The most numerically challenged child can see in a moment what is wrong with the privatisation programme that will waste Labour's second term and uncounted millions of taxpayers' money. Borrowing costs companies far more than it does the state. Then they must take their profits. As a result, every town that has received a privately financed hospital has seen beds and community health services cut, as trusts struggle to meet the extortionate bills. What should be cause for good cheer - the opening of a modern hospital - has provoked citizens' revolts from Calderdale to Kidderminster.
To please "new" Labour's core constituency in the lobbying, construction and management consultancy industries, the Treasury is simultaneously raising taxes and providing worse services - an achievement that only the African kleptocracies can match.
The case should close here, and would close here if the department that justified monetarism and entry to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism had not invented a canting explanation to confuse critics. Exposing it takes a little time. But the pleasure in understanding the falsity of the political class's fraudulent pragmatism makes the effort worthwhile.
The Treasury assures us that what appears to be a debauching of the public finances is prudent because risk is being transferred to the private sector. If things go wrong - as things invariably do - then the burden of costs overrunning and computers crashing will be carried by big business.
The plea of mitigation slyly exploits a wider source of mystification - everyone who believes the Financial Times has been instructed at length that risk is what the private sector loves. Chief executive officers are extreme sportsmen in Paul Smith suits. They live hard and fast, and cling to the edge by their fingertips. They are never happier than when staking all on gambles that make Russian roulette seem like a lazy game of bowls. The perils they confront are too awful for cowering public servants to contemplate. Look at how the mighty directors of Railtrack and Camelot have been reduced to penury.
Perhaps not. But as ministers claim to be pragmatists without an ideological thought behind their blank faces, we should look at what risks corporations run when they are invited to Gordon Brown's car-boot sale.
The law's delays are an injustice in themselves. The innocent must wait for their names to be cleared, while the victims of crime are left in doubt and fear. Last month, the Lord Chancellor's Department announced that a private finance initiative (PFI) information-technology project to replace the courts' paper files with fast, efficient databases had been postponed indefinitely. Magistrates' clerks who tried to use the system said it was worse than what went before. The cost of the project had risen from £183m to £319m. "Will ICL [the contractor] be penalised at all?" I asked a spokesman for Lord Irvine. "No," he replied. The risk in this instance has been passed to the taxpayer.
The new technology of the new economy is what a private sector grown vainglorious on the self-congratulatory myths of Silicon Valley is meant to understand. Doubtless the Home Office thought as much when it gave Siemens a £77m contract to provide a paper-free system to process asylum applications.
It is not too fanciful to say that the result has been a social disaster. When Siemens delivered the system in 1999 - 18 months late - it couldn't cope. A backlog of 200,000 cases built up, and 600 immigration officers had to be hired to cope with the chaos as best they could. Mounds of rotting paper files, which were waiting to be transferred to disk, had to be fumigated. Tens of thousands of asylum-seekers were stranded on miserly food vouchers for years, as they waited to know if they could stay and earn a living.
Politicians who preached that the poor cannot have rights without responsibilities were most anxious not to accept responsibility themselves. They blamed the victims. The media were never going to accept the double negative of investigating the failings of a private firm while missing the opportunity to incite racial hatred, and bought and encouraged every lie about the bogus overwhelming the system (rather than the system collapsing under the weight of its designers' ineptitude).
In February, the Home Office admitted defeat and scrapped the Siemens document management programmes. Yet Siemens will still be paid until the end of its contract in 2003, as well as help with the stopgap measures necessary to clean up its mess.
The risk in this instance has been passed to the taxpayer (again), to asylum-seekers stuck on benefits way below the poverty line, and to the ethnic minorities who have been on the receiving end of the neo-Nazi violence that the buck-passing and victim-blaming encouraged.
