Bastardisation of the East: Budget airlines - connecting Barnet with the Third World

Friday, August 28, 2009

Budget airlines - connecting Barnet with the Third World

Is Barnet being used as a Petri dish for what is soon to become David Cameron’s Britain? Or do we have a not so subtle way of clearing out Barnet’s least useful and most expensive from the borough so that a Tory run council can claw back millions of pounds it lost through sheer ineptitude? Either way, we have a clear indication that however bad this current lot are, there’s worse waiting in the wings.

The Guardian has picked up on what looks like a Tory policy. The Tories haven't needed many of these until now as Cameron has been doing just fine sniping at the current circus and enunciating his cha-cha-chás with vacuous buzzwords like ‘choice’ and ‘change’. But over in Barnet we seem to have the blueprint for a local innovation that the future PM is "expected to look closely at", nicknamed ‘easyCouncil.’ It’s the brainchild of Barnet council leader Mike Freer, who has become sufficiently enamoured with the business plan of budget airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair to base distribution of council services on them. Well, partially - Freer isn’t really interested in the idea that the average Brit can fly to Malaga or Prague for vastly reduced prices, but rather more taken with the part where the airline does the very bare minimum and customers have to pay extra for basic services such as food on board, getting a seat or even booking and checking in to the flight they have already paid for.

Conservatives were at best slow off the mark and at worst outright Quislings during the clamour to defend the NHS from wingnut smears from across the Atlantic and it’s easy to see why. This new plan cuts services run by the council or outsources them to private companies that will no doubt maintain the levels of customer care previous privatisation efforts have brought. One example reported in the Guardian is the cutting of live-in wardens at sheltered housing for old people, replacing them with 'floating wardens' that work across the whole borough and may be privately funded. Another example is the 'priority boarding' given to those that can pay an extra charge to be fast-tracked for planning permission. Council services will effectively be run with extra benefits going to the highest bidders at the expense of those coughing up for the basic 'rates'. Yet another example of judging a society by how well the people at the top are doing rather than the nation’s least well off and yet another way of widening the gap between rich and poor.

By copying a model as hostile to users as Ryanair we can already work out that Mike Freer has no interest in public services, so how should we judge his ability to handle profits? Well, last year he was recognised by Private Eye for this very skill:

"One man who raised cluelessness to an art form was the Tory leader of the London borough of Barnet, Mike Freer. He told councillors that he couldn’t be blamed for the council losing £27.4m in dodgy Icelandic banks because he had never bothered to review the council’s investments. Ever. And in a former life he used to be, er, a banker. Quite.”

Useless in all the fields required of a modern day British council leader, what better inspiration could there possibly be? The Guardian has done well to look into this outrage, but the real test of how far the Conservatives would be pushing their luck remains The Daily Mail and its comments crypt. And even here we find many of its denizens are wailing and moaning in consternation:

"As we saw on Panorama, the way Barnet are dealing with elderly, frail people, who can't look after themselves, is by removing wardens from warden controlled, secure housing, and cutting back on housing benefits for the disabled, hoping they'll move out of the borough. Barnet council is penalising the weakest members of society BECAUSE they can't fight back. How's about Mr. Freer and his palsaccepting the blame for wasting £37 million in the Icelandic banks WITHOUT asking the council taxpers approval."
- Nannette, London, 28/8/2009

"Ludicrous. Why should people have to pay extra just to get councils to do the job they are supposed to be doing anyway?"
- Rosie, Slough, 28/8/2009

¶ posted by the leech at 8/28/2009

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