This module is for those seeking Corporatization of state assets, government agencies or municipal organizations into corporations. We will be using as our models, the BBC and the National Health Service. You, at the back of the class. Capita? Are you chewing gum? Spit it out or share some with the whole class. Pardon? You don’t understand the business model for sharing your gum? Quite right. Gold star.

Now, to understand the methodology of turning public assets into private investment opportunities, we need to understand a basic Machiavellian principle of divide and rule. This would normally apply to a rebellious underclass, but works just as well for the public sector. Firstly, ensure that you repeatedly describe the publicly funded institution as ‘bloated expensive and too centralised’. Think of a slow moving luxury ocean liner with its hull clad in Louis Vuitton and gold leaf, even if the image in most people’s heads is a battered shabby whale with scars all over it. Ensure that there are no comparable private institutions so that no one can compare the running costs or challenge your assertions that the institution is no longer ‘fit for purpose’.

Next, destroy the economy of scale by introducing an internal market. Firstly break up each part of the institution into smaller fund holding units that compete with each other to provide services at external market prices that were previously absorbed by the overhead at cheaper rates achieved through the economies of scale.

A perfect business model to study here is from the nineties - John Birt’s visionary ‘Producers Choice’ initiative in the BBC that divided the BBC’s 23,000 staff into 8,500 buyers and 14,500 sellers. This meant a light bulb replacement in an office used by one programme would be charged against their production budget along with office rental and the costs of requesting a music track from the BBC sound library and discovering that it was now cheaper to ‘outsource’ the need by nipping down to a supermarket and buying it. Thus, the BBC, (the bloated luxury liner clad in gold and Vuitton) which used to operate like an old Hollywood studio with its own carpenters, props and costume stores etc could now sell of all of these wasteful assets and pay the market price for private companies to supply them with what they previously supplied to themselves at a fraction of the cost. Even when the model is discovered to have been flawed and is scrapped, the important work has been done and the economies of scale fatally damaged.

Another instructive example from the nineties is the UK National Health Service which was also subjected to the internal market by turning each health authority into a separate fundholding trust with its own management rather than the centralised layers of administration (remember to say bloated and unwieldy) that were wilfully capitalising on the economies of scale by cleaning hospitals, buying equipment, feeding and caring for patients from the same budget. The staff costs of course, would initially rocket by 800% due to the new layers of management required for each trust, but you can’t make an omelette fit for purpose without over-egging. Then, show your adaptability to market forces by changing the structure at least three times but always retaining the internal market ensuring the institution becomes more and more expensive and can be cherrypicked by private providers for the most lucrative services.

The final part of this module covers the closing stages for which all of this preparation has carefully laid the ground. Declare the public institution a wasteful drain on the nation’s resources and argue for a complete private sector replacement dictated by the market with some cursory inspectorate to ensure that some basic standards that are no longer economic to maintain can be seen to occasionally be observed by high profile incidents that are exposed and censured whilst the majority remain un-reported. Argue that the country can no longer afford the public funded institution and hope that the British people maintain their reputation for apathy and resignation and don’t flood the streets to protest that everything they have come to rely upon is being taken away and sold to the highest bidder.

Next term, how to divert attention from tax avoiding international corporations by scapegoating foreigners and homosexuals for everything that is wrong with the European project, the economy, the welfare system and the lack of decent real ale in golf clubs  Farage Major and Cameron Minor, see me after class. Putin? Insolent boy. Put your shirt back on at once.

The peculiar calculus of US Intelligence was laid bare to the world when NSA Director General Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. At one point General Alexander, resentful at this unnecessary intrusion into his agency’s activities fell back on what Samuel Johnson called ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’. Patriotism. Talking ‘from the heart’, he appealed to the emotions of the committee:

‘These are patriots who come to work every day saying “How can we defend this country and protect our civil liberties and privacy?” Nothing that has been released, has shown that we are trying to do something illegal or un-professional.’

The sums are starting to emerge in this appeal, but no one denies the NSA’s innate professionalism. They are at the cutting edge of data collection and surveillance monitoring, due in part to the only part of the ‘special relationship’ that truly exists; the secure link between the UK’s GCHQ and the NSA exposed by Snowden but an open secret to anyone who studies the math. The arithmetic according to Alexander goes like this:

The NSA is stuffed full of patriots = No wrong can be done by the NSA.

Never mind the damage done by the botched intelligence operations of yore. That wasn’t the NSA. The CIA state sponsored assassinations, the failed coups or more spectacularly the successful ones that toppled democratically elected leaders and consistently undermined the credibility of a nation that pretends to defend democracy. Never mind the Iran-Contra affair, the Sandanistas and well, since we’re only talking about ancient history here, the failure to acknowledge the coup in Egypt for what it was, the illegal rendition parties across the globe, the odd illegal war and the continuing machinations that say anything goes as long as it suits the current agenda of priorities, drawn up every couple of years like an a la carte menu that the restaurant keeps to itself and seldom deigns to share with those who pay the bill.  My enemy’s enemy is my friend is an equation that gets a little shaky if you drill down to the shifting sands of intelligence agendas that see Saddam and Bin Laden failing to stay on the right side of the table.  

