone but the damage caused by her fatally flawed politics sadly lingers on."

And of course, with us now reeling under the oppressive boot of the most rightwing Government in history, this analysis is as pertinent as ever. The Coalition parties are rolling back the State further than Margaret Thatcher ever tried, but working fully in the spirit of her neoliberal ideology with its concept that Government should do as little as possible while profit-making should be introduced into every conceivable social transaction. It must have been with some satisfaction that in her final days she witnessed both the near destruction of the social welfare system and the effective privatization of the NHS with nearly all frontline services being put out to compulsory competitive tender from 1 April.

But of course, as with so many leaders, there are many myths about her which do not quite bear up to scrutiny.

- Contrary to myth, her Government borrowed vast amounts of money whilst preaching parsimony, needing it first to pay for  the record unemployment caused by her initial monetarist economic policies; and then to pay for tax cuts when she finally gave up on the doctrine so she could court re-election in 1987. She did reduce borrowing for a short time artificially by one-off sales of privatized state assets like the telecomms, energy and transport sectors, a policy castigated by her One Nation Tory predecessor Harold MacMillan as "selling off the family silver." Only in her last two years out of ten in office did she balance the books paying off £8 billion of the national debt, barely a quarter of what Gordon Brown managed (but for some bizarre reason never seemed to speak about in the 2010 election - we forget that just as she was the Iron Lady, Brown was for some years titled the Iron Chancellor).

Borrowing by Governments - since the war, Labour's financial record has bettered the Tories on running surpluses until having to bailout the banks. (Source - Guardian Newspaper)

- Contrary to myth, the Tory regime did not conquer inflation: it was suppressed to low levels for some years by her inducing a recession which put millions out of work, but overall it was just above 10% when she came to office, and just under 10% (and on an upwards spiral) when she left. 

- Contrary to myth, in spite of "hand bagging" the European Community, it was Thatcher's government that passed the Single European Act ushering in free movement of labour and capital across the Union, the single biggest step towards the Europe we have now. She also took us, albeit with reservations, into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precusor of the single European currency. She was no Euro-federalist, but in spite of the rhetoric and image, her support of the EU defies her adoption now as the masthead of the Eurosceptics: the EU we have now is in no small part down to her actions in office.

It was her Government that began the process, continued by the Major Conservative Government, of moving the long-term unemployed off the unemployment register and onto long term disability benefits. Disability/sickness benefits nearly trebled in pounds cost under Thatcher, rising from 15% to nearly 22% of the total social security bill (and to 26% under her successor John Major) as the Tories massaged the unemployment figures for political ends. This supreme example of statistical manipulation, as well as the manipulation of the lives and wellbeing of millions of vulnerable people, has now reached a viciously twisted denouement with her successors' assault on people they now decry as the LTB - lying thieving bastards. 

We could also remind the public that, as the ailing political giant Nelson Mandela, who led his nation to remarkable reconciliation, is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral, they might reflect that some of her supporters were keen to hold his funeral many years ago. After she derided Mandela as the leader of a "terrorist organisation" and refused to boycott the apartheid state, Mrs Thatcher was content to permit the Federation of Conservative Students to campaign for his execution by hanging.

By their works shall ye know them - and so we did and should continue to. This then is her legacy.

And yet, rather than partying at her death, the real challenge for the Left is to disseminate that legacy. The privatization of the NHS, for example, has been decades in the making - it was Thatcher who first brought in the internal market in health and ever since then hospitals and doctors have been pushed into ever-decreasing circles of both chasing the lowest price and proving their worth in terms of money rather than quality of care. Administration costs have nearly tripled while billions of pounds of public money have been robbed from the public coffers in the form of the Private Finance Initiative, yet another child of Thatcherism.

The risk now is that by courting controversy with tasteless "death parties" and the like, the Left allows her politics to be converted into some sickening hagiography that belies the truth of it : how many times have you heard ordinary members of the public saying things like Maggie would have sorted out the bankers or how she would have stopped the mess the Coalition have got us into? 

