Quite happily working away yesterday on a complicated task when the phone rings. An electronic American voice is shouting down the phone ‘hey, this is Las Vegas, you are a prize winner…’ whirr click, no thank you. It takes me the statutory 15 minutes to get back where I was. I’m now wondering when the next one of these calls comes.

Flick over to email - about 60-70% of this has now become spam despite filters, fire walls and generally trying to take care where my email address might appear. I probably spend 10 minutes a day checking to make sure I’m not deleting anything important.

I get no sense from central government that they are making any attempt to do anything about any of this. While they rant on about ‘efficiencies’ they could probably make everyone more effecient at work in one masterstroke by dealing with spam and noxious non-prize winning phone calls.

I personally don’t believe this is a difficult thing to stop either. Contrast the complete control government exerts over broadcast media, or to a lesser extent the radio.

It all sounds petty and trifle but such things often underline much wider issues. We have a government so ideologically hell-bent on privatisation and the ‘market’ that everything becomes fair game for commodification - the phone system, email systems, social discourse.

I think what we’ll find is that ‘efficiences’ will be those of the market; there is a real danger that public services will be cut or the quality reduced while the private sector firms come in and cherry pick the service areas which they can make a guaranteed profit from. Think school dinners where companies are being awarded 25 year contracts and it takes a celebrity chef (to his credit) to expose not just that scandal but of the very low standard of the food.

So back to my irritating phone call; it’s not a freak event - its the logic of the type of values that Blair and his cronies promote - if there’s money in it, lets make it (even his wife can’t open her gob without charging 30,000 US dollars). So why have the phone system or email sitting idle all day when spammers and prize offerers could be using it to scam me or sell me things I don’t want? That’s the market. It’s effective in making money for a very small number of people, but socially efficient it ain’t.