[qcnguy]

Governments don't pay for infrastructure by saving up surplus tax revenue in a piggy bank. They take out loans to pay for it, same as the water companies do. The UK pays around 8% of its spending on interest payments and that's rising rapidly, despite the fact it can print money.

British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era infrastructure whilst the government sets the prices they're allowed to charge. Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized, so the fake "privatization" is a red herring. It's the expected outcome of price controls, not whether the utilities are owned by the state or not.

[happymellon]

You really twist yourself around here. But this?

> Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

Bloody Tories, the whole problem isn't that they were in charge for 32 years from 1979-2024, it's the 13 years of Blair. They have been powerless to stop the spooky Left and fix the pipes before the water was privatised (or anything afterwards, because obviously it's still the Left)!

[qcnguy]

The Tories are a centre-left party. That's why they lost the support of conservative voters at the last election and are now in the doldrums, with much of their base having defected to Reform.

[happymellon]

> The Tories are a centre-left party.

Oh boy. That's funny.

> much of their base having defected to Reform.

Yes, they found a party they will say the quiet bits out loud, so they don't feel as uncomfortable being bigots and racists.

[ahartmetz]

Maybe they are now (I doubt it), but they surely weren't under Thatcher.

[overfeed]

The Tories decided to flank Farage from the right during the last elections. Calling them "centre-left" is a joke.

[qcnguy]

Correct. But by "decades" I meant in the 40 years since Thatcher.

[cma]

Water was privatized in the 90s after Thatcher.

[happymellon]

The pipes that "are Victorian and should have been replaced before privatisation" were around before then.

They have had plenty of time to replace them.

[Podrod]

>The Tories are a centre-left party.

You honestly believe this? If so: Jesus H. Christ!

[p1necone]

I was hopeful that the eventual endgame of right wingers blaming everything on the left when the right was in charge for literal decades would be for them to eventually maybe consider that that wasn't the problem.

Turns out I was wrong, all it takes is to no-true-scotsman everything into the "bad wrong left wing" bucket on the quest to move the overton window ever rightwards. Hilarious. The mental gymnastics knows no bounds.

[Der_Einzige]

You must think that the lib dems are now more conservative than them.

Bullocks. All of your argument is bullocks

[scythe]

>This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

The post office in the United States is not privatized and yet has been able to set prices in a way that sustains the business for centuries. You can't simply assume that all public entities will ignore fiscal reality.

In fact you may run into the opposite problem: when a utility is public, their debts appear on the government balance sheet and legislators are responsible for them. When it's spun off as a quasi-private monopoly, the government can impose debt on the utility without appearing to increase the public debt.

[jdietrich]

The US Postal Service has been running at a loss since 2007. It lost $9.5bn last year, despite a colossal bailout in 2022 that was supposed to return it to profitability. Most of these losses can be attributed to pension and healthcare costs. The USPS is pretty much the worst example of a sustainable nationalised business that you could possibly choose.

[Aushin]

Only because of legislative sabotage in 2006 by right wing ideologues determined to prove that public services "can't work"

https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407

[coryrc]

The problem that's at-least-purporting-to-address is one facing all the levels of government: boomers promised themselves future taxpayers would give them lots of services (money) while setting aside wholly insufficient capacity to make it fair to the future working citizens.

[qcnguy]

Yes, in theory nationalized companies can set prices rationally and turn a profit. In practice they rarely manage this for long because sooner or later a populist comes along and forces them to lower prices in order to win votes. It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor, it's a big part of how he won votes, meaning they've been building up a huge tech debt backlog. He clearly expects that the rest of the country will eventually bail London out and he'll be seen as the hero.

The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.

[djankauskas]

Could you explain the case that TfL charges too low for fares due to a "socialist" mayor? Looking at the agency's reported recovery ratios, they actually recover more than 100% of their direct operating costs on the Underground from fares, and even buses have a 70% ratio. In the Western world this is actually abnormally high; in NYC buses don't even clear 20%. It's possible some of this gap is explained by accounting differences, but nonetheless London is clearly not charging cheap fares.

The reasons why Western systems often don't recoup even operating expenses, let alone capital costs, from fares are because transit is a public service with public externalities. Drivers on the road contribute to pollution and congestion, especially relevant in dense areas like London. Some level of subsidy is appropriate to account for the positive externalities of discouraging these negative outcomes while still encouraging regional mobility.

This is not to say TfL is as efficient as it could be; there is a well-documented capital costs crisis in the Anglosphere, particularly when it comes to transit. The issues here are more complex, though, than vote buying from an allegedly "socialist" mayor.

[qcnguy]

Since lockdowns I think the underground only recovers around 70% of its operating costs. Maybe you have seen different figures?

The freezes eliminated investment projects needed to keep pace with population growth. There's also just big problems maintaining the stations and doing more than the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on. Travel on it and the stations are dirty, overly hot, etc.