These of course could not be further from the truth - Thatcher led the way in deregulating banks and breaking the mutual building society sector; and more widely the Coalition are simply fulfilling the process which she began (and Blair continued), taking it to its next, ideological stage. Like Thatcher, they laud inequality and seek to destroy the social bonds between people, just as she once declared that there is no such thing as society. Britain under her Government became a place which was less kind, less united, where sterling replaced community. Memorably, her bleak take on the parable of the Good Samaritan had more to do with cash than care: “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions - he had money too”

It is what she leaves behind that we should be debating. Instead, by focusing on (and, even worse, publicly celebrating) the death of an elderly woman, someone whose place would simply have been taken by someone else had she never existed, we cede the real debate about now and the future of our society. The anger may be real, understandable and shared, but it is tragically misdirected. And, in spite of all the fluster in the right wing press, the Iron Lady herself would doubtless have thoroughly approved.

Her Legacy Remains

Private Sector Efficiency? Tell me another one...

There is an oft repeated assumption, not only among the neoliberal right, but among many in the centre and Nu-labour infected centre-left, that two legs good, four legs bad. Or should I say "public sector waste, private sector efficient."?

The theory goes that, if maximising profit from your activities is your main focus and sole objective, you will find ways to become ever more "efficient" and "effective". At what precisely? In the final analysis, at extracting as much excess cash from your customers as possible over the actual cost of producing the service or goods you are selling. It's not exactly a particularly edifying or trustworthy nostrum, nor does it in fact follow that you will provide the best conceivable service - rather you will provide the one that gives you the best financial advantage.

The Tories' willingness to embrace this goes without saying. But why have even many of those who supposedly believe in public service been seduced into turning to the private sector to find ways to improve services to taxpayers? Whether in the form of the huge contracting companies like PWC and Crapita, which have ripped hundreds of billions of pounds from the public sector in return for poorer services (including abandoning one contracted-out Education Authority mid-contract); or in the form of consultants charging massive fees to identify savings; or whether in the form of the new owners of privatised state industries requiring ongoing government subsidies to carry out their role, as in the case of the nuclear power industry, private enterprise has in fact very little to recommend it as a guru of efficiency. Somehow, however, private effectiveness is taken as fact, in spite of the very substantial lack of evidence.

British-owned private companies on average take far more out of their profits as shareholder/owner dividends than almost any other major economy - fifty per cent more on average than US companies and nearly three times the rate of Japanese firms. meaning that other countries regularly re-invest more and consequently outperform us. In spite of poor business performance, British Boardroom salaries have rocketed to phenomenal amounts, with bonuses proliferating far beyond the banking sector alone, just as ordinary workers have been told to tighten their belts. Greed is good, it seems, if you've already supped greedily enough.

The railway industry is a case in point. By the end of the second world war, the private rail companies that ran the British rail system were more or less bankrupt, with tens of millions of pounds in accumulated debts. In 1946, the Labour Government nationalised them and turned them into British Rail, but, critically, made this new state company liable for the ongoing debts of its private predecessors. Consequently, although BR ran at an operating profit from 1947 to 1962, its requirement to pay the debts of the old owners meant it ended up making losses which had to be subsidised by the Government. After a while, with investment in new rail held back because of this, BR ended up requiring constant, ongoing public subsidies.

In spite of this, an integrated, modern, electric rail network was created. By the 1980s, a steady decline in passengers had reversed and massive investment began in the Channel Tunnel project, which was completed just before BR was split into 24 regional and network franchises and sold off to the private sector in 1994. The Conservative Government claimed that by doing this, the magic wands of the profit-seekers would drive forward ever-better rail services and cut costs, so that the taxpayer would no longer be out of pocket (albeit because of the original losses of the private sector way back in the 1940s).

