[NeedMoreTea]

It's a great refrain, yet after living through 40 years of successive privatisations, public-private partnerships and so on, it has repeatedly failed to deliver the promised better efficiency. Maybe one or two succeeded.

Profits and higher exec pay, certainly. Consolidated and bought up by someone else's state utility, as profit centre, yep. Removed from being a political football where the parties on the right of centre consistently under-fund something to "prove" it needs the freedom of private enterprise, again, certainly. Just about every effort to "bring the benefits of the market" to the NHS have made it less efficient, or added layers of additional expense.

Governments, of course, often did encourage, and achieve, sometimes remarkable efficiency. Until it became simply dogma to change it, for change's sake. Few services or arms of government got a blank cheque, except periodically the military. Not surprisingly there's considerable inefficiencies around military spending.

It's funny though, it usually turns out to be the privatisation, the socialisation of a private industry's pollution, accident or other abuses after deregulation that wrecks figures. Like, say, a private sector prison performing so poorly it has to be snatched back into state control, banking bailout, or the public private partnerships which prove disastrous for government return on investment. These are the ones castigated in assorted committees, who are constantly questioning efficiency and return on investment.

[Bartweiss]

> It's a great refrain, yet after living through 40 years of successive privatisations, public-private partnerships and so on, it has repeatedly failed to deliver the promised better efficiency. Maybe one or two succeeded.

The rejoinder here is generally that nationalization also has a terrible track record. Even in domains where some governments have performed efficiently and well from the beginning, governments which take over from private owners often do quite poorly.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm in favor of privatization. It's entirely possible for both transitions to be primarily harmful, and indeed it's fairly likely if both are championed by people who see a personal benefit. There's a bit in Hitchhiker's Guide where a driver thinks the rain is so heavy his wipers aren't helping. When he turns them off, things do get worse, but when he turns them back on they don't get any better. I've heard multiple Brits cite this to explain the way nationalization and privatization of rail has worked: nationalization brought waste and unreliability, privatization brought gouging and line closures, but each left the harms of the other intact.

[NeedMoreTea]

Can't disagree with much here. :)

Dogma on left of centre is as damaging as on the right as it tends to produce more change for change's sake, just to a different destination. Same goes for so many private sector takeovers and buyouts. In each instance it rarely delivers.

> rail ... each left the harms of the other intact

Pretty much true. The biggest issue during the nationalised period was funding. Few post-war state enterprises got to reinvest profit, so investment became a political choice, which led to the ageing rolling stock and unreliability. Waste - not so much, though I'm sure plenty existed. Pre-war approach to public enterprise seemed to work much better - a town or city owned a corporation, that could keep and reinvest its profits, and the city was more like shareholder. I'm not sure why this approach ceased to be - possibly the ever increasing centralisation from both right and left.

The way rail was broken up was utterly bizarre and ridiculous - it was never going to work broken up in such an unnatural way. Yet, if Corbyn had his way and re-nationalised, it might work, briefly - at great expense and disruption - for his first term. First Tory government would bring back under-funding, and off we go again. Nope, never gonna work.

Better stronger QoS regulation than that, though a rethink of the various disjointed bits is looking unavoidable. If only privatisation had gone back to the big 4... or created a medium 8 or something.

[Bartweiss]

> it tends to produce more change for change's sake, just to a different destination. Same goes for so many private sector takeovers and buyouts. In each instance it rarely delivers.

Nicely put. I do think it's possible that nationalization and even privatization can produce improvements, but they're obviously not deployed on the strength of detailed, domain-specific evidence. Mostly, someone just gets control of a troubled system falls back on doctrinaire arguments that their preferred solution always works, never mind questions like "does the government have any experience here" or "will this immediately become a private monopoly".

More cynically, your description of rail points to the other side of the game. If you've got a working instance of the approach you don't like, pile on challenges (regulation and unprofitable obligations on one side, funding cuts on the other) until it breaks, then declare the need for your preferred solution. And not coincidentally, the long-term outcome is almost always these batty public-private partnerships or private-consultant-run government programs that are profitable for someone but work horribly.

I should learn more about the national-era history of British rail, it's always sounded like the biggest 'flaw' was simply being vulnerable to Tory funding cuts. The privatization approach was truly absurd - at this point I suppose the best hope available is emulating something like not-a-real-market private utilities?

[NeedMoreTea]

Trying to stay away from the party political, I think the experience is that telephony may have been suitable for privatisation - people are happy switching providers, and do so all the time. Water, Post Office and electricity not so much. Thirty odd years later and regulators still haven't figured out how to get people to switch in any appreciable numbers. Maybe those really are natural monopolies, regardless of party dogma - and were often those pre-war city corporations.

> until it breaks, then declare the need for your preferred solution

Equally cynically, that does seem to be the way government and regulation works lately. Just look at the Post Office privatisation - take things away from them year on year from counter services, savings, licence renewals to city mail, so it's no wonder they're declining and "need" privatising. Then they wonder why the electorate doesn't trust politicians. Or BBC licencing deals... The stench of where that's heading is getting overpowering.

They may have got plans wrong many times earlier, but it appears former generations were far more genuinely concerned with actually trying to make the country better - whether one-nation Tory or Labour, or administrations elsewhere. I'm sure there's some age-related rose tinting, but I don't think anywhere near all. Where did that ethos go? :)

> the best hope available is emulating something like not-a-real-market private utilities

Private with stronger service obligations - like to permit other companies to run charters, freight or express on the tracks. Hopefully make them more like a real company - where they own the track, buildings and trains. Needing at least three companies involved to reschedule or add a new service is in the interests of no one at all. Yet that starts to look like going back to LMS, LNER, GWR and SR. That almost admits it was organised better in the 1920s. Not sure that's politically possible. :)