Drivers on London's roads are very heavily taxed already, supposedly to reflect those externalities. Public transport obviously also contributes to pollution and congestion, especially when building underground lines, it's not externality-free.

I don't think TfL has a cost crisis. Crossrail overran but that was mostly due to the software complexities of the signalling tech debt around the Heathrow tunnels and other issues that can affect any kind of project. It's just hard to tell right now because they can't build at all.

The fare freeze was broken by central government briefly, but only by bribing Khan with central government money for upgrades. Exactly the outcome he wanted!

[midnightclubbed]

> The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.

Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.

If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.

When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?

Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).

[qcnguy]

The difficulty of getting people to vote for tax rises is a good justification for privatization. This difficulty isn't some uniquely right wing thing. The Democrats and Labour don't campaign on general tax rises either. At most, the left are willing to campaign on "tax rises for people who aren't you". That's because any party that wants to raise taxes on the majority loses.

So, governments of any color have to work with that as a constraint. Given that nobody has worked out how to convince everyone to accept big increases to their tax bills, you can either pay for new expenditures with borrowing or with cuts elsewhere. Sometimes cutting elsewhere is also hard, so either:

1. Everything gets put on the credit card. This ends badly.

2. Stuff is privatized. This yields an immediate cash influx, and voters are usually happy with the results which is why very few privatizations have been rolled back. The reason is that outside of very left wing spaces most people trust private companies on pricing much more than governments. Private companies run special offers, sales, sometimes cut prices even in the face of inflation and can be visibly seen competing on price. Government owned organizations never do this.

It's also (quietly) popular with governments on both left and right for another reason - it means they have less stuff to manage and less stuff that can blow up. If there's a problem with a privatized industry they can just tell you to switch to a competitor instead of needing to campaign on it and promise to do better.

Natural monopolies do exist and sometimes governments just have to bite the bullet and run such things themselves. But there's a lot of room to debate what is and isn't a natural monopoly.

[worik]

> The Democrats and Labour don't campaign on general tax rises

They should try it. We desp3rately need to move the Overton window on this.

Tax is good. We need more of it. A screamingly obvious fact. Give us a chance, please, to vote for it.

[danans]

> It's not just water where the UK has a problem with this. Transport for London has also been forced to underprice its services for years by London's socialist mayor

In the US we have a problem with fantastically underpricing public roads. We don't expect their books to break even, much less generate a profit. Meanwhile everyone asks why train systems are not profitable.

> The US is a very right wing country.

Yeah, at least compared with most of Europe.

> It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.

You didn't notice when the current president (somewhat successfully) bullied retailers into swallowing tariff-caused price increases, so they wouldn't damage his popularity? That almost seems right-wing socialist.

[qcnguy]

I don't think Trump is anyone's idea of a textbook conservative, especially not economically. He's a former democrat with populist instincts. Such politicians are often popular. It's frequently said in the UK that the median British voter is socially conservative and economically liberal.

It's true that the US subsidizes its road network. The effect is somewhat different though. If TfL doesn't get enough money in due to price controls then the network just degrades. If the US subsidizes its roads, the network can be maintained using subsidies. For it to be equivalent, roads would have to be privately owned but unable to charge the true cost of maintenance.

[swiftcoder]

The point is that the US doesn't subsidise rail, and yet they do exercise price controls on many forms of rail, so on both fronts rail is screwed when it comes to competing with road travel

[danans]

> I don't think Trump is anyone's idea of a textbook conservative, especially not economically

I'm just going off what you said above:

> The US is a very right wing country. > It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls.

I don't think he is a traditional conservative either, but rather a right-wing nationalist ethno-socialist.

However, the fact is that he has the near unanimous support of most "textbook conservatives", both in Congress and in the broader Republican party, as evidenced by their voting for and supporting a massive debt-exploding budget and their silence in the face of his ethno-nationalist executive actions.

If he isn't a textbook conservative, neither are they.

[wredcoll]

I'm just piling on but:

> a textbook conservative, especially not economically

Wtf is a text book conservative supposed to be, exactly? And have we ever had one?

All the republicans in my life have raised the national debt and spent their time passing laws about culture war issues.

[qcnguy]

Trump has certainly dragged his party towards the left economically speaking. With lots of squealing and resistance, but they went there in the end because it's popular with voters. They haven't managed to win people over on fiscal conservatism despite trying.

But US politics plays out in many ways, including at the local level. For water supply who the POTUS is doesn't matter that much, it's not handled at the federal level. American political outcomes vs the rest of world are the result of long term social trends beyond any one man.

[autoexec]

> This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized

This clearly isn't always true and when it does happen the public has the ability to require the transparency from their government to catch it happening quickly and the ability to hold the elected officials responsible for it accountable by voting them out and replacing them. Private corporations don't allow the level of transparency the public needs and aren't accountable to the public either.

