Craig Murray as ever tries to steer a course which no-one else has ever steered. And crashes. Here he is talking about the impact of the weather:

A combination of crazed right wing thinking and crazed left wind thinking, so typical of the UK, is why our airports are rubbish…

BAA invests in only enough cold weather equipment to cope with a mild to normal winter. It has not tied up capital in equipment that may be fully needed only once in every five years. It crosses its fingers and hopes – it has, in effect, no insurance.

It is not of course unique. The philosophy of just in time ordering that transformed cash flows two decades ago, means total collapse if transport is disrupted. You hold no stock, carry no excess of anything.

It is this ideological commitment to short term profit maximisation that makes capitalism an unsafe model for British public infrastructure.

But then there adds to the chaos the left wing rubbish of health and safety culture. A man may not unload bags if there is any ice under his boots. He may slip. All risk must be eliminated and we must live hermetically sealed from our environment.

He’s right about the left-wing rubbish, of course. But is ‘just in time’ thinking all about right-wing ‘ideology’ and ‘short-term profit maximisation’?

I think not.

Forty years ago back in the communist USSR a huge proportion of all food grown rotted in the fields or was lost in useless storage/transport. But over in the capitalist USA a huge proportion of all food grown rotted on the shelves and was eventually thrown away, as the supply chains for filling shops did not have the information management tools to avoid this waste – better to have too much in the stores than too little. (Note: I did a fascinating Harvard case-study on this one.)

You today are an ideological hard-core right-wing capitalist selling widgets. You want to make as much money as possible. Part of doing that – and, of course, of being as ‘green’ as possible – lies in reducing waste.

You have hard choices. You can decide to make no provision for bad weather or other disruptions and stock only the widgets likely to be sold in normal times.

But you know that if you do this you may lose out at some points to your ideologically hard-core capitalist rival up the road, who is known to be investing in snow-clearing kit and making other precautions so that his shop can stay open and sell widgets come what may.

On the other hand, because you are not spending that money by way of weather insurance you can spend it on enhanced widget design and so have better products to sell most of the time.

In other words, it’s a gamble. Different people who believe exactly the same thing reasonably may take different choices about how to maximise their sales.

But choices do have to be made. Imagine my joy to hear a UK Minister on the radio yesterday saying that if as a society we invest in more bad weather kit (snow-ploughs etc) we’ll lose other things we might have bought instead. A grown-up!

This applies on the micro-level too. Almost no-one in the UK invests in snow-tyres, hugely increasing the likelihood that difficult slippery roads will be blocked by inane accidents caused by people unused to the conditions.

Snow-tyres cost money. Would the public if given a free vote prefer to keep the £250 or so it costs to fit snow tyres every year and take their chances? I suspect yes, if only because many people would bank on some people being responsible enough to do so, in effect reducing the risk at no cost to themselves – a typical free-rider problem solved in snowy countries by the law compelling everyone to make the change as winter looms. 

The argument perhaps loses some force when it comes to quasi-public quasi-monopolies such as roads or airports which have privileged positions. But even they have to choose and take some chances – investing in more winterisation insurance means less to spend on other facilities the public might like.

I nonetheless name the guilty:

  • Oxford City Council: the road from the Botley roundabout into Oxford yesterday was an idiotic disgrace. Stop wasting money on phoney propaganda adverts on buses telling everyone how ‘green’ Oxford is, and invest instead on stopping the city seizing up when it snows
  • Eurostar: yes, I mean you, Eurostar. Even though many trains were going you yesterday came up with the astonishing idea of cancelling the reservations of all your passengers, compelling everyone to queue in inhuman conditions without a ticket system. Vous êtes trop stupides. 
  • the M4 motorway authority: what the hell are you doing? How can you be so incompetent that you can’t keep all lanes and exits clear soon after a snowfall? The exit to Oxford coming up from London on Sunday evening was a deathtrap of uncleared snow   

In other words, Craig is wrong again. Capitalism is not an ‘unsafe model for British public infrastructure’. It has nothing to do with ‘capitalism’. It has nothing to do with ideology of left or right, or even about public and private.

Even if it were all about ‘capitalism’, there is little to be said for the proposition that ranks of risk-free civil servants in drab offices are going to make any better decisions than people in business whose very existence depends upon studying risk closely. Look at the farcical performance of Oxford City Council, presumably one of the more intelligent local authorities in the country..

Everyone has to live with risk and uncertainty. Go for a strong return 90% of the time and then take the hit when things eventually go awry? Or opt for a less strong return 99% of the time?

Look to maximise revenues or ‘utility’ over 2 years? Or over 20 years? Boldness? Or caution?

The point is that the market alone gives space for both. Indeed, it’s the interplay between them that makes things happen at all.