Queuing, grumbling, and death on the trolley — look out for the National Food Service
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It is just as well that we do not have a National Food Service. The queues would be as long as ever, the staff would be grumbling, people would be dying of starvation in the aisles or on the shopping trolleys, and Gordon Brown would be promising to spend more money on it. He might even rustle up a retired banker to tell him that this is the service we need, although no other country has one, except North Korea. More public spending is what he prescribes for the National Health Service. Its cost has already gone up by one-half in real terms (that is, allowing for inflation) in a decade, but is it 50 per cent better? The Chancellor's colleagues complain that it is getting worse. It has its own inflation rate, which is higher than everyone else's, and its own productivity rate, which is lower. Still he cannot or will not accept that the model is wrong, and that what it lacks is the three Cs: customers, competition and choice. They seem to get us fed without much help from him. Meanwhile the queue outside his own door is lengthening. He will be asked to stump up for education, for transport and. I dare say, for the defence of the realm. Labour chancellors before him have taxed and borrowed and spent and told the taxpayers how grateful they should be, until the public finances could take no more of it. This Chancellor still aspires to be different, but what a chance he has missed.
Winter warmer
A SEASONAL benefactor is sending me £200. He lives in Tyneview Park, the stately home of the Benefits Agency, and this is my Winter Fuel Allowance, a Gordon Brown special. I shall spend it on a case of my preferred winter warmer, for this £200 has come round in a circle. It belonged to me before I paid it to the Inland Revenue, which paid it to the Department of Social Security, which passed it on to the charitable agency on Tyneside, which has returned it to me — less, of course, the money that fell off the plate on the way round. About 4 per cent of the Department of Social Security's turnover is absorbed by the costs of the department itself, and the same goes for the Chancellor of the Exchequer's departments, which I take to include the Inland Revenue. So I only get 92 per cent of my money back, and the rest of it goes to keeping civil servants warm in winter. I am their benefactor, and I shall tell them so if I can find the right leaflet to read and fill in. The Chancellor takes a pride in these makework arrangements and this week he was boasting of them again. No doubt he thinks that they make him look like a benefactor.
Let us pray
SOMEBODY will have to pick the railways up, dust them down and set them going, but it will not be Sir Alastair Morton. He has had enough, and this week he stands down as the Strategic Rail Authority's chairman. Six weeks ago in The Spectator he was inviting our prayers for the railways. How much more they need it now that Stephen Byers, as the minister responsible, has put the track and signals in the care of an insolvency practitioner. Now the money, what remains of it, is leaking out of Rai1track, whose contractors and creditors are understandably asking for cash on the nail. No one could have done more to frighten investors and lenders away than Mr Byers, who seems to believe that his New Model Railtrack could find all the capital it needs by saving up, while at the same time not being conducted for profit. The whole industry will need a different structure if it is to support, and to manage and justify, massive investment. It could then make a business case to the new corporation which, so I maintain, we now need for financing grands projets — but what do ministers care about such things when they are happy playing with trains and derailing them?
Reprieve on Sunday
IT would be terrible if the Barclay brothers, who own the Ritz, were to run out of money, so I am glad that they have found somebody to share the costs of Sunday Business. The Press Association has come to its rescue and the paper will return in the new year. When it was launched, I thought this was the last thing I needed. Yet another Sunday paper, but produced on pink newsprint to look like the Financial Times and to read like an FT supplement? Oh, please — but Jeff Randall, its editor, hit on the novel idea of hiring experienced financial journalists who knew their stuff and could write. This was different. I enjoyed it. Then, as happens to newspapers, it got a new editor and a relaunch and a redesign, with a colour magazine and a sports section and pages and pages of personal finance, to make it more like the other Sunday papers and more like the FT. I went off it. Now another relaunch is in prospect. Newspaper managements normally pay for these by economising on journalists, but I commend the original novel idea.
Exchange. . .
NATHAN MEYER ROTHSCHILD had his personal pillar at the Royal Exchange, but time and the markets have moved on, and the historic trading floor at the heart of the City has stood empty for the best part of a century. Visitors stare at its portico, frieze and inscription — 'The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof' — and vainly wonder what goes on behind them. Now they can see for themselves, for the Exchange reopens next week, restored to glory as a place where the Rothschilds might shop, buying shoes from Lobbs, clothes from Dunhill, jewels from Theo Fennell and Tiffany, and champagne by the large glass from Corney 8z. Barrow. I hope that the visitors will be told something of what is going on and has gone on all around them in the City. There is room for all this in the revived Exchange and there ought to be room in the plans.
. . . and Mart
ROTHSCHILDS and others who cannot get down to the Royal Exchange should put their Christmas shopping in the hands of Katie Dashwood at Dash'n'Dote (01451 870379). She is applying the lessons she learned as the City's coolest secretary and, as she says, personal shopper to a market chairman whose name I suppress. Now Dash'n'Dote offers competitive prices on caviar and foie gras. Tell your friends.
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