The circle, such a perfect shape, don't you think? Admittedly it doesn't tesselate, but then maybe that's because it's such a stand-alone shape. Try and tesselate the circle and you'll still end up with an aesthetically very pleasing pattern. Gaze up into that endless and remorseless vacuum that is our universe and almost everything that you're likely to see appears as a circle- the two-dimensional representation of the sphere- and anything that isn't yet will be eventually. The laws of physics have decreed it to be so. The sun, the moon...
We should count ourselves fortunate indeed, then, that it is the 'perfect' Circle that is now charged with bringing certain other forces to bear, upon our NHS. Circle! Who wouldn't want to think of the NHS in such perfect terms?
Type "Circle" into your choice of search engine and you might expect, at the very least, to find images that strive towards such perfect symmetry, sites that allude to something magnificently aspirational.
Alas, the very first site that my search has revealed unashamedly uses the word "corporate" upon its home page. Now my head is corrupted with terms like, "square the circle." Read on and the subterfuge and consequent slide, swiftly away from perfection, will send your head spinning too. Spinning, contradictorily, further from the perfect circle. "Circle" and "corporate" do not sit comfortably together!
Circle have been charged with the 'safe-handling' and 'care' of Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire. They are aiming to make £300,000,000 in savings during the ten years of their tenure. And if they don't, or should they happen to run up an 'unexpected' overdraft, it's important, isn't it, that nobody 'at the top' should be left out of pocket. 'Happily' there will still be at least a choice few at Hinchingbrooke Hospital who won't yet be needing to watch their backs, or their salaries.
CEO Ali Parsa claims that Circle will be able to break even by 2013. That would be the same Ali Parsa who was Executive Director of Goldman Sachs's European Banking Investment Team. And that would be the same Goldman Sachs that, last year, paid only £4.1 million in corporate (that ugly word again) taxes, on pre-tax profits of £1.92 billion.
Let's just place those two figures side by side, shall we? Just so that we can better compare the two:
£4,100,000
£1,920,000,000
That's just over 0.2% in taxes. Yes please! I would imagine that most of us would be happy to sign up to that sort of deal.
So- still thematically- just to round things off for you, Ali Parsa pocketed £169,000 in 2011; Lord alone knows by just how much this sum will have rocketed in 2012, CEOs generally tending to have developed a convenient immunity to the usual restraints of austerity. Presumably most of this somewhat overgenerous sum will have found its way into the man's overly-copious pockets, via the tax payers. Hinchingbrooke's savings will have to be carefully targeted, so as not to impinge upon Mr Ali's cut.
'Care' of Circle, Hinchingbrooke Hospital is now operating upon something akin to corporate business lines. One can only wonder as to the tax affairs of such a place and those of its board of directors. Will Ali again be able to sort it so that the top brass are to be taxed at 0.2%?
A logo with a circular theme is surely just aching to materialise. Something to do with "cutting corners with the nation's health," I should imagine. Any ideas?
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