Taxi violence in Britain?

In South Africa, sad to relate, stories of shootings at taxi ranks are all too common, as taxi bosses hire hitmen to take out their rivals. There have even been threats uttered against Johannesburg’s new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, and I believe someone was shot a month or two ago when a new route opened.

Until now I’ve not heard of taxi violence in Britain. But now Sky News is reporting shooting incidents at a taxi rank in Whitehaven (north-west of London, where the 2012 Olympic Games are to be held), which are possibly connected with taxi rivalries. Body Of Suspected Gunman Found After Shootings Across Cumbria | UK News | Sky News:

Police have found a body believed to be that of Derrick Bird, who was being hunted over shootings across the Lake District.

The body was found in a wooded area near Boot, where Bird, 52, had abandoned his car.

Police hunting Bird found a gun in the area where the body was discovered.

Local reports are putting the number of fatalities in the shooting spree as high as 10, including one person killed in Duke Street, Whitehaven.

It hasn’t been confirmed yet that it is taxi-related violence, but that is what some people seem to be saying.

In South Africa the taxi “industry” is one of the finest examples of the unfettered free market in actiion, with minimal government regulation. It’s a free-for-all out there, the nearest thing to laissez faire you can find. If there is a serious incident, in which 5 or more people are killed, the government does get involved, to the extent of trying to broker a peace deal between the rival taxi bosses, rather as they are trying to do between ZANU-PF and the MDC in Zimbabwe.

Itn’t capitalism marvellous?

Real Economic Development, Not Slogans

Half an Hour: Real Economic Development, Not Slogans:

Indeed, the remark reflects the fallacious belief that all private sector economic activity is wealth producing, while all public sector activity is wealth draining. This is simply not the case. A wide variety of public sector activities can directly drive revenue into the province (for example, sales of energy by a crown corporation) while others can drive it indirectly (for example, tourism marketing and promotion). Meanwhile, private sector activity can be nothing more than an unproductive drain on society.

Hear! hear!

And we know how private sector activity and “structural adjustment programmes” have impoverished many parts of Africa, though of course asset stripping does “produce” wealth for a few.

Time to curb the ‘asset strippers and robbers’ who ruin the financial markets, say archbishops -Times Online

For more than thirty years the ideology of neoliberalism has spread throughout the world. It was enthusiastically propagated in the Reagan-Thatcher years and led to the mania for privatisation, which continues in South Africa and has led to the deterioration of our roads, the quality of our water, and many other things.

Church leaders have been slow to speak out about these things. It takes a well-publicised financial crisis to get people like the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to start using words like “idolatry” when referring to it in public.

Time to curb the ‘asset strippers and robbers’ who ruin the financial markets, say archbishops -Times Online:

Leaders of the Church of England launched fierce attacks on the world’s stock market traders last night, condemning them as bank robbers and asset strippers and calling for a judicial review into Britain’s financial services.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York demanded stronger regulation and an end to speculation and living on debt.

Dr Rowan Williams spoke out in defence of Karl Marx, defending key aspects of his critique of capitalism and gave a warning that society was running the risk of idolatry in its relationship with wealth.

(Hat-tip to Fr David MacGregor)

The hidden and unintended consequences of the privatisation mania are now beginning to appear. Mutual building societies and insurance cooperatives went commercial, bribing thier members with “windfall” shares (actually, it was only part of their investment received in advance — they were mortgaging their future value to external shareholders). Some of them, like the Old Mutual, continue to use the word “mutual” in their names, to deceive the public. The Old Mutual should actually be called the “New Commercial”. One result of this can be seen in the collapse of Northern Rock in Britain.

Another unintended and unforeseen consequence of the privatisation mania can be seen in the deterioration of the quality of South Africa’s water.

News – Environment: SA water quality is fast deteriorating:

South Africa’s water quality is fast deteriorating but the shrinking scientific and engineering capacity to counter this is emerging as the ‘real crisis’ to strike the country.

This is according to Dr Anthony Turton, a senior water researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who maintains that up to 50 percent of municipalities ‘do not even have one qualified engineer’ on their staff…

“The original work for that was done in the 1980s in massive programmes based at the CSIR,” says Turton. “Those programmes generated many PhD graduates, but also did the primary science on which future management will be based.

“Those programmes are no longer in existence and this is a national crisis of note. We need to recover the bits and pieces we can and then develop new national capacity,” says Turton…

“Nowhere else in the world is this happening so we cannot turn to other countries and say: ‘Please help us’. We as a nation will be required to solve this problem as a nation. This is where national science councils come in. They are national assets, but the current funding models are so restrictive that their potential is being reduced and the capacity they have is being privatised.”

The privatisation of national resources like the CSIR was begun under the National Party government in the 1980s, and has continued under the Thatcherist policies of the ANC. One of the reasons that our water supply has deteriorated under privatisation is that nobody stands to make a lot of money out of water research.

And only when it is actually staring them in the face do Christian leaders publicly speak out, and then mostly against the symptoms, not about the causes of the disease, which has been growing unchecked in the Western world since the 1980s, and metastatising throughout the world through globalisation.

The benefits of privatisation

Walton Pantland, discussing the recent postal strike in the UK, notes some of the benefits of privatisation in Red Star Coven: It’s not just about your letters arriving late.

It is not only Britain that has suffered from this process, because the Thatcherist policies of the ANC (and of the Nats before them) have led to a similar process here in South Africa. The Nats introduced toll roads, and the ANC government is extending the system. Life expectancy and literacy rates in some parts of Africa, because the free market enthusiasts demand that governments spend less on health care and education.