A Fascinating Insight into the In Campaign

I thought I'd share a personal insight, and one that I suspect isn't that uncommon.

While many readers may know that I love wine, I am about quality rather than quantity. I'm trying to be healthier and succeeding. With that in mind, I popped around to my neighbour with the bottle, offering a glass. My neighbours are Guardian left, to the point of it being cliché. I should also add another way I'm trying to improve myself which is to avoid politics with anyone that isn't similarly minded or likely to be persuaded. So, I just don't talk politics with them. Except this time.

On entering, I noticed my neighbour had a Stronger In badge. No real surprise, but hey, I'm not going to talk politics. Here's some wine, would you like some etc... how was the holiday etc.

Anyway, they asked my opinion, how would I vote. And we had a discussion about it. One fascinating point was that they supported the EU because of all the social and environmental law that Brussels passed that Cameron won't, because Murdoch controls him. At this point, and I don't know if it was the wine, or the general bullshit about Murdoch, but I felt the rage rising, quietened it a little and then asked why they were against the unelected Murdoch changing things, but not against the unelected Brussels.

I think this is a lot of the In support. It's that rather than fighting for elected power and winning over the electorate by argument, they see the EU as a way of bypassing them. Establishment people like the EU because they can get them to do the job instead, to bypass those grubby proles that aren't the bien pensant.

I reflected further on this matter, and how I think this is the root of Euroscepticism across Europe. Over time, what the establishment and Brussels think the EU should be about has been shifting away from the public. Euroscepticism was, in the 1980s almost non-existent. It's growth (and not just in the UK) has been about ignoring the public. Based on the nothing that David Cameron received in his renegotiation, the EU has no intention of addressing this. It is full march ahead to full integration.

So, I'm voting with absolute certainty now for one simple reason: I believe exit is inevitable. The EU will push things too far and the public will want to leave. We are going to have to bear whatever pains we are going to have to bear sometime, so it may as well be now, before we integrate still further, than later.

Thoughts on Labour Relations

I've been doing a bit of thinking about labour relations in the past and the current situation and thought I'd bounce some things around

1) Unions rose in a time of monopoly employers. Employers treated workers badly, employees didn't have many other options, but what they could do is collectively stop working. And at that time, employers also didn't have many other options but the local workforce, so had to work with the workers, as a group to accept their viewpoint.

2) As industrialisation grew, so did trade unions, peaking in the late 1970s. It could be argued that greater automation reduced the union workforce, but the scale of decline has been far greater than just large factories. It has fallen from 12m to nearly 6m and the remaining trade unionisation is nearly all in the public sector.

3) There's a lot of attribution to Thatcher in smashing the unions, but the fact is that membership of unions continued to fall after she left office, as did strike days. They fell under the Blair years with no new union laws.

4) My hypothesis is that the rise in car ownership changed the relationship between management and workers. If you worked in a factory and didn't like the terms, the factory 5 or 6 miles away was now another option. You could just leave and go work for them instead. At the same time, employers could grab employees from further away with skills. The need for a union to resolve your grievances disappears. And so as more and more people got to own cars, more unionised jobs fell.

5) Unions still exist in the public sector because the employer is generally a monopoly.

Thoughts?

A Thought about "Going Out for a Drive"

Stephen Bayley is a bit of a nob and has written an article in the Guardian about why we no longer "go out for a drive". He talks about how roads are too full and all that, which out in the sticks just isn't true.

But it got me thinking about how we did it as kids, and how I would even take girlfriends out for a drive somewhere. And I got to thinking about when I stopped and I think the reason that it stopped is to do with how we improved Sundays. To anyone who doesn't remember before the 90s, we had 3 TV channels, mostly showing rubbish, the shops were shut and cinemas and pubs had restricted hours. You could do some gardening or DIY, as long as you didn't forget something you needed as the shops were closed.

Which meant that if you just wanted to get out of the house, "going for a drive" was about all you could do.

The Cost of Bureaucracy

There was an interesting comment by DBC Reed about bureaucracy and competition in an earlier post, that has triggered a memory of post that I intended to write:-

I know I have rehearsed King Gillette's argument that competition increases bureaucracy before and you have acknowledged the validity of some of it,but there are newer contributors on here who appear to be enemies of the Post War British state founded on a mixed economy so some continued resistance is in order.

I'm not disagreeing with DBC Reed here, but I've long wondered how much the cost of bureaucracy affected things like competition.

Let's imagine you're working as a GP in the 1930s. You've got a patient with an ingrowing toenail. How efficient would it be to have competing hospitals providing ingrowing toenail surgery? That GP would have to send each hospital a letter, written by hand, posted, wait for a response of a few days. Someone at that hospital would have to check the appointment book, see when they could fit someone in for an ingrowing toenail operation, write back and once the GP got all the quotes a few days later, he would then write to the particular hospital and book them in. The GP then has to send a letter to the patient.

That's not only slow, it also has lots of cost in people's time writing things to and fro.

Here's how you can do it today: A GP taps a request into a comparison system. It sends a message across the internet to the servers of each hospital, that check an online appointment book, find available slots, and report back a price and availability time in about 5 seconds. The GP then selects it, at which point the system books the slot at the hospital and sends an email to the patient.

The model for today costs a lot to set up, but once set up, the transaction costs are minuscule.

What I'm wondering is whether in the past, we suited more of a state-run model, with large, centralised organisations, because while competition would have lowered prices, the cost of the bureaucracy to run it would have been so huge as to wipe out the gains, but having dramatically lowered the cost of bureaucracy, we now suit more of a fragmented model.