Increase in rail-worker casualties

The immediate cause of the deplorable fatalities on the track near Margam has been identified. However, the report goes on to say that the Rail Accidents Investigations Branch (RAIB) will continue work to establish the root causes of the incident. In particular:

the RAIB's investigation will identify the sequence of events that led to the accident and consider: 

•  what might have influenced the actions of those on site 
• the protection arrangements that were in place 
• the planning of the work and the implementation of Network Rail's standard for keeping people safe on or near the line 
• any relevant underlying management or organisational factors

Possibly coincidentally (because it makes no reference to Margam), a report has appeared in Private Eye about the effects of the gig economy on track maintenance. It states that a trackworker on a zero hours contract was killed by a train while placing warning devices on tracks near Purley, Surrey, last November.

As a Controller of Site Safety (COSS) he should have been watched by an assistant. His brother was rostered as his assistant that night. Both were booked by an agency which 'engages self-employed individuals on zero-hours contracts'. The assistant was in bed; he was booked to work 60 hours that week in his daytime parcels-delivery job.

[...] British Transport Police has investigated ghosting 'involving other contractors' for more than 10 years. But Network Rail's contracting regime causes other safety problems. After a 125mph express nearly hit trackworkers in 2917, it emerged that people on zero-hours contracts feared losing work if they complained about unsafe practices. [...]

By outsourcing maintenance, Network Rail can conform to government employment rules while exploiting the gig economy.

If systemic errors are revealed in the course of the Margam investigation, I trust that the new Transport Minister, Grant Shapps, will not hesitate to correct them.

Mozambique: how soon we forget

"People across central Mozambique are struggling to rebuild their lives - four months on from two devastating cyclones. Nearly 650 people were killed and more than 160,000 were displaced after cyclones Idai and Kenneth tore through parts of southern Africa. Many are still waiting to return to what is left of their homes."

This report is from last week, but one fears that little has changed.

Enigma: the Polish clones

Eighty years ago, less than two months before the invasion of Poland which would trigger World War 2, a short conference of cryptanalysts began in Paris. At the meeting, representatives of the Deuxième Bureau and the British intelligence services were presented by Polish Intelligence with clones of the Enigma enciphering machine currently used by the German military and techniques for decrypting the messages it produced. These were the fruits of ten years work by the Ciphers Office of the Polish army's general staff and the brilliant mathematicians they had recruited. The Polish contribution to the Enigma decryption - including the invention of the "bomba kryptologiczna" (cryptologic bomb) - is detailed here.

Two new party leaders

I regret that Jo Swinson did not promise to re-examine the rôle of seaborne nuclear weapons in UK's defence strategy (nor, of course, did Ed Davey) but if we have to have a prime minister with access to the relevant codes I would rather have a rooted wife and mother who is less likely to start a war than someone who has abandoned his family, failed to fulfil his duties as journalist, minister or even MP (how often has he attended the Commons since his re-election?) and treated the metropolis as a play-pen. Boris Johnson's mayoralty of London was made less than disastrous by having good people around him to keep him in check. Much depends on his choice of ministers. With so many recent resignations and refusals to serve, his pool from which to select is drying up. If he insists on choosing only hard-line Leavers, thus spreading the talent pretty thin, he is unlikely to obtain the confidence of the House of Commons. The traditional loyalty and cohesion of the Conservative Party will not come to his aid.

Jo has had an extra 24 hours to pick a shadow team. No rumours have emerged, which suggests that there will be no massive upheaval. However, she may have to retrieve portfolios from the Lords if the hints that more Members are about to cross the floor (or the gangway) have substance. Then there is the strong probability of Wales returning a Liberal Democrat again on 1st August. 😉

Co-ownership

There is a pattern of Liberal influence in government. In 1977, during the Lib-Lab pact, a working party was appointed by the then Secretary of State for Industry to develop the idea of a Co-operative Development Agency. One of the working party's recommendations was that the Government should bear the cost of setting up the agency and running it for a period of three years. After that, it was expected that the CDA would become self-financing. The original remit of the CDA was a wide one—to promote the adoption and the better understanding of co-operative principles and to represent the interests of the co-operative movement. The Board of the CDA decided to concentrate on the worker co-operative sector and it has been successful in promoting the co-operative concept and encouraging the setting up of worker co-operatives. When the CDA was first founded, there were only 300 worker co-operatives; in 1990, when the Conservative government wound it up, there were more than 2,000. After the Thatcher/Howe monetarist adventure which cut a swathe through small and medium enterprises, it was found that proportionately more cooperatives had survived than their traditional counterparts. The CDA was a rare example of Labour/Liberal convergence, of one of Labour's roots (the cooperative movement) and a long-standing Liberal commitment to co-ownership coming together.

Under the coalition, when the Conservatives had already started to bully or con Liberal Democrat ministers into compromising party policy, the Finance Act 2014 offered tax breaks to employee ownership trusts. However, as a legal advisor pointed out, "Whilst the two new tax exemptions are welcome and go some way to putting employee trust ownership on a par with the tax advantages for direct employee share ownership, tax, of itself, should not drive business structuring. Employee ownership is a tried and tested business model in the UK. Businesses such as the John Lewis Partnership are proof of this. This is what should attract attention to this ownership model. Of course, the new tax exemptions certainly serve to raise the profile of this under-used business model." A month after EO Day, the Employee Ownership Association is pressing for more government action to promote a business model which gives greater financial stability and job satisfaction, resulting in low staff turnover.

