The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity.

The opportunities for LP–BBC print cross-promotion are blatant enough. Shiny new Lonely Planet Magazine‘s launch issue featured a story by Stephen Fry, that tied in with his fine …in America book and series. The second issue has David Attenborough in “The land that time forgot“, the Galapagos. I wonder how easy a non-BBC subsidiary would find it to commission a travel feature from either of those two. Unlike, say, Top Gear Magazine, this is a market segment in which the BBC had zero presence until November 2007.

As I predicted in my previous piece, both issues have been light on advertising. In rotten market conditions, Lonely Planet Magazine has an ace up its sleeve: BBC magazines are able to buy market share by taking a hit on profitability, in the short term at least. Strategies like that aren’t so readily available to small commercial players like Wanderlust.

But these advantages are trivial compared to the online expertise that Lonely Planet has bought into. The BBC runs the best news website in the world, at our expense. Three BBC Online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after that 2007 acquisition. The latest marketing wheeze, launched yesterday, is a travel module integrated inside BBC.com that provides access directly and exclusively into Lonely Planet hosted content (via). When it comes to social media, these digital marketeers know where the online travel information market is going:

Users will also be able to click through to the Lonely Planet site to discover a range of content and tools to plan, book and share travel experiences.

The feature is geo-coded, of course, and so only visible to overseas viewers. Oh, and any UK nationals who check BBC.com for the footie results when they’re on holiday. In any case, the idea that growing the worldwide brand power of Lonely Planet could fail to distort the domestic travel information market is naive. The 26m readers of BBC.com are being corralled into Lonely Planet for their travel information, at the expense of other UK-owned and -sited travel portals, among them struggling startups.

The travel guidebook market is worth something like £100m in UK retail book sales alone. Quite where the online market for travel information is going, nobody quite knows. But it’s safe to assume it can only grow. And with the massive, unfair advantage of BBC Online know-how behind it, taxpayers’ help in effect, it’s likely that Lonely Planet will shout so loud that other UK players barely get heard. Innovators with shallower pockets will be trampled or deterred from entering in the first place. Is this really what the BBC is for?

First published here.

The reason’s simple: whoever changes the signs doesn’t have the incentive to bother. Nobody’s checking every little detail of his job – nobody could. And these little extras – what we used to call public service – aren’t Big Picture stuff. (You could have said the same about clean hospital toilets until a couple of years back.) By turning my postman from a public servant into a rational economic actor, we’ve destroyed the small parts of his job that used to connect him with our lives in all their complexity. Marketization can only put incentives (targets, bonuses, competition) in place for a proportion of what he does, or did. The rest is deemed worthless, history. Or it’s left up to his own integrity, which we still expect him to display in his new daily life being pushed around by capitalists.

Now I’m not saying that I oppose the market running public goods; nor do I know whether this ‘public servant’ ever really existed, or even if s/he did, whether we could re-energize the corpse. But deciding where markets can be successful needs to be an empirical judgement: they appear to be better at running airlines than train networks; better at holiday camps than prisons.

And marketization isn’t a process we should be celebrating. When markets need to take over, it’s a sign of human failure, a necessary second-best option, not something anyone should be proud of, Left or Right. Smith, like Worstall on a good day, teaches us that self-interest can be useful, not admirable.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Like Dave, I doubt the Greens can build a systematic left-wing alternative to Labour, now properly classified as a ‘centre-right’ not a ‘left’ party. But I do believe the popularity of mainstream greenish politics offers something. A ‘moment’, perhaps, for slipping something with a progressive flavour in with the recycling. A reasonable place to look for inspiration is Sweden.

Sweden’s Green Party have just finished 8 years as junior coalition partners in a red-green government. Top of their list of achievements was the inauguration, in January 2005, of a so-called Alternation Leave policy. Under this scheme, 12,000 Swedes have the annual opportunity to take a government subsidized sabbatical from work (similar to parental leave, but without a baby). Three main conditions apply: employer consent is required; the vacancy may only be covered by recruiting from the pool of current unemployed; you may not work while on leave, except to start a new business.

While headline UK unemployment is low, we have above-EU-average rates of economic inactivity for males aged 25-64 (pdf, p.9). More than supposed sick-man France. Schemes that give the jobless employer-based training may pay us back in the long term. Alternation policies similarly support entrepreneurship: give your big idea a go, with a twelve-month safety net should things go Pete Tong.

