“But you’re called 8-hour Cleaning Services!” he complains, and is told: “It’s just the name of the shop, sir.”The National Health Service. It’s just its name; it’s not what it does.Mr Milburn is insisting on reform. He’s setting up local trusts that will receive government funds from which they can buy operations from their preferred supplier.Sound familiar? It should do It’s the internal market back under another guise The Tories should praise it A lot. If Old Labour believe that praise is justified, they might bring down the government. Well, it’s worth a try.Sir Patrick Cormack inflated himself to make a point of order about “the rampant verbal inflation” of question time.The House had reached no more than question 10 on the order paper. He asked the old todger in the chair to demand crisp answers from ministers instead of their rambling diatribes.Todge could do nothing but agree, as one helpless old member to another.Simoncarr75 hotmail
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The mighty German industrial trade union, IG Metall, is firing a series of shot-across-the-bows strikes in support of its claim for a 6.5 per cent pay increase. Yet German industrial workers are the best-paid in the world – and the country has just dipped into recession and has 4 million people unemployed and rising.Are they unreasonable, out-of-touch or, maybe, just greedy?
Actually none of the above. The labour unrest in Germany reflects two profound pressures in European society: the cost of social security and the shift from manufacturing to services. These happen to be particularly evident in Germany, but they are relevant to all of us.The German workers might appear to be acting greedily, and the scale of the claim is far above inflation, but their discontent has a solid economic background. For the past three years they have been accepting very low pay settlements of around 1.5 per cent a year, while workers in service industries have been doing rather better. Now that the mood of German manufacturers has improved – they are more confident than they have been for a year – they want to claw some of this lost ground back.But surely German workers are already stupendously well paid? Well, no – that is the case if you look only at pre-tax pay. In fact, they take home less than their British counterparts.

The latest comparable figures looking at what workers were actually paid are for 1998, but the relationships will not have changed much. These show that the cost to a German employer of a single worker on average earnings in manufacturing, converted in equal purchasing power dollars, was $35,863 (£25,133)a year The cost to a British employer was $29,277. But knock off tax and employer and employee social security and the German worker received only $17,147 while the British one got $19,906. German income tax for this worker is similar to ours – 17 per cent against 15 per cent. The big difference is much higher social security costs in Germany.Now it is true that the German worker may have better pension provision, though these are being cut, and he or she probably has better health care. But school performance is worse according to the latest OECD study, and, of course, unemployment is vastly higher. Furthermore, in the last year German wages in international terms have been depressed by the poor performance of the euro, so that if a German family is holidaying anywhere other than the eurozone, it will feel quite poor.