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Originally posted by SaltireWarrior
I know it sucks.
Best move is to come to Scotland, we have it a wee bit better than our neighbours down south.
Also persuade anyone you know to never vote Tory in their entire life. Ever.
Originally posted by DaveNorris
capitalism - failed.
comunism - failed.
democracy - failed.
maybe its time for something new.
hey id vote for ronald mcdonald to be prime minister, he cant do any worse than the clowns running the show at the moment.
Originally posted by illuminnaughty
That stiff upper lip has a hook in it. Hook line and sinker. We`ve been had good and proper. Only thing left is to gut us and it wont be long before that happens, under camoron and his gang of tossers.
Originally posted by cassandranova
You could always come to the States. It's not better here, but the natives are much more restless.
You could always come to the States. It's not better here, but the natives are much more restless.
For two decades the Private Finance Initiative has been a risky way of funding new hospitals, schools, prisons and roads: companies build and maintain public facilities under contracts lasting as long as 35 years. File on 4 (broadcast last week, available here this week and on podcast indefinitely) identifies PFI hospital contracts that within a few years of being struck have been sold on, yielding profits for financiers averaging 66.7 per cent.
(To put that in context: a more conventional profit margin for a FTSE 100 company such as Sainsbury would be closer to 3 per cent.)
File on 4 exposes the UK Government Treasury’s failure to gather meaningful data about the secretive secondary market in PFI contracts. The programme interviews analyst Dexter Whitfield who has tracked down data that betrays private sector profits whose dizzying scale suggests an appalling lack of advocacy on behalf of taxpayers in the framing of the original contracts.
...
More than £250 billion of public money has been committed to PFI projects and we remain trapped in these contracts for decades to come. In Portsmouth alone paying for the Queen Alexandra Hospital means finding £44 million-a-year, rising with inflation, until 2040. Already under strain, in two years since opening the hospital has shed 700 jobs, with 90 more to go and the palliative care ward has been shut.
While Portsmouth Hospital struggles to meet its financial obligations, including the £44m a year for its PFI, the company that built the hospital has done very nicely out of the deal. Five years ago the Midlands construction firm Carillion put in half the original capital for the project and last year it decided to sell its 50% stake in the equity. The buyer was an infrastructure company which now has the right to charge for cleaning, catering, maintenance and other services over the next 29 years. We asked Carillion what price it got for the shareholding and what level of profit that represented on its original investment. In a long reply the company doesn't give any figures and says only that the profit was "not excessive" but an academic at Edinburgh University has tracked down the details.
...
"Carillion was the lead equity investor, they put in £12m. It opened in July 2009 and last June Carillion sold its stake in the deal for £31m. So it put in £12.1m just a few years ago and it sold that stake for £31m last June."