We hear a lot about ‘lifelong learning’ – this policy puts its money where its mouth is. Here’s a year – go fill your head. It’s also liberal (voluntary), costable (set numbers in advance) and even supports ‘family values’. Plenty of Swedish alternation-leavers have spent their time raising children or extended family. It’s a practical way to show government commitment to ‘work-life balance’, that goes beyond platitudes.

None of this will smash the capitalist system and reclaim surplus value for the working (wo)man, of course. It’s not a workplace panacea. It does, though, combine sellability with the seeds of a new model for employee/employer relations. A start towards ‘Scandinavianizing’ British working life. Maybe even a real-world path to a Citizen’s Income. Even more interesting than the details of the policy (which I’d call ‘intriguing’ rather than ‘convincing’) is the realisation that in a galaxy not so far, far away from us, There Is Never No Alternative.

Of course, for our Greens to get anywhere near Westminster, we’re going to need a serious dose of electoral reform first. And that, as they say, is another story.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

It is axiomatic, since the death of socialism, that governments must everywhere retreat… Liberalisation, privatisation and global policies of “small government” (except in the areas of defence and law and order) have led to a withdrawal by governments from areas of concern, which, until recently, had been seen as their primary functions.

He’s 180 degrees wrong. In fact, the state is hungrier than it’s ever been. Figure 2.1(a) of this pdf shows that total managed expenditure has almost tripled in real terms since 1963-4. Even as a proportion of GDP, current spending matches the mid-1960s. Of course, unlike 40 years ago, we’re now instructed how to dispose of our toasters, whether we must strap children into car seats, and what we can wear to work or shop.

What happened in the 1980s wasn’t deregulation and privatization, but re-regulation and government capture. The New Public Management: governance networked on the al-Qaeda model. Nothing was privatized in the sense that control passed into the hands of private citizens, or even (*shriek*) workers. Every pseudo-transfer retained the magical Postwatch proliferation property.

And it’s all hidden, partly beneath this language of “privatization”, retreating government and non-existent competition. For instance, unless you happen to read through pages 43-44 of the Postwatch Annual Report 2005/6 (pdf), you’ll have no idea that the self-appointed (but certainly not self-financing) consumer champion spent £200,000 obtaining a judicial review of a Postcomm (that’s the regulator, by the way) decision; or that during this financial year they anticipate a potential £700,000 bill from legal action involving Royal Mail. Corporate lawyers get distastefully rich while different parts of the sclerotic state sue the arse off each other. Nor would you know that since Postwatch is funded on a fee per complaint basis, a shortfall of £870,000 caused by a drop in customer complaints is expected to be made up by the DTI. When service improves, it costs us more, on top of the more it’s already costing us to improve the service. Still, on the plus side, at least that annual report is available in Welsh.

Socialism may have lost, but boy did big government win. I can’t see how anyone, let alone an eloquent commentator such as Jeremy Seabrook, could think otherwise.

First published at The Sharpener.

But the best blog post I’ve read all year has given me a nudge. Specifically, this:

… to voice my entrenched views questioning the morality of making a profit from the provision of healthcare…

I guess this feeling is common. It probably forms the backbone of public opposition to “privatizing” the NHS. But why? Why do so many of us instinctively feel that profiting from healthcare is plain wrong?

We don’t have the same hostility to profiting from chocolate (rots teeth) or brewing (cirrhosis) or skateboard-making (broken wrists). But the people who put the ultimate impact of these right, we expect to work for love. It’s not an argument about funding limits: public healthcare expenditure per capita in France is higher than the UK, within a national insurance system part-provided by private contractors. It’s not, either, about healthcare being “free at the point of delivery” or involving co-payment. Both are compatible with wholly private, wholly public or neither-Arthur-nor-Martha provision.

And the finite-pot argument (that profit subtracts from the total available for patient care) is a fallacy, if multiple providers increase competition and therefore efficiency. When only one airline flew to Paris, nobody could afford to go. Now most of us can. Nobody seriously argues for a National Supermarket Service. And so on. This economic line of reasoning, the finite-pot argument, whether accurate or not, seems too instrumental anyway: the objection appears to be one people just feel.

But yet, in my experience, people working and being treated inside the NHS don’t just feel part of a giant civic institution, as they do in state education. There are no civic side-benefits, not any more. I just wanted the surgeon to make my daughter well. I didn’t care who paid her. The institutions that impacted daily on staff were teams, groups of colleagues, wards, units.

And we don’t just feel that doctors and nurses ought to work for board and lodging and no more. They are quite rightly allowed to make a profit from their labour. Yet companies involved in the business of making people better aren’t?

First published at The Sharpener.