Carillion go down the shitter [split topic]

[im barry bethel]

I fail to see what makes them so much better, why Carillon are so great at catering and tarmac?! This isn't even a privatisation ethos, it's just a proxy bureaucracy

Carillon aren't a building company, or a catering company, or a cleaning company... they're a contracts company, run on a sub contractor basis. The left hand takes a contract and the right hand subs it out (which then gets subbed out again and again) while keeping a margin off the top

[jobotic]

Well, they are and they aren't.  They have their place, for sure.  But they definitely shouldn't be handling public sector work.  Every time something like this happens - where a private sector company that has been given public sector works goes out of business, or ends up being massively more expensive, etc etc - I think to myself "perhaps NOW the government will realise that you can't privatise everything, because there are some things that shouldn't be done just to make a profit".  But they never do realise, and I don't think they ever will.

The trouble is, a massive chunk of the voting public don't realise it either.

Nah, they realise, they just don't care.

[MoonDust]

Nah, they realise, they just don't care.

Agreed. It's all short-termism. If it saves the government money now and makes profit for the company now, nothing else needs to be considered.

[Buelligan]

Well, just imagine if we lived somewhere like the old USSR where all the publicly-owned valuable bits got "sold" off to gangsters.  Imagine living in a world run for the benefit of the criminal elite where the only way to get through is to get off your fucking tits on hypernormalisation and Downton Abbey.

[Quote]

Don't forget bathtub vodka.

[Buelligan]

I couldn't think of anything witty enough to say about Carillion going down the shitter to warrant a new thread...

Carillion - ask not for whom the bell tolls... ?

[biggytitbo]

Exactly, absolutely none of the benefits of the 'free market' - innovation, competition, price discovery, whilst apparently retaining the traditional downsides of state run industry - poorly run, taxpayer moneypit etc. The worst of both worlds.

At least with the utilities you can make a case on paper that its  a genuine competitive market, even if the reality is that's largely illusory, with infrastructure like this its entirely about a slight of hand to defer difficult decisions about public expenditure (and public responsibilities) for services at an immense cost to the taxpayer in the long run.

[Buelligan]

I think it's great that the public get to decide whether to buy water or go to jail and if they choose not to buy, they don't have to pay.  That's real freedom.

[gepree]

According to https://evolvepolitics.com/carillion-changed-rules-safeguard-ceos-multi-million-bonuses-shortly-crisis/

Newly liquidated government contractor Carillion changed their own rules to protect
the multi-million pound bonuses paid to bosses from being clawed back by investors and the
British taxpayer, should the company enter financial difficulties.

The rule change happened just weeks before the company suffered an 'accounting crisis' that wiped £600m off of its share price.

[phantom_power]

Accounting crisis? Is there a more cunty phrase?

[Paul Calf]

This should be a massive scandal. Even the BBC have got it on the front page. Can't wait to see how the tabloids avoid it.

[Buelligan]

The weird thing is that, a bit like the DUP's Ash for Cash scandal (it's worse than a scandal), it seems that politicians can do or permit, encourage, support, outrageous things and no one actually cares.  Nothing changes.  People still vote for them.  #hypernormalisation

[mobias]

Carillion is of course only one letter removed from Marillion. Coincidence? I don't think so. Lets take a look back at the lyrics from their 1985 hit Kayleigh to see if there were any clues that might have predicted this industrial collapse.

Kayleigh is it too late to say I'm sorry.
Kayleigh could we get it together again.
I can't go on pretending that it came to a natural end.
Kayleigh I never thought I'd miss you,
And Kayleigh I'd hoped that we'd always be friends.
We said our love would last forever,
So how did it come to this bitter end.

As you can see the writing was pretty much on the wall from the start. I don't know why they bothered.

[greencalx]

Ah, right, ok, this was worthy of its own thread after all. Sorry Neil.

I'm not averse, necessarily, to private companies being involved in the provision of public services. For example, we don't expect the NHS to manufacture its own beds, PET scanners, vaccines and so on, and seem to be perfectly happy that these might be purchased from external companies. And there are potentially instances where the benefits of public ownership are not obvious (BT springs to mind). But I think a line needs to be drawn somewhere, and my suggestion would be to ask the question: If the outfit you're contracting to goes bust and the service no longer operates, will that be a problem? If the answer is "yes", then you should think very carefully about placing it in an environment where going bust is a necessary part of process by which the market delivers its vaunted efficiency.

[Buelligan]

I think one should perhaps also consider what the value of certain things is to society (I know there's no such thing as society in some peoples' books).  To me, if something is necessary for the proper running of a civilsed society it should not, primarily, be run and exploited for the benefit of a select few.  The goal should be the provision of that good to everyone as reliably and freely as can be done.

[greencalx]

I think that's kind of implicit in the question of going bust being a problem. If these services have value, and need to continue in the event of a providers' failure then this must be because of value to society. But I guess it doesn't hurt to have that written in more explicitly.