Not even Siemens and the Home Office had the nerve to claim that the failure of the PFI to install a working IT system at the Passport Agency was the fault of "bogus holidaymakers". Nevertheless, the risk was passed to the public, which first was presented with a bottleneck of 565,000 passport applications and then saw the price of passports rise by 33 per cent.
Commenting on the disasters, Computer Weekly said that the PFI had a "fatal flaw". If a new computer programme was the intellectual property of ICL or Siemens or whomever, the government couldn't call in a rival to work the system if the original contractor wasn't up to the job. It would have to scrap the project and start again. Often, it preferred to stumble on, paying more and more to the private operator.
If you owe the bank £100, you're a debtor. If you owe £100m, you're a partner. The private finance initiative and public- private partnerships create de facto private monopolies. In utopian free-market theory, the customer can always shop elsewhere. With the PFI, the supplier has the customer by the throat, because the government cannot, say, close down the Passport Agency or London Underground while it finds a new contractor.
Not that ministers show any signs of having a cool appreciation of the bind they are in. The greatest PFI scandal came from Andersen Consulting, which won the contract to supply a new National Insurance computer. It was, said the then social security minister, Jeff Rooker, "rubbish". Pensioners, widowers and benefit claimants suffered. When asked why Andersen had been forced to pay only 10 per cent of the cost of the shambles, Dawn Primarolo, the Treasury's Paymaster General, said she wouldn't make the management consultants pay more "for fear of jeopardising future relationships".
The "relationships" are intense. Andersen (now rebranded as Accenture) is a new Labour favourite. Before the 1997 election, it gave the party its services for "free" and hired Patricia Hewitt.
Even the Tories wouldn't tolerate Andersen. They banned the company from receiving state contracts because its auditing during the DeLorean scandal was too lax - the commercial equivalent, I thought at the time, of being expelled by the SS for being too brutal. Primarolo's remark suggested that the cultural world of new Labour is too saturated with the platitudes and personalities of the corporate con-sensus for comparable resolution to be thinkable.
So the risks were passed to the public.
They are often fatal. A study by University College London of the first 14 privately financed hospitals found that the consequence of getting corporations to build and manage NHS wards was, on average, a 33 per cent reduction in beds in each hospital (12,000 went in total).
The PFI contracts to ITnet to manage housing benefit in Islington, and to Capita to do the same in Lambeth, resulted in families being thrown on to the streets, as backlogs of claims grew into the tens of thousands. In local, as in national, government, councils found the consumer had little choice. Lambeth will have to pay millions to be rid of Capita, while Islington Council's leader, Steve Hitchins, told me that huge amounts of officer time were being wasted in negotiations with ITnet.
Again, there is no DeLorean-style punishment. Despite its lamentable record in south London, Capita has been given the PFI contract to run the new Criminal Records Bureau.
(The government will soon force all of us to prove to employers that we don't have a criminal record. You may lose your job if you can't get a letter from Capita, which will have to send out millions of certificates a year. The criminal records themselves are littered with inaccuracies. My top tip is that the bureau is a racing certainty to take the place in the public's affections currently held by the Child Support Agency.)
I could go on. PFI has left the streets of Hackney and Brighton clogged with rubbish - who now dares say that new Labour has exorcised memories of the Winter of Discontent. The part-privatisation of the Tube will take underground the philosophy that gave us Railtrack. There is a growing scandal about the ability of consortiums to manipulate the profits of risk. They extract money from the Exchequer on the grounds that their public works are a risk, and then make windfall profits when the risks prove illusory and they refinance their debts.
But I hope that one mild point is clear by now: new Labour isn't new and isn't Labour. Ministers' claims that they are free from ideology are merely daft. Everyone has an ideology. What is ludicrous is their boast that they are pragmatists concerned only with delivery. They are, in truth, the blind, doltish, doddering and wildly imprudent relics of Thatcherism.
They don't protect the public. They don't protect public money. They have no proper sense of where interests conflict. How can they be pragmatic when they don't know what works? When they don't even look at what happens?
