And always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse

The suggestion that the NHS brand could be sold overseas is being opportunistically tied to Danny Boyle's Olympics love-fest and the Team GB feelgood factor, but this does not stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Britain is adept at marketing invented heritage abroad, from upper class fashion to Scotch whisky, but the fundamental principle celebrated at the Lea Valley hoe-down is not one that can be monetised let alone exported, namely: free at the point of use. That is the core brand value, after all. Take that away and it's not clear what the NHS brand stands for, beyond a nostalgic longing for carbolic soap, tapioca pudding and Hattie Jaques.

For some, the brand idea is merely another opportunity to call for reform, which we all know ultimately means privatisation. Others claim that the NHS is already in business abroad, through Moorfields and Great Ormond Street clinics in the Middle East, so marketing the NHS brand through some form of franchising is not that radical a departure. In reality, these offshoots are selling the labour of consultants and other specialists (who operate as independent contractors), which can already be accessed privately in the UK. What they're not doing is spending public funds or exporting paid-for resources such as trained nurses or medical equipment.

One parallel that no one seems keen to point to is BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm that generates revenue by selling programmes abroad. In the catechism of the right this is an abomination that gives the subsidised BBC an unfair advantage over purely commercial broadcasters. But selling intellectual property that was developed using public funds is no different to exporting expertise and techniques developed within the NHS. Assuming "NHS International" is a franchise with local "hardware", then this "software" is what you would get for your money, presumably along with higher standards through quality control from HQ. The irony that this latter aspect is usually presented as the achilles heel of the NHS will no doubt be lost on those critics who now see merit in selling the brand.

The real point of the parallel between the NHS and the BBC is that the profits generated by the latter's Worldwide operation are seen as a justification for a cut in the licence fee, rather than as a bonus that the corporation should be entitled to use for investment. The suspicion is that NHS trusts that generate profits from overseas franchises or other tie-ups will be obliged to plough those monies back into general expenditure, thereby helping to keep overall health spending down, rather than to upgrade or expand domestic services for the benefit of UK citizens.

The Worst Job I Ever Had

Back in the late 70s, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, adopting their Derek and Clive alter egos, did a sketch called The Worst Job I Ever Had, which concerned retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's bum. I was reminded of this by the latest plans to get an honest day's work out of the prison population. The idea of running businesses using prisoners, or even siting businesses within prisons, is obviously not a new one, but it is an idea with an uneasy history. This arises because of our confusion between work and punishment.

The modern prison, as a correctional facility (a place to re-engineer morals), could not have evolved without a blurring of the lines between factory and gaol, and more particularly the blurring of two goals: the disciplining of the individual and the production of value. The intersection between the two is often located in Jeremy Bentham's idea of the self-financing Panopticon. This unrealised scheme is famous today partly because of Michel Foucault's use of it as as a metaphor for power relations in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The purpose of the Panopticon was, he wrote: "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power", and "Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable". In other words, the structure of the building implied constant observation, which removed the need for actual constant observation. Self-repression was all. It is one of the ironies of history that the intended site of the Panopticon, which was eventually used for a more conventional Victorian penitentiary (and staging point for Australian transportees), is now occupied by Tate Modern and Millbank Tower (the 1997 home of New Labour) in Pimlico. Art and politics conquers vice.

Before Bentham, John Bellers' 1695 Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry introduced the idea of the "big house", but specifically as a means of alleviating the novel condition of pauperism, which had grown over the preceding 150 years following the dissolution of the monasteries (a source of relief) and the growth of itinerant labour in the seventeenth century (the stirrings of the agricultural and industrial revolutions to come). Bellers' idea would influence many social visionaries, including Bentham, Fourier (the Phalanstery) and Robert Owen (New Lanark). In time, the idea was seen to provide the framework not just for the relief of pauperism but for the reparation of the criminal to society, with the tantalising promise that the labour of the criminal might return a profit. In part this was because poverty itself (vagrancy) came to be criminalised, and thus crime was seen as the concomittant of an unwillingness to work. Penal servitude, which had initially been a means to provide indentured labour for the colonies of America and Australia, was replaced by domestic penal (or "hard") labour after 1857, often in the form of oakum picking (unravelling old rope for caulking). Without colonial transportation (out of sight, out of mind), the need to work criminal labour became more pressing.

