(no subject)

[chess]

First, a practical thing: does anyone know much about chiropody in Cambridge? I appear to have ingrowing toenails which keep being ingrowing again after I attack them viciously with toenail-cutting implements, and I'd like to find someone competent to work out what's gone wrong, but I don't really know how to go about this without it costing lots of money.

Second, http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ is a very good website, and reminds me why I am distinctly puzzled how otherwise perfectly nice people can vote Tory, given their vast preference for the 'hanging/flogging' and 'free market' end of the scale. The free market is not very nice (it promotes inequality which makes people resentful, it means some people starve whilst others live in luxury, it is *not very nice*) and punishing criminals rather than trying to rehabilitate them is also not very nice. I probably have more cogent arguements why each is a bad idea, but fundamentally I object to them because they are Not Very Nice.

Thirdly, it's springtime and sunny, but everything still feels and tastes like dust and ashes to me. I just walked out of church this morning and went home because I felt I was harming the important things that were going on there (lots of prayer for the summer mission and some people going out to do primary healthcare stuff in rural India) just by being there. I'm not really sure what's wrong; I just have that big cloak of cobwebs back.

Comments

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

The NHS is very far from privatised. Even the Internal Market set up by Ken Clarke was pretty much dismantled under Labour; the NHS is your classic inefficient state-run mess.

The statistics about rail privatisation are pretty much unanswerable - capacity, total number of passengers carried, investment and number of services have all actually increased rapidly since privatisation - despite the fact that it was done horribly badly, and it could be improved very easily by introducing (gasp) actual compettition, which the public appear to be scared of. What has fallen (by about five percent) is punctuality; but this was almost inevitable and is mostly due to mass obsolesence (which is due to the country being unable to afford to run a nationalised rail service...).

What's also unanswerable is the American and Australian rail networks, both of which are *necessary* to each country and are therefore run privately, as it's far too serious a business to be left to the politicians.

Furthermore, consider our own history. The time Britain lead the world in rail transport was pre-1945, when the Railways were privatised.

The most obvious example of privatisation working is British Airways; a dead weight nationalised, a profitable corporation (even now, when most airlines are losing money) privatised.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

I'm not suggesting that whether a service is privatised or not is the only factor in its efficiency and success. For example, Britain's private railways may have led the world pre-1945, but back then, there were no cars. Likewise a service can be public-run and still be in a mess, especially if the bureaucrats in charge are left to quietly run their own rackets and dip their hands in the till.

I understand that many consider the NHS should be +more+ privatised, but to my mind it is still considerably more privatised than, say, the French system. I suppose peoples' definitions of what constitutes a privatised company could vary.

Regarding your series of corporate examples, if yo look back on my comment, I never at any point suggested privatised companies were all doomed to failure, just that much privatisation has been disastrously managed in this country. If you want my opinion about whether privatisation as a whole is "good" or "bad", I'm broadly opposed to making any core service (e.g. the NHS or public transport) profit-driven, but believe that any government-run core service needs to be far more tightly regulated than is currently the case.