Care-Oriented Thrustingness, Trust-Friendly Cutworthiness

Now that the virtues of the free market have been demonstrated in such devastating fashion, the governing faction of the Business and Bankers' Party has decided that the scope for profiteering is still just not quite wide enough. Accordingly, the Minister for Compassion, Liam Byrne, has announced that he wants to see businesses running schools, health centres, youth clubs and children's centres. Apparently this is because Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, whose post as business secretary gives him absolute jurisdiction over such enterprises as public health, education and children's welfare, has called for a summit on taking money away from the NHS and pumping it into innovative, businesslike and profit-making companies "while retaining an ethical mission". Byrne, who is a New New Labour minister and knows a thing or two about ethics (though evidently not the difference between ethics and ethos), has heard somewhere that "if people in business thought more about the benefit to the public of their work, rather than a personal bonus, then our country could have avoided a great deal of pain". Strangely, he does not appear to have said anything about removing the legal obligations upon people in business to make a profit above all else, or even about recanting the New New Labour doctrine that the footpad morals practised by the likes of Tony Blair, David Blunkett and Lord Mandelbrot himself are identical with "retaining an ethical mission".