[biggytitbo]

The weird thing is that, a bit like the DUP's Ash for Cash scandal (it's worse than a scandal), it seems that politicians can do or permit, encourage, support, outrageous things and no one actually cares.  Nothing changes.  People still vote for them.  #hypernormalisation

Everyone is too busy being OUTRAGED at something wrong someone who doesnt matter said to care about anything important.

[Shay Chaise]

Bad time for anyone looking for your traditional oil rig jobs.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-42662085

BBC have opened a play-by-play page as this is going on.

Sounds like the amount of precarious employment involved here is about to be blown wide-open. Sadly Jon Snow failed to touch on this in his interview on Channel 4.

Corbyn has got in proactively on this business which is good to see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=113&v=w7av_K5enbM

Interesting political strategy using 'taking back control', the Brexit phrase to promote renationalisation. Surely that is going to pull in a few of those working class voters in towns in the East of England.

[jobotic]

Everyone is too busy being OUTRAGED at something wrong someone who doesnt matter said to care about anything important.

No they're not. People can be pissed of about more than on thing.

[Zetetic]

And there are potentially instances where the benefits of public ownership are not obvious (BT springs to mind).

I think the benefits of bringing bits of BT properly under public ownership are sort of obvious.

The infrastructure bits are clearly as much of a risk as, say, Network Rail is insofar as we're not going to abandon in it in the event of a early-2000s style France Telecom fuckup and the markets attached to the last-mile and so on only work as well as they do (...) due to the hefty amount of regulation that Openreach is subject to. (Noting that plenty of people would like Openreach to be considerably better regulated, both in terms of lubricating various markets and not handing over critical infrastructure to Division 2 of the MSS.)

I guess the advantage is that - like Railtrack - we get to keep several billion pounds worth of debt off the public books, right up until we don't.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

https://politicalscrapbook.net/2018/01/carillion-chairman-advised-tories-on-corporate-responsibility-and-warned-labour-threatened-jobs/

Of course he did. And now he retreats slowly out of shot as his doomed company burns to the ground taking thousands of jobs and livelihoods with it.

[DrGreggles]

There are Carillion contractors where I work (NHS hospital).
I wasn't on site yesterday, but I'll be popping along to their offices shortly to see what's going on with them - if they're still there.

[biggytitbo]

No they're not. People can be pissed of about more than on thing.

Nah, there'll be a little murmur whilst its in the news then we'll just do the same thing again and no one will give a shit. It's not like we haven't been through this cycle a dozen times before.

[biggytitbo]

https://politicalscrapbook.net/2018/01/carillion-chairman-advised-tories-on-corporate-responsibility-and-warned-labour-threatened-jobs/

Of course he did. And now he retreats slowly out of shot as his doomed company burns to the ground taking thousands of jobs and livelihoods with it.

Yeah, but look at how nice his yacht is.

[Paul Calf]

tag:Bell ends

[Norton Canes]

[British Sea Power announce benefit single]

[greencalx]

I think the benefits of bringing bits of BT properly under public ownership are sort of obvious.

The infrastructure bits are clearly as much of a risk as, say, Network Rail is insofar as we're not going to abandon in it in the event of a early-2000s style France Telecom fuckup and the markets attached to the last-mile and so on only work as well as they do (...) due to the hefty amount of regulation that Openreach is subject to. (Noting that plenty of people would like Openreach to be considerably better regulated, both in terms of lubricating various markets and not handing over critical infrastructure to Division 2 of the MSS.)

I guess the advantage is that - like Railtrack - we get to keep several billion pounds worth of debt off the public books, right up until we don't.

I guess I was thinking about the retail end of what BT does, rather than its whole operation. With the benefit of hindsight, privatising only the retail of services (rather than infrastructure) would have been a sensible thing to have done. But I guess back in the early 80s no one had any inkling of the need to upgrade wired connections into peoples' homes (I don't think we can blame the Thatcher government for not pre-empting what Tim Berners Lee was going to invent 9 years later). I suspect the thinking was that landline services were going to compete with mobile (which they have done, reasonably successfully), plus there are cable operators etc too. The key question is whether it makes sense to duplicate infrastructure. My gut feeling is that you'd be better off having one shit-hot fibreoptic connection serving every home, rather than two or three mediocre connections slugging it out, in which case now I would agree that bringing the infrastructure (which could now be argued as even more essential to economy and society than it was in the 80's) under public ownership might not be a bad thing.

The point was I was trying to find an example of a less contentious privatisation than say rail or prisons, and BT was the best I could do with about 5 microseconds thought.

[Action Fish]

Has there ever been anyone good called Rupert? I know everyone's thinking of Rupert the Bear but his slavish obedience to authority always made me very suspicious.

Rupert Henry St John Barker Moon.
https://youtu.be/Gg3LLrvue_4?t=13s

[Neville Chamberlain]

To be honest, I'm not surprised Carillion went down the shitter - I visited their office once and it looked like a building site!!!