Private finance initiative

This article may be Overly British

Americans may not understand humour, only humor. Canadians and Australians may not understand anything at all. Don't change a thing to remedy this.

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“I don't understand how it works, best leave it to the experts”

~ The British taxpayer on PFI

“He's a fucking gullible idiot”

~ A PFI spiv on the British taxpayer

“I'm off to the pub to get pissed”

~ The British taxpayer

£410 million will be paid in rent for the Coventry University Hospital (pictured).

The pockets full initiative (PFI) is a way of creating "privatisation by stealth" (PPPs) by funding public infrastructure projects with private capital. In practice, however, it is designed to siphon money out of the UK government budget into the pockets of greedy self serving spivs. This elaborate form of theft is probably the most blatant scam ever to be carried out against the gullable and cretinous British taxpayer.

How the scam works

Behind all of the fancy jargon the set up is simple. Instead of investing in the construction of new hospitals, schools, bridges and military projects directly, the government gets a bunch of spivs to build the stuff for them, rents it off them for five or ten times as much as it would have cost to build it in the first place and at the end of the 30 year contract the spivs get to keep whatever they built. This way the government can divert billions of pounds of tax revenue directly into the pockets of their rich buddies and give them control of public infrastructure too.

From the spivs point of view the PFI scam is vastly superior to plain old fashioned privatisation because in the olden days under more fair minded leaderships such as the Evil Thatcher Junta, spivs were made to pay a token fee for control of huge slices of public infrastructure, typically a tiny proportion of the value of the assets. Under PFI the government is obliged to pay the spivs five or ten times the value of the assets in rent during the privatisation process.

History

The idea of PFI was invented by an insanely optimistic bunch of Conservatives in the early 1990s, as a way of enriching their friends in the city at the expense of the taxpayer and hammering huge irreparable holes in the welfare state, in accordance with their party motto of "take from the poor and give to the rich". It was not widely used because the Tories stupidly underestimated the credulity of the British public. Had they rolled it out in the early 1990s they would have made £billions for their mates in the city and £millions for themselves in backhanders.

The concept of PFI was put on a back shelf in Downing Street, where it stayed until the most economically illiterate man ever to hold the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer came across it in 1997, shortly after he moved in.

Motivation

The only people to turn up to Tony's "exclusive" party were a bunch of complete twats.

When Gordon Brown and Tony Bliar won the election, they realised that they could buy some popularity. As they had no friends except nerdy politician types they decided to look around for some cooler ones. They knew that intelligent people and moral people are notoriously boring, so they decided to hang about with rich spivs instead.

Tony Bliar decided to hold a grand "exclusive" house warming party to which he would invite all the richest people in Britain. On the day though, the only people to turn up were a load of degenerate tossers like Noel Gallagher, Ben Elton, Ross Kemp and Rebekah Wade. Although famous, the dregs of 1990s British celebrity culture were not the calibre of people Tony and Gordon were looking for as mates.

Tony and Gordon were devastatingly upset to be snubbed by all the super rich bankers, traders, property developers and other kinds of spiv but they were too weak willed and feeble minded to pursue the only sane course of action; a vengeful and relentless pursuit of these fucking spivvy bastards in order to strip them of their wealth by any means possible, to keep it, or to burn it, or even better to hand it out to poor people (which would piss the spivvy bastards off the most).

It would cost a lot of money for Gordon and Tony to be able to buy any friends.

Instead they pathetically decided to devise a scheme to bribe the spivs to be their friends. Obviously the spivs needed some massive bribes to be seen hanging about with a maniacal looking billy no mates with evil eyes and his fat Scottish sidekick.

This pair of dimwitted chancers were nowhere near intelligent enough to devise a bribery scheme large enough to interest their would be friends. Things did not look promising for the desperate duo until one day Gordon came across the old discarded Tory blueprint for PFI. He was obviously too thick to understand it so he gave it to a nerdy advisor to read. The advisor came back to tell Gordon that it was nothing but an insane Tory scam designed to funnel billions of pounds out of government funds into the hands of spivs like bankers and property developers and that it was such a barkingly right-wing scheme that even the Tories had rejected it.

Implementation

A typical PFI spiv.

In a rare moment of coherent thought Gordon realised that this was exactly the kind of scheme that would finally allow him and Tony to buy their dream of hanging about with proper rich people.

All they had to do was find a marketing team brilliant enough to convince the public that such a transparently corrupt scheme was in the public's best interests. In the end it was not difficult, the British public being nothing more than the world's largest collection of eccentric drunken halfwits.

The pitch was simple, don't mention it as much as possible so that 95% of people would never find out about it. Only a tiny minority of the remaining five percent would be intelligent or sober enough to understand it and to start asking questions. Some of these could be fobbed off by talking up the "transfer of risk to the private sector" and of the "Golden rule of economics". Anyone left complaining after that could be denounced as a lunatic or a communist.

The spivs and the banker types were well chuffed, all they had to do was knock about with this pathetic pair of scunners for a few years, in payment they would get 30 year PFI deals giving them billions of pounds of guaranteed income to invest in their hobby of gambling it all away on the stock market.

The spivs soon lost the majority of their new found income by letting their banker mates play with it, the rest they stashed in tax havens. By this stage the bankers were so badly addicted to gambling they couldn't stop, especially since they were only ever playing with other peoples money anyway.

Pretty soon the banks realised that all of their competitors were doing the same kind of reckless gambling and embezzling as they were, so they stopped lending each other money causing the Economic recession.

The recession

The recession was great for the bankers and the spivs.

The bankers told the ever gullible and desperate Gordon that they needed a few hundred billion pounds and if he wouldn't give it to them they would have to go and be friends with Slimy Dave instead. Gordon paid up because he didn't want to look like the one who lost the whole "friendship group" less than a year after Tony went on his well earned holiday to the Middle East.

The PFI spivs felt left out when they saw the bankers getting all this free money, so they threatened to stop being Gordons friends too until he agreed that he would stop making the spivs pay to build the hospitals and schools and make the taxpayer pay for it all instead, he'd allow the spivs to keep all the infrastructure and then sign up to 30 year rental agreements on the stuff he'd just paid for.

Conclusion

Everyone was happy, except the taxpayer who was slightly more poverty stricken and pissed off than before and just as fecklessly drunk.