But all of that was in the bad old days, even if it was only last week that Angela Merkel noticed a few more clicks on her phone and couldn’t get reception anywhere near her right ear. The NSA could not possibly be involved in anything that violated the constitution or acted against the liberties of its citizens because they are patriots. But their allies could. Those effete Europeans with their weird cheeses, suggestive pasta shapes and warm beer could do it and if the NSA just happened to run across the fact that they were doing it and maybe even asked them to, they could legitimately see the data and utilise it. The ultimate intelligence cut-out; a whole continent.

Of course there is a perpetual undercurrent of ‘so what’ about the revelation that allies spy on allies as well as enemies. They have been doing so for as long as there have been intelligence agencies and probably before. The Germans are being a little prim saying ‘you do not spy on your friends’ but noticing that the French are suddenly very silent on the matter and not chiming in with their pious sentiment. Also, like every other country, they seem to have no qualms about spying on their own. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) - Germany’s foreign intelligence service made a fool of itself in 2005 when it placed many of the country’s journalists under surveillance trying to find the source of leaks from…the BND.  Intelligence is an Ouroboros serpent that feeds itself with itself. 

Once you know that if you use the right political math you can gather anything on anybody, well, get out your calculator, there’s data to eat and we’re hungry. It’s an addiction described by Graham Greene, Kim Philby and John Le Carre through memoir and fiction. The covert world is exciting on occasion and as catnip to a field agent or intelligence analyst. Never more so than when an order comes in to monitor a world leader or one of your own country’s politicians.  On one side of the ‘special relationship’ a frisson ripples round the UK Security Service or the Secret Intelligence Service as the legal officer gives the OK and the surveillance can begin. On the other, a little shiver shakes the foundations of the NSA presaged by an email or briefing note that begins ‘Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and Section 215 of the USA-PATRIOT Act of 2001…’  Because then, anything goes.

The former enables collection and reading of the content of communications generated by non-U.S. persons, the second enables the collection of metadata, but not the specific content, of U.S. citizens electronic or digital communications. That they sub-contract to those sneaky Europeans.

Skewed math was also prevalent during a particular painful exchange between  House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and University Law School Professor Stephen Vladek when Rogers rewrote the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution on a peek-a-boo basis. He suggested during the hearing at the US National Security Agency (NSA)  that it’s impossible to have your privacy violated if you don’t know that your privacy is being violated.

The recalculated amendment according to Rogers would read:

‘No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws…unless they don’t notice.’

This is the equivalent of a child covering their eyes during a game of hide and seek on the basis that if they can’t see Papa, Papa won’t be able to see them. As with so many things emerging from these exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not the product of a credible intellect.

The typical defence to all this activity is that of General Alexander to the Black Hat security conference in July of this year. Terrorists live amongst us. This is undeniable. London and New York have had painful confirmation of that. But balance and oversight are the keys and it simply isn’t good enough to allow the likes of GCHQ and the NSA to pursue agendas that are subject to interpretations that go beyond protecting the country and move into mass surveillance for its own sake. There has to be a debate that does not end with governments of every hue deciding to leave the matter in the hands of the spies. The Spycatcher affair of the eighties showed what such abandonment of responsibility led to, with a cabal within MI5 pursuing an overtly political agenda against its own government. There is nothing in the subsequent expansion of digital capability that suggests there is sufficient oversight to prevent this happening again. Worse, a government can pass to the intelligence community, agendas it would rather not expose to voters and therefore have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance of monitoring via committee and legal officers on every office floor whilst paying only lip service to matters, the specifics of which, they would rather not know.

The ultimate calculus of the international intelligence community comes up with the conclusion: ‘If we don’t watch everybody, we might miss something that may threaten our country, our political or our commercial interests or our agency’s existence.’ Two and two do not make five. It is Orwellian arithmetic and it doesn’t add up.

‘All The Years of Trying’ is an ode to the Stratford Bard of London’s East End produced and directed by London based film makers Dom Shaw and Daniel Carboni of music documentary specialists Anonymous Films. Patrik Fitzgerald. Known as the Punk Poet and composer of the ultimate anthem 'Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart'; Fitzgerald kicked against the brash three-chord orthodoxy by performing waif-like and vulnerably alone with an acoustic guitar and a tattered book of poems at the height of the punk revolution.

Although never making it to the dizziest heights of pop fame he continues to be a well respected figure, cited as an early influence by author and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, and legendary journalist and Nirvana biographer, Everett True. The new millennium has seen a resurgence of interest in this determined, brave performer who battled on with his music through much travail and now seems set for new appreciation by a whole new generation charmed by his stripped down honesty and integrity.

The film is directed by film maker Dom Shaw who first met Patrik 32 years ago and filmed him for his seminal punk documentary ‘Rough Cut & Ready Dubbed’ which won the John Grierson award for best documentary. Featuring some of his best known songs and interviews with people influenced and entranced by his music, the film is an affectionate tribute to an old friend. ‘I knew Pat long before I met him’ says Shaw ‘because every song was soaked with his own vulnerability and humour that myself and many others could completely identify with.’

