About as clear a statement of her views as you’re ever likely to see:
Everything costs the state.
Polly Toynbee.
6 responses
-
That’s rather a selective quote, Tim, without the sentence before it or the numerous sentences after it that should be read with it:
“It is a message all these social enterprises repeated to them time and again. It takes cash to set up a company out of nothing to take over a government function… there is no escape: it is still taxpayers’ money buying the contracts, even if they are better run by social enterprise.”
Just saying… -
Well, she has cherry picked all the best examples of social enterprises that work in London.
Social enterprises are valid and have their place, but when they are pump primed with government cash and there’s already the market providing these services, its all a bit daft.
You pay the double whammy of capacity building, and the price of the services on top.
And then it creates a dependency culture amongst many social enterprises – and some are bleeding hearts, and sometimes their services can be poorer and more expensive than the private sector.
But don’t get me wrong – there are some very worthy and well performing social enterprises that offer high quality services. But this is down to the enterprises themselves – their board, management and staff, and not central government setting them up!
Lets celebrate our successful social enterprises, but they are definitely not the big solution that Polly intimates.
I did some work on this in Belfast, where a community worker in a social enterprise asked “show me a successful social enterprise that is financially viable and sustainable without grants because I have never seen one”! in the case in Belfast, it was true, not one was viable on its own. -
Perhaps Mrs Toynbee should ruminate on the eternal question as to whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog? Also Polly should also ruminate on whether she wants a cracker or not..
Kind Regards
The cloned corpse of Marcus Tal -
For Toynbee, the state is Santa Claus. She is an idiot, and I have no idea why people take her seriously. She is quite charming on a personal level, though.
-
The good old Labour movement inspired Co-op has just scrapped its final salary pension scheme, and soon there won’t be any left except for state employees. The state seems to look after its own when I thought it existed to look after all of us. Like in Soviet Russia, the state in Britain is self-serving and I’d advise any youngster to join the ranks of its paid staff unless they have a very special talent. A bigger state is great for those on the inside but a disaster for those of us paying for it.
-
“She is an idiot, and I have no idea why people take her seriously. She is quite charming on a personal level, though.” I’m sure they used t say that about Godwin.
Leave a Reply