But nothing could be further from the truth - rail services are no more efficient that before privatisation. Customer satisfaction has declined although transport requirements mean more people have to use the service. Our fares are among the highest in Europe. And the public subsidy at today's prices has risen from £2.3 billions in the last year of BR to £5.2 billions in 2008/9 - an increase of 126%. This has been cut in the current financial year, but will still stand at nearly 110% more than the cost of BR to the public purse.

So, with the Tories eying up more private involvement in the NHS even after the revision of the health bill, as well as seeking to widen private contracts in government as some sort of panacea for every problem, the Left need to reassert that it is not just on the basis of ethics and ideology that we want to see the state running our public services; it is also because keeping things in the public sector makes plain good business sense.

London to Wakefield service last week: nearly 20 years and £48 billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies after privatisation, East Coast railways and their rivals are still using decades old British Rail rolling stock.

Shares with No Value on Offer from Politician with No Values

You couldn't make it up! But trust (if you dare) Nick Clegg to do just that.

Eying his party's rock bottom poll share, our unloved Deputy Prime Minister has come up with a wheeze he obviously thinks will curry favour with recession-hit voters. He wants the State to divest itself of the two fully owned state banks - Lloyds and RBS - by giving shares to every adult in the UK free of charge, which they can sell once they reach the price the State originally paid for them back in 2008/2009. This would be 50p per share in RBS and 73p in Lloyds and we would all get 1,450 and 450 shares in each bank respectively. BUT, the rub is that you could only sell the shares for the excess over the price paid by the State, so that the Government can recoup the cost of its original purchase of the banks.

Nick's big giveaway works like this: if your RBS shares reach 60p each, you can sell them and you get exactly 10p per share (60p sales price less the original 50p which goes back to the State). So  that would leave you with as much as £145 minus tax of £29 and sales commission of maybe £8 leaves £108. It is always something I guess, but......at the moment, the shares are actually worth less than the State paid for them - 45p for RBS and 37p for Lloyds.

So the Great Plan is to give the citizens of the UK approximately £15 billions of debt in these banks. Not really an even vaguely attractive prospect, but somehow very apt for the hapless Deputy PM and, of course, his ever chippy sidekick Vince Cable, the eminence incapable of the Coalition.

Clegg's model was used to sell off Soviet industry to the Russian mafia

With the Lib Dems standing at just 1% of the vote in the latest poll for London Mayor (and outpolled by 13 to 1 by the Greens among 18 to 24 year olds), offering the public something that has absolutely no value at all seems to summarise their prospectus and prospects more eloquently than anything any of their opponents could possibly dream up.

A pity though, that these soulless men, shorn of any tattered shred of Keynesian Liberal principle, should squander the golden opportunity they have to transform the banking sector from a focus of greed into a genuinely mutual or co-operative sector, funding sustainable recovery. The nationalised banks could have been precisely the right vehicles to create a network of community banks, supporting prudent investment in social enterprises and co-operatives, helping individuals and communities to restore their fortunes.

Certainly that was the sort of approach the old Liberals argued for that back when the financial sector still had a large mutual segment in the form of the building societies. They opposed the Tories' sale of state-owned Girobank in 1989 (ultimately to be part of Santander) and an SDP peer, Lord Taylor of Gryffe, led the opposition to the theft of the Trustees Savings Bank from its depositors and its subsequent sale to the private sector (ironically ultimately to Lloyds) by the Thatcher Government. These days are clearly long gone.

By contrast, the model proposed by Clegg is one first widely used in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, where it was known as Voucher privatisation.  There, state assets were stripped and given away to all citizens in the form of low value share vouchers (at the behest of the ever eager advisers sent out there by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation). The Russian mafia made a (financial) killing as desperate people sold their shares off cheap to grab a few roubles - much as many would do with the pittance offered by Thatcherite Nick's sale of the century in recessionary Britain.

Desperate men employing desperate measures; but at a huge cost of missed opportunities and squandered assets which could have been employed so much better for the Common Wealth.

