Beware being a heartbeat from anarchy

Competitive forces – the triumph of the marketplace over regulation – are all too often the embodiment of expectations of a miracle panacea. ‘If only I didn’t have to buy all my tarmac from Ronez, my phone line from Jersey Telecom, or my utilities from Jersey Gas, Water or Electricity . . .’

Competition means choice and lower prices, doesn’t it? And it’s convenient to think that dangling the threat over a supplier or service provider that you could take your business to the other fellow down the street will stun him into magically improving his offer to you. It doesn’t always work that way. Nor should it.

But it hasn’t stopped the deregulators rushing in regardless. Look what happened to British Rail, broken up into a plethora of ‘competing’ train companies, with infrastructure in a separate set of hands. So what happened when accidents occurred at Hatfield, Potters Bar or Paddington? Blame was passed round like carriages on the Circle Line – acres of litigation, responsibility deflected by all and sundry.

Bus deregulation in the UK led to companies competing on the lucrative routes and ignoring those with less return. Service to the public was determined by profits to shareholders.

Sometimes ‘competition’ is purely illusory. Splitting up London Transport, which for years provided a joined-up approach to moving the city’s millions, only led to its reinvention as Transport for London since in an inter-

dependent sector, you simply can’t have a cavalier approach to things like schedules or routes – or, indeed, pricing.

The latest sense-challenged proposition has cascaded from the UK Competition Commission itself: that the British Airports Authority must sell several of its airports in order to generate competition and improve services.

Gatwick competing with Heathrow or Stansted! What ‘improvements’ do they envisage? Pilots accelerating away from their stands to the runways to compete for take-off slots? Surely not.

What will certainly happen is that along with the airline moguls like Richard Branson and Michael O’Leary, a host of foreign private equity firms will swoop on the sale to make quick profits with scant regard to any direct plans to regenerate or improve the lot of the long-suffering travelling public.

BAA’s airports compete with those on the continent. Of course they should be better managed, but setting them against each other is a waste of effort and expense and is counter-productive. The gleeful support for a sell-off from the competing cash-lean airlines is motivated by the prospect of blackmailing each airport to reduce its fees. It’s a boardroom bonus, but misery for travellers faced with dumbed-down security, safety cover and baggage-handling – all the things budget operators happily pass on to others to organise.

Divided kingdoms are fragile fiefdoms and provide a lesson for home consumption. If – perish the thought – there were a pan-Island emergency, competing sensitivities and procedures between Constables and parish municipalities would be disastrous. Unbridled competition is only a heartbeat from anarchy.

Cut-throat competition produces a war-zone of casualties. Competing UK supermarkets fiercely driving down prices from suppliers have all but wiped out our local tomato industry.

A lot depends on what you want to achieve, and in what context. There’s nothing wrong with positive competition. We have been witnessing an orgy of healthy competition in Beijing, where athletes have pitted their training and commitment against allcomers. But things go seriously wrong when the pressure is so great that silver medallists are distraught because they are made to feel a failure because they didn’t achieve gold.

It also cannot be right that children are forced to compete so hard at school that they crack along the exam trail, to say nothing about the skulduggery that emerges as parents compete to gain places for their prodigy in schools of their choosing. We’ve all seen how competitive risk-taking on the money markets has skewed the international economy quite as determinately as naturally occurring meteorological turmoil has exacerbated food and commodity production.

Now, of course, there are various ruses available to stifle competition when you fear it the most. Trade restrictions and tariff barriers are mighty powerful measures. But then there are the sly ones. Take the American LPGA, for instance. Its latest trick to reduce formidable competition from Asian – notably Korean – lady golfers is to ban them from taking part if they are not fluent in English. Which, of course, the majority aren’t.

You’d think that there would be competition-free zones. Gardening is a restful, green and pleasant pastime; it brings great pleasure to the many and brightens up a parish or two. But woe betide the competitive element. One whiff of organised communal competition and it’s strimmers at dawn, with no cuttings taken. Bang goes the leisure activity in a flurry of marrow-nobbling and bloom-blighting.

And there is a less than alluring prospect that with global resources under threat, the likelihood of mankind having to compete more actively just to survive will bring conflict closer to all societies and at all levels.

So what’s bad for the body politic would sound a death knell for the body homo sapiens. What if all the corporeal elements were in competition? Say my brain was operated by neuroservices.com, my digestive system by gutforever.org, and my legs by footloose.co.uk. Just imagine the web exchanges that would pass between competing agencies before I got the best deal to get up and walk to my first choice restaurant and eat.