Early factories in the eighteenth century were largely unmechanised. The concentration of labour in one place, as opposed to the older model of dispersed work in homes, was driven by the concentration of raw materials and the consequent reduction in transportation costs and process inefficiencies. From its earliest days, the factory system was founded on the observation and disciplining of workers, to prevent "soldiering" (i.e. everyone working at the slowest acceptable rate). Mechanisation provided an efficient means of remote-controlling the worker, through the imposed rhythm of the machine and its strict control of time, but rigid ordering of work precedes it. It would have been odd if notionally free men and women were more restrained and invigilated than prisoners, so the practices of the factory were transferred to gaols.

This adoption of factory modes spread beyond prisons. State institutions in the nineteenth century generally adopted the paradigm of production, organising around processes and commodities. A barracks became a warehouse of "uniform" soldiers, a hospital became a production line for the output of healthy bodies, a school squeezed square pegs through round holes to produce a "standard" model. Active inspection (quality control) was paramount, and defect management (AWOLs, patients who die, recalcitrant pupils) was heavily proceduralised. Waiting (or "down time", in the original factory sense of that phrase) meant waste, but it also signified control, the storage of labour pending further use, so excessive waiting became a means of discipline: standing on a parade ground in the rain, waiting hours for an appointment, facing the wall in the corner of a schoolroom.

Over the twentieth century state facilities evolved in line with the work environment, so today they usually look like offices and are increasingly striving to look like the Googleplex. New-built hospitals have expensive reception areas festooned with awards and motivational posters, while wards aspire to the informal cheer of a breakout area or a coffee point. Schools have modular timetables and desk clusters, to support the commitment to projects and teamwork (though the focus on a standard output, measured in exam results, remains). The barracks of the future is already a nondescript office building in suburban America from where drones are remotely operated.

There is therefore a certain inevitability in the proposal to run call centres from within prisons. The job is a highly supervised one, with minimal personal control (you're working through a call-list provided by the system), high stress and a degree of dehumanisation that echoes Victorian factories. It is this very "routine and discipline" that makes the idea palatable to the right. The claims that earning £3 a day will make a difference to their families or build up a "going straight" nest-egg are ridiculous. Ken Clarke was at least honest when he said: "prisoners are simply a wasted resource – thousands of hours of manpower sitting idle". If you can access that resource for a pittance, so much the better.

But it would be naive to think that the exploitation of prisoners is a capitalist plot to undermine labour generally, though it clearly will lead to job losses among the non-criminal. I doubt even the Tories seriously intend to expand the prison population to the level seen in the US (0.7%, compared to 0.15% here), and even that is insufficient to impact on wage rates. Stagnant incomes in both the US and UK are the result of bigger factors than penal exploitation.

What's more worrying is the continued belief that any work is intrinsically virtuous, but that certain types of work are only suitable for certain types of people, and vice versa. David Cameron is quoted as saying: "Prisoners working productively towards their own rehabilitation will contribute to the UK economy and make reparation to society". The contribution to the economy (as opposed to selected companies' profits) will be negligible, and the reparation to society involved in answering irate calls about shoddy service is non-existent. In truth, most people are uncomfortable about prisoners doing good as that robs them of the luxury of contempt. Far better that they should do a shit job (picking oakum before, working in a call centre now) than do something that might indicate they were worthy of acceptance back into society, like social care or building work. Perish the thought that a prisoner should get to do a socially admirable job, regardless of how cheap they are to employ.

Just as the petty refusal to allow prisoners the vote is a way of tarring them, so the choice of work (necessary but unworthy) is a form of punishment. The original treadmill would probably be ruled illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights (or as a "cruel and unusual punishment" in the US), but the modern treadmill of the call centre is acceptable. If it's good enough for the unemployed, it's good enough for criminals.

Filthy Lucre

Politicians and the press have got themselves in a tizzy over the money-laundering charges announced against Standard Chartered Bank, with even a Labour MP crying wolf over the assumed plot to dethrone London as the world capital of funny money. (Tip to John Mann: when you find yourself in agreement with Boris Johnson, you really should pause for reflection). Banking is a supra-national industry, so the idea that London and New York are direct competitors in a zero-sum game is risible, which even the Bank of England's own Bagpuss concedes. Johnson's tub-thumping for London masks the reality that his endeavours in support of banking benefit American firms as much as British ones.