Porridge for Profit - Privatizing Prisons

The announcement yesterday that a Birmingham prison is to be moved into the private sector is yet another huge and disgraceful step towards the total dismantling of the public sector by the Con Dem Government. Ethically, it is a terrible social decision to allow companies to profit from the incarceration of prisoners and raises many deeply troubling questions about the future of the prison system and rehabilitation of offenders.

It is not the first case of privately run prisons in the UK - 11 have been contracted out since the 1990s, and about 12% of prisoners are already held in the private sector, not that you would know from the condemnation by Labour MPs in response to yesterday's news. But this is first case of an existing public sector prison being privatized, and Group 4 Security, who have won the contract, operate as a profit-seeking company. They do not have social objectives in what they do - an outgrowth of private security guard operators, they are known for low wages and operational mismanagement. They do make nice profits for their shareholders, and in this context, what genuine interests might they have in running a prison?

Far from wanting to rehabilitate offenders, a private prison operator will inevitably see much merit in repeat offenders - guaranteeing a continued supply of business. Likewise, facilities for prisoners during their stay in jail would be kept to a bare minimum to drive costs down and again increase returns - the track record of existing private jails pretty much confirms this. And of course, doubtless arguing that this might save the public purse costs, the operator would logically look to maximise the financial returns to be had from cheap/free prison labour.

Unlikely? Well, take a look at the USA, where so many of this government's ideologically-motivated initiatives have their origin.

The USA has privatised scores of its prisons, precisely as, under the barbarically inhumane "three-strikes-and-you-are-out" rule implemented by many states, the prison population has trebled in recent years, with even minor shoplifters (like Gary Ewing) now imprisoned for life. Deploying the cost argument, these prisoners have been conscripted into all sorts of labour - the bulk of US armed services uniforms and ordinance is now manufactured, free of charge, by (disproportionately black) prisoners. The private company Unicor "employs" 20,000 prisoners in 70 US jails to carry out work which even includes making components for Patriot missiles.  Wages can be as low as 23 cents (or 15 pence in UK terms) per hour. Prisoners are also used for a huge range of contracted-out services, including corporate payrolls and call centre work, sometimes placing customers data privacy at some risk, but keeping plenty of income flowing into owners' pockets. The twisted "three strikes" policy ensures a continuing supply of such handy, exceedingly low-cost labour.

If this was happening anywhere else, such as Iran or Zimbabwe, it would be condemned as slave labour. But instead, the US example is being used as a model for Britain. With foaming rightwing papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun backing the move precisely as a means of saving the taxpayer money and vindictively dehumanising prisoners, the Lib Dem Minister, Sarah Teather, blandly states that it doesn't matter who runs prisons, as long as prisoners are rehabilitated effectively.

Prison: no such thing as a free bowl of porridge...

This more than anything betrays her lack of understanding of what is going on in the minds of the corporations bidding for contracts like this, and others in services like health and elder care. This is a company that exploits the staff who apply to work for it voluntarily, minimising wages and maximising working hours - is it suddenly going to be infected with some sort of social concern virus when it takes on prison work? Or is it going to drool at the prospect of virtually free labour and an endless supply of new business?

How we treat prisoners is a mark of how civilised we are, or not. Not only should many of those in prison not be there to begin with, but anyone in a prison is still a human being. They deserve dignity, even if in some cases they are there for removing dignity from others, because the prison system should not be about vengeance or humiliation, but about correction and support to find a better life when they come out again. There are many examples of former prisoners going on to make good and contribute very effectively to society, not least in helping younger people avoid getting into the sort of trouble they have experienced themselves.

But if we give prisons and their inmates over to the likes of Group 4, the emphasis on rehabilitation will no longer be at the heart of the system; rather it would be viewed by corporate executives as being like turkeys voting for Christmas - leaving us with the real prospect that, in future, prison may well work, but only for the purpose of filling the pockets of Group 4 shareholders.