There is more here.

Our aid money diverted to prop up Fox's failing Department

That was my first reaction when I saw this story. The BBC reports:

The Department for International Trade is to be given part of the official £14bn aid budget. It will spend the funds on helping developing countries learn from UK expertise on trade deals and attracting foreign investment. The move will see Liam Fox's department spending funds earmarked as Official Development Assistance. The funds will still count towards the government's target of spending 0.7% of national income on overseas aid.

It seems to me that money that could be spent directly on people suffering from poverty and disease in third-world nations is being diverted to men in suits who will give "advice". Such advice has in the past enabled corrupt governments to use tax havens to deny their nations revenue to support public services.

The media release speaks of "UK expertise on trade deals". As I understand it, Dr Fox's Department is still learning, having had to recruit an outside expert and train up many civil servants as a result of losing access to the real expertise in Brussels. As for attracting foreign investment, surely that is the province of CDC or Actis, neither of which now need taxpayer funds?

The suspicion still remains that this a bit of Treasury sleight-of-hand to divert overseas aid money into helping to offset the cost of a troubled Department. There will also be the temptation to use part of it as a slush fund to pay "commission" in order to secure trade agreements. But even if my cynicism is ill-founded (and I hope it is), this diversion of funds is a long way from the original intention of earmarking 0.7% for helping people on the ground.

Several flashbulb moments

From the NASA history site:

The LM landed on the Moon at 20:17:39 GMT (16:17:39 EDT) on 20 July 1969 at 102:45:39.9. Engine shutdown occurred 1.5 seconds later. The LM landed in Mare Tranquilitatis (Sea of Tranquility) at latitude 0.67408° north and longitude 23.47297° east and 22,500 feet west of the center of the landing ellipse. Approximately 45 seconds of firing time remained at landing.

For the first two hours on the lunar surface, the crew performed a checkout of all systems, configured the controls for lunar stay, and ate their first post-landing meal. A rest period had been planned to precede the extravehicular activity of exploring the lunar surface but was not needed.

After donning the back-mounted portable life support and oxygen purge systems, the commander prepared to exit the LM. The forward hatch was opened at 109:07:33 and the commander exited at 109:19:16. While descending the LM ladder, he deployed the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly from the descent stage. A camera in the module provided live television coverage as he descended. The commander’s left foot made first contact with the lunar surface at 02:56:15 GMT on 21 July (22:56:15 EDT on 20 July) at 109:24:15. His first words on the lunar surface were, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

So it is exactly fifty years since a manned spacecraft landed on the moon. (One should not forget that the Soviet Union had landed - or crashed - at least half-a-dozen objects on the moon's surface starting in September 1959.). Most people of a certain age can remember exactly where they were when it happened. My own memory is reinforced by the fact that my first daughter had been born the day before. There was a visit or two to the maternity hospital at Barnehurst, which even then was far from overcrowded so that Yvonne and young Catherine received the sort of personal attention which would astonish users of the English NHS today.

The new granddad (grandmother must have wondered what the fuss was about and retired to bed) and I settled down to watch the lunar excursion through the early hours of the morning. Notwithstanding the remarkable background programming fronted by James Burke and Patrick Moore, and both our perhaps conservative preferences for BBC, my recollection of the respective programmes was that ITV was providing the better pictures, so we agreed to stick with the commercial channel. We did hear and puzzle over the immortal first words. The rest of the time between then and my departure with DVL for Swansea is all hazy, but I do recall the first clear night and looking up at the full moon and saying to myself: "We've been up there.".

Brexit boost to pill-makers' profits

Just as Brexit did not on its own eviscerate Ford Europe or cause Deutsche Bank to embark on its current austerity programme, so the escalation in the price of pharmaceuticals was already under way before the June 2016 referendum. Phil Hammond, writing as MD in the current Private Eye, confirms there was rank profiteering. I quote extensively from his article. Two cases stand out.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that from 2011 to 2015, Auden Mckenzie was the sole supplier of 20mg hydrocortisone tablets (the primary treatment for Addison's disease) and charges to the NHS rose from around £46 to £90 for a pack of 30 tablets, increasing the yearly bill to the NHS from £1.7m to £3.7m. The CMA has provisionally found that Auden Mckenzie was making monthly payments to its rival Waymade not to enter the market.

The CMA has also accused four drug companies of unlawfully colluding to increase the price of prochlorperazine, a drug used to treat nausea and dizziness, by 700% over four years. Alliance, Focus, Lexon and Medreich allegedly agreed not to compete to supply the 3mg tablets to the NHS, forcing a price hike from £6.49 a pack in 2013 to £51.68 in 2017.

In July 2018, the Department of Health was given new powers to predict and control the spiralling costs of generics, but the National Audit Office has not been convinced that the DoH knew how to use its powers.

Now Brexit has presented the industry with a splendid new weapon. Sterling has hit a 27-month low against the euro, causing price inflation and making the continental market more attractive to pharmaceutical suppliers. Nor is the NAO confident that the DoH would be able to safeguard medicine supplies if and when the UK leaves the EU. These failures affect us in Wales, because the control of the price of medicines is not devolved to this country, as it is to Scotland.

There appears to be little real competition between the companies which have sprung up in the last twenty years or so. The government must use the powers which parliament has given it. If these fail, then it must look seriously at setting up its own manufacturing facility to keep the private sector honest.