‘Everything I've ever read about myself has said how shy and self effacing I am, so I really shouldn't blow my own trumpet about this film. Having said that, I have watched and kind of enjoyed it, I think. I've probably written some good tunes and there are some of them in this film. Being stuck into celluloid is a bit like having your soul stolen, however.  But there you are... Enjoy the film. ‘ Patrik

‘It seems as if all those old bands from the punk era and later are getting their renaissance’ says producer Daniel Carboni, ‘and to be truthful, some of them aren’t worth the attention. But Pat never seems to have got the attention he deserved except from a well respected network of influential artists. We hope this film will help to change all that.’  

It seems as if top cops in the UK are repeatedly calling for the legalisation of drugs to reduce crime. The latest to do so is Durham police chief Mike Barton who advocates Class A opiates for addicts being made available through the National Health System. So far, no government has deemed it a vote-winning measure and have done little more than juggle the various substances between legal categories for judicial purposes. But it feels as if the tipping point might be only a few years away with a petition calling on the government to follow the advice of the Home Affairs Committee and introduce that fabulous device for kicking an issue into the long grass, a Royal Commission on drug law reform. But leaving aside the timidity of politicians, there are some indications that some legalisation may be instituted in the next decade. If it is, a number of the options proffered by pressure groups and advocates among the police have come with expansive claims about the effect on the criminal enterprises that control the import, export and sale of drugs in the UK that need to be tested against the available evidence.

Firstly there are the stated aims of legalisation. Top cops of course like to highlight the reduction in organised crime. Drugs legalisation advocates of various hues tend to soft-pedal this angle over a general belief that the state should play no significant role in what citizens choose to inject, sniff, smoke or otherwise ingest to get their rocks off. The headlines tell us drugs only lead to addiction and death and that legalisation would simply lead to increased use and a generation who would thus treat substance abuse in the same way they do alcohol.  Too late. This has been a feature of my parents generation, of mine and that of my children. In fact, drugs were much easier to obtain than alcohol when I was 16 and considerably cheaper.

The Home Office expresses the perpetual view of all Governments cowed by the task of allowing the commercial or medicinal exploitation of drugs: "Drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. They destroy lives and blight communities. The UK's approach on drugs remains clear, we must help individuals who are dependent by treatment, while ensuring law enforcement protects society by stopping the supply and tackling the organised crime that is associated with the drugs trade." Well, good luck with that pious mixture of hubris and delusion. One notorious member of a family of gangsters grown fat on exploitation of a lucrative Colombian drugs cartel that reportedly owned its own submarine, was fined a million pounds and reportedly asked the Judge with a wry smile if he preferred cash or a cheque. The fight against organised crime has been a pathetic drop in the ocean in a war in which the culprits are more likely to eliminate each other from the growing empires of  organised crime in the endless power plays between the controlling syndicates than to succumb to a knock on the door from an under-funded constabulary.

In 2009, the lobby group Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s report 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' financed partly by, amongst others, the J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust was careful to highlight the difference between drug use and drug addiction or dependency using the usual arguments every teenager caught with a quarter of dope in their laundry by their parents utilises when backed into a corner. Alcohol, caffeine, anti-depressants, tobacco make us all drug users to a greater or lesser degree and all are legal.

It’s always been a convincing argument, particularly when walking home late on a Saturday night or Sunday morning in any major town centre. There is a striking feature about wandering around London in the early hours that is as regular a sight as rubbish trucks growling down the streets at dawn. The city bus stops are full of young women alternately crying or throwing up. Their male counterparts always seem to be missing, perhaps not as resilient or more incapable having a greater capacity if not tolerance for gallons of  the electric soup.

But what police advocates of legalisation through the NHS seem to forget is that most drug use is recreational. Far from being wrinkled husks gasping for another hit and queuing for the chemist to collect their methadone prescriptions, most are casual, occasional and social users who regard their substance of choice as just another choice amongst the panoply of prerequisites for a good night out.

Given this subtlety, it’s easy to see how organised crime would adapt to changing legislation by cornering the market in new designer highs that can’t be found amongst the prescribed versions that would be available through the health system or even over the counter at your local chemist. The model that seems to suggest a way to completely circumvent them or at least put a serious dent in their business is the free market or supermarket model that suggests commercially available through licensed premises, off-licence models aligned to those for alcohol or caffeine energy drinks. This has the disadvantage of doing little more than handing control of the market from an underground cartel of loosely associated and competing criminal exploitation specialists to suppliers with an advertising budget. But given the worship of free markets over state intervention, this may well be where it all ends up. Tobacco advertising bans will dissolve under the weight of such a prospect, which would suggest the cigarette lobbyists should be hyping this as the panacea to a wealth of schizophrenic state proscriptions.

But what would a commercial drugs company with advertising dollars to spend and a research and development department dedicated to producing market-friendly innovations and designer highs to all price bands and demographics look like? Whilst the current atmosphere persists, it is possible that we may all soon be about to find out.