The irony of the "wild west" jibe (which appears to have originated with John Mann) is not merely that this is a metaphor trademarked by the USA, but that the fast and loose attitude was imported from New York to London in the 80s as American banks and brokers moved in following deregulation (they also imported the convention of big bonuses for traders). And while the US has started to re-tighten regulation on their side of the pond, this has been a series of small steps following their own large deregulatory strides in the 90s.

What's really bonkers is the implicit suggestion that greater regulation and more vigorous pursuit of crime in New York will somehow attract business away from London. They're not going to win the Iran account, for starters. This week's revelation of the "fucking Americans" quote is actually an excellent advertisement for the independence of British banks. If you don't want the FBI poking their noses into your affairs, you now know where to go. The claim that this is actually about reputational damage is eyewash. No one who hasn't been hiding in a cave for the last five years is under any illusions about what banks do, and a few thousand individuals dropping Barclays for the Co-op won't change the fundamentals. The adjustment in the Standard Chartered share price reflects the risk of profits lost to fines (usually much bigger in the US than the UK), not the risk of business drying-up.

The charges against Standard Chartered are very serious, though the bank does contest the scale and degree of complicity, and the New York regulator may well be guilty of trying to make a name for himself. However, even if this fizzles out, there is no question that there is something systemically wrong with the banking industry. But the suggestion that this is peculiar to London is absurd. While light-touch regulation went down a storm here, other banking centres are hardly noted for their high ethical standards or diligent regulators. Switzerland did not build a banking industry on transparency, and it has no intention of changing its ways. New York gave us the "giant vampire squid". Banks everywhere are prone to scandals because they deal in money, and a large portion of the world's money has been secured illegally and/or unethically. As the wealth of the world expands, both the quantum and the proportion that is "ill-gotten" increases, the latter because so many nations are (for now) wholly or partly kleptocracies. Even in established democracies, the increase in inequality leads to more funny money as greater amounts are funnelled offshore to dodge tax.

The banking scandals this year can be divided into three types. First, there is common-or-garden incompetence, where greed all the way up the management tree leads to excessive risk-taking (rogue traders etc). Second, there are simple conspiracies to game the system by insiders at the expense of outsiders. LIBOR rate-rigging is the standout example, though an honourable mention should go to Goldman Sach's "muppetgate" (London pointing the finger at New York on that occasion). The other type of scandal concerns dodgy money: the HSBC laundering of drug profits, Standard Chartered's (alleged) laundering of Iranian trade deals, and the wealth-management (i.e. laundering) of funds extracted by "politically exposed persons", the euphemism for dictators, their cronies, and corrupt officials everywhere.

Some dictators are now finding the hosts of their foreign assets less hospitable than before, though this sudden fit of moral opprobrium tends to signal a shift in the political wind, as Mubrarak and Assad have found, rather than any persistent distaste for ill-gotten gains. There is a strong overlap here with tax dodging: blatant evasion will be (occasionally) prosecuted, but avoidance will be treated as morally neutral, so long as you don't attract attention by shitting on the carpet, a la Jimmy Carr. This "pragmatism" is the fundamental problem. Incompetence and greed can be tackled within banking (though nobody seems to be trying too hard), and there are technical means to limit insider-dealing and market-rigging, but the temptation to deal in dodgy money will never go away because the money won't. In fact, the temptation increases because the amount of dodgy money increases. This is simply too big a market for most banks to ignore. It is far easier to redefine "dodgy". A report by the FSA last year, into money-laundering risks faced by UK banks, came to some revealing conclusions in this regard (see page 4, points 7 and 10):

Some banks appeared unwilling to turn away, or exit, very profitable business relationships when there appeared to be an unacceptable risk of handling the proceeds of crime. Around a third of banks, including the private banking arms of some major banking groups, appeared willing to accept very high levels of money-laundering risk if the immediate reputational and regulatory risk was acceptable.

