Morning musings

Woke up to wonder about the various ways in which things are sold or doled out.

So in the case of sweets, they are doled out in shops at so much a quarter, or perhaps the 100g these days. One would not think to make such things freely available (but see below).

In the case of the plumber, it used to be the case that one paid by the visit, with the charge being of the form A+tB+C where A is the call out charge, t is time on the job in seconds, C is the cost of parts & materials and VAT is left out of the account. But, quite commonly now, we pay on the subscription model. So here, at Epsom, we pay British Gas so much a month to look after our water taps. If there is a problem they come and do it, free at the point of service. Perhaps except for parts, the C bit of the charge. And they do reserve the right to declare plumbing events to be ultra vires, that is to say outside the package that you have bought. But we would be happy to fix it for you at £75 an hour plus parts & materials.

A lot of insurance can be thought of as buying services on the subscription model. Which is likely to be charged on the basis of need, rather than on the basis of ability to pay. Not very lefty at all.

In the case of health, we have decided to hand the whole business over to the government and pay for it through tax, which is charged on the basis of ability to pay and so is reasonably lefty. State pensions are somewhere in between, run by the government but including a large contributory chunk, a chunk which reflects the ability to pay in the past. But proper in that it encourages people to make the connection between putting in and taking out, a connection which people are all to apt to forget in the case of tax. At least two people have reported medical gossip to me about the abuse of free health services by people from bog-standard estates, annoyingly keen to prove their right of access, one of which reporters, despite being a old-fashioned lefty public servant, was an advocate of nominal charge at the point of service.

I then started to wonder about the circumstances in which goods were handed out for free. So, in the offices which I worked in, pens and paper used to be freely available from the cupboard. An arrangement which cut down on red tape but did not punish waste and abuse - taking the stuff home for private consumption or for sale in the local car booter. And what about telephones? When is it appropriate to charge staff for private calls? In Microsoft offices and Google offices now, both very rich and successful corporations, all sorts of goods are freely available to staff and visitors. Pens, paper, soft drinks, snacks, meals, pinball machines and pool tables.

In some households, certain consumables are freely available to members and their guests, but not their servants. So in 'Brideshead Revisited', drinks were always put out in the afternoon for whoever might want them. Whereas in other households, the housekeeper, who might or might not be the wife of the head of the household, kept everything - for example the tea caddy - under lock and key and had a large key ring hung with keys hanging from her waist band. I have read in novels of the ceremonial handing over of the keys from the outgoing housekeeper to the incoming one.

Access to stately homes & gardens is mostly charged, either by subscription or at the point of entry. Access to our National Parks is not charged, although one might well be encouraged to contribute, over and above whatever fraction of the tax that we pay finds its way to them. Access to the seaside is not charged, although there may well be back door charging in the form of charging to park the car without which one would be hard put to get there. No-one has yet thought of a way to charge for the air that we breathe, although we have been charged for the water that we drink for some time.

Clearly lots to chew on here. A subject for many essays. But equally clearly, it was time for morning ablutions.

After which, I was intrigued to read in yesterday's DT over breakfast that the BBC had hired a lady QC to advise it on its bullying and harassment procedures. This struck me as an odd choice: why would you hire someone to do this whose most important professional skill was to be able to turn out an entertaining, aggressive and persuasive speech in the adversarial climate of an English courtroom? No doubt such people are also quite clever, but would one not do better to hire an HR professional? Someone with prior knowledge of the problems and the various ways of dealing with them?

On the other hand it strikes me as quite likely that QCs would be well up for bullying and harassment themselves, they are likely to be that sort of person, so perhaps the point is that they bring expert knowledge from that side of the fence to the party.