Three quarters of the banks in our sample failed to take adequate measures to establish the legitimacy of the source of wealth and source of funds to be used in the business relationship. This was of concern in particular where the bank was aware of significant adverse information about the customer’s or beneficial owner’s integrity.

As banks have become larger and more global, and as the percentage of ill-gotten gains and money avoiding tax has grown, the likelihood that banks will be managing dodgy money has increased. The days when this blind-eye activity was the preserve of only a few specialist banking centres, such as Zurich and Geneva, are long gone. The attitude of the industry is that money is money and intrinsically blameless. Ethical scruples are an "inefficiency" in market terms. Competition, allied to an operating mentality based on personal enrichment, means that banks cannot and will not be choosy. Mexican drug profits and Iranian sanctions-busting are just business. The only solution to money-laundering is a political decision to enforce transparency, but that means removing the same veil that protects and enables tax avoidance. Unsurprisingly, the political will is lacking.

There's a Riot Goin' On

"There's a dog in the middle of the courtroom, though it was a different one today. They alternate: there are two of them, a huge German shepherd and a rottweiler. They bark madly whenever anyone raises their voice". This strange image comes from a report on the trial of Pussy Riot in Moscow, written by the husband of one of the defendants. It is chock-full of a particularly Russian eccentricity, where reality and the fantastic blend into one another, usually in an official setting. It could almost be a passage from Gogol's Dead Souls or Bulgakov's The Master and Margherita.

There's more: "A woman who looks after the candles in the church testifies and becomes an immediate star on Twitter. She says she saw the girls' "devilish twitching" and "committing impudences".  And ... "An absolutely crazy witness appeared. He said that the girls had placed themselves in hell. That they'd declared war on God. That "hell is as real as the Moscow subway". The hubby-cum-writer, Pyotr Verzilov, claims: "Usually Russian courts are quite boring, but this week it's been like a scene from an American movie". I don't know what American film he's thinking of, but it's not Twelve Angry Men or Legally Blonde.

It's hard for a foreigner to quite get what is going on in Russia, hence we tend to focus on those elements of the spectacle that we can most easily relate to. Pussy Riot are variously described as "punks" and "riot grrrls", though among their key musical influences appear to be early 80s Oi! bands, who were not exactly noted for their feminism (despite Jimmy Pursey taking up modern dance), while their political analysis was crude when not being hijacked by xenophobic arse-wipes like Gary Bushell. Visually, Pussy Riot owe more to The Residents than Cockney Rejects.

The other trope regularly bandied about is that the women's court appearance is a show trial, echoing the famous Moscow trials of the 1930s. While the bias of the court supports the belief that this is a politically-motivated prosecution (they challenged and insulted Putin, not the Orthodox church), there are differences. The Moscow show trials were distinguished by improbable confessions and tearful odes to the wisdom and mercy of Comrade Stalin, not to mention the subsequent airbrushing of the guilty from history. Pussy Riot continue to be confrontational rather than confessional, and YouTube will preserve their performance for future generations. It's possible that Putin's mercy will be eulogised, as a shorter sentence than the advertised 7 years for "hooliganism" would still be effective in slapping down the opposition.

For all its trappings of modernity (guitars, Twitter, feminism), the Pussy Riot trial seems to hark back to the late nineteenth century, not just in terms of the absurdist legal process but also in terms of the power of the symbolic act. Staging a performance art piece (a "punk prayer") in a cathedral is hardly on a par with assassinating a Tsar, but it appears to have offended the Kremlin mightily. To add to the irony, Madonna, who found flirting with the trappings of religion to be a good career move, is about to perform in  Moscow. There are hopes she may show solidarity, perhaps singing Like a Prayer ("When you call my name, it's like a little prayer"), though that might be a little self-regarding (so odds on, then).

Madonna is respected in Moscow because she is rich and successful. Pussy Riot are the object of official contempt not because of their politics or their art, but because they are unsuccessful and poor. Oligarchs who fall out of favour are charged with corruption; less powerful troublemakers are charged with hooliganism. As Chichikov in Dead Souls discovered, wealth and status are what people care about, and the means by which you achieve them (in his case by buying the title to dead serfs to use as loan collateral) matters little. If this all seems like the weirdness of foreign-land, we should bear in mind the popularity of London among the new, airbrushed elite of Russia, particularly for pursuing offences to their honour in our absurdist libel courts.

No head for heights

Every ten years, since 1952, the British Film Institute magazine Sight & Sound has published a list of the greatest films of all time, based on a poll of critics and film-makers. Since the second poll in 1962, the number one film has been Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. This year, Rosebud & co have finally given way to a thrusting new kid on the block, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The steady progress of the latter (7th in 1982, 4th in 1992 and 2nd in 2002) must indicate something, though I'm in two minds as to what it is.

It might appear odd that a Brit publication should have such clout, but the UK (or more precisely London) has a reputation as being even-handed in its treatment of Hollywood and international (i.e. non-English) cinema, so it earns kudos in a way that Roger Ebert or Cahiers du Cinema could not. A failure to show any sort of home bias probably helps as well. Apart from Brief Encounter in 1952, there hasn't been a "proper" British film in the critics' top ten, though 2001: A Space Odyssey (6th this year) counts as a British production and Hitchcock learnt his trade in the UK.

Since 1992, the votes of film directors have constituted a separate poll. This has tended to become more modern in its choices, partly as recent directors are celebrated (so The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Taxi Driver all feature). Conversely, the critics' poll has become ever more antique, so we now have three silent films in the top ten and none more recent than Kubrick's 1968 space epic. I suspect this separation has helped propel Vertigo to the top, as the directors clearly still value a Welles or an Ozu ahead of a Hitch.

I'm not a great fan of Hitchcock as I find his work melodramatic (the McGuffin is, by definition, manipulative), misanthropic and lacking in humour. I think these qualities go together. I'm also jaded by the excess of psychoanalytic tropes, which indicate either cynical exploitation or genuine obsession on Hitchcock's part, probably a bit of both. Vertigo is famously about impotence and the male gaze. The camerawork fetishises the feminine and James Stewart's character (Scottie Ferguson) spends most of the film operating as a voyeur prior to a symbolic sex act. He first fails to ascend to the top of a bell tower due to his debilitating vertigo (i.e. impotence), so contributing (so he thinks) to a woman's death, and then succeeds in angrily dragging Kim Novak all the way to the top before they kiss. Hitchcock's genius, or cruelty, is to spoil the happy ending by having Novak's character then accidentally fall to her death.

Citizen Kane is ostensibly about a by turns charming and bullying megalomaniac, loosely based on William Randolph Hearst (the Rupert Murdoch of his day), who ends up friendless and alone in Xanadu, his palatial country retreat, stacked to the rafters with unopened crates of expensive art. It's formal brilliance is its use of multiple, sometimes conflicting, testimonies to build up a multi-faceted picture of the man. It is essentially a social film, which recognises the ultimate unknowability of anyone (the Rosebud motif) and the vanity of personal ambitions. This last theme links it to Vertigo, which ends with the tolling of a bell that brings to mind John Donne's lines: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

This is ironic as Scottie Ferguson is unquestionably an island unto himself, and all the more troubled for it. His Pygmalion-like determination to mould Novak's character, and his obtuseness in the face of his ex-fiancee (played by Ma Ewing, no less), are reminiscent of the uber-individualist John Galt in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which was published the year before Vertigo was released. Scottie's obsession with Novak's character Madeleine (redolent of the Madonna and Proustian idealisation) is the flip side of his disconnection from society (he has "retired" from the police to pursue the classic loner role, the private eye).

So I have two theories to explain the ascension of Vertigo. The first is the increasing prevalence of psychoanalytical interpretations, both in wider culture and more specifically in cinema criticism, with the highly visual Freudian and Jungian strands to the fore, albeit in debased forms. The second is the neoliberal revanche from the late 50s onwards, which eventually erupted into the political sphere in the 70s and achieved power in the 80s. The success of the film in this year's poll may simply reflect momentum built up before 2008, but it may also indicate that the rule of the angry white dude has some way yet to run. Of course, these two theories are not mutually exclusive. An angry white dude with a castration complex isn't an encouraging thought, mind.

I leave the last word to Citizen Kane's Mister Bernstein, the Leopold Bloom-like mensch. He too had an eye for the ladies, but his obsession (his Rosebud) was grounded in a humane and social context.

One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.