Maybe the government could work out some deal that gives the public the right to put webcams in every meeting/board room of the private company, force their bookkeeping to be published to the internet, allow the public to request internal email and other communications, require independent audits/reports, and grant the public the ability to fire and replace any and all employees or executives at the private company who fail to do their jobs, but even then you'd still have the problem that private companies demand extra money on top of what is required to do the job just to line their own pockets. Why should we accept that?

[OtherShrezzing]

>Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment

The overwhelming majority of people would disagree that the Conservative Party can be described as "left". Since 1979, the Conservatives have been in power for all but 14 years.

[qcnguy]

Their voters obviously don't agree. Not only have they defected to Reform on a massive scale, but Reform recruiting former Tories like Dorries is hugely controversial within the party base, exactly because Tories are viewed as being too left wing.

[4ggr0]

that's like saying the CDU in germany is left because CDU voters started voting AfD. people flocking to an even more conservative party does not mean that the original party is somehow left.

[qcnguy]

Good example. The CDU is in a coalition with the left wing parties and refuses to work with the AfD in any way, not even winning votes with their votes, on the basis that the AfD is right wing and thus inherently evil. So the CDU is indeed not a recognizably right wing party anymore, and has suffered mass defections for that very reason. If it were, it would enter into coalitions with other right wing parties rather than being taking orders from a partly literally called Die Linke.

[triceratops]

> on the basis that the AfD is right wing and thus inherently evil

I thought it was on the basis of the whole Nazi thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na... Everyone except Nazis agrees that Nazis are inherently evil.

[qcnguy]

The AfD has nothing in common with the Nazis.

[ceejayoz]

It's entirely possible to have a right-wing party that still takes the stance "we don't join coalitions with the Nazis".

[gjm11]

Within whose party base? If you're saying that the Tories are viewed as too left-wing by Reform voters, then I assume that's true because Reform are further right than the Tories, but so what? If you're saying that Conservative voters find it "controversial" (whatever exactly you mean by that) that Reform is recruiting former Conservative politicians -- well, I'm sure they don't like it, no one likes it when some other party poaches their politicians, but I would like to see your evidence that their dislike is "exactly because Tories are viewed as being too left wing".

So far as I can make out, here in the UK the near-universal view is that the Conservatives are a centre-right party, Labour are somewhere between a centre-left and a just-plain-centre party (unsurprisingly, people who are further to the left see it as further to the right and vice versa), and Reform are a not-so-centre right party. (People who aren't Reform supporters would mostly describe them as far-right. Not many people like to use that sort of terminology to describe themselves, so people who are Reform supporters would say other things.)

Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party. Likewise, some people further to the left would describe Labour as a centre-right party. I think more people would do that than would describe the Conservatives as centre-left, but that may just reflect the people whose opinions I happen to be most exposed to.

(I mean, specifically, in the UK. Other countries have different overall political leanings. Someone in the US, comparing with the parties there, might accurately describe the Conservative Party as centre-left. But in terms of the UK political landscape: no, of course they are not a centre-left party.)

[qcnguy]

> Pretty much no one other than extreme rightists would describe the Conservatives as a centre-left party

If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).

Reform's popularity is driven by the belief that the Conservatives have become so captured by left wing "wets" that they cannot be fixed. Otherwise it makes no sense to split the right, and right wing voters there resisted doing so for a long time. The most commonly cited reason for switching to Reform is a belief that the Tories won't actually enact any right wing policies no matter what they say, and so that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party.

The fact that you believe "pretty much no one other than extreme rightists" has this view and that Labour is seen as a "centrist" party indicates that indeed, your gut feel is correct, and the people you know aren't a representative slice of the population. How many people do you hang out with regularly who read the Telegraph or Daily Mail? Maybe it's none?

If centrism means anything it means trying to adopt mid-way positions that appeal to the majority, but Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down. That's not what centrists do, they chase votes, doubling down is what ideological extremists do. They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.

[gjm11]

> If an election were called tomorrow [...] Reform with a massive majority [...] 33% of the vote

(Just remarking in passing on what a terrible electoral system we have in the UK. But, also, precisely because we have this terrible system, it is likely that a lot of the 67% who would prefer Reform not to win would, if there were actually an election tomorrow, vote for parties other than their first preference in the hope of keeping them out. Voters who don't like Reform often really don't like Reform.)

> that's a third of the country saying through their votes they think the Conservatives are a center-left party

Assuming for the sake of argument that it's actually true that 1/3 of voters would vote Reform if there were an election tomorrow (polled voting intentions far away from actual election dates aren't super-reliable) and that all those people agree with Reform about everything, that's 1/3 of the country who are to the right of the Conservatives.

That is not the same thing as 1/3 of the country thinking that the Conservatives are a centre-left party.

(There are plenty of people to the left of the Labour Party but wouldn't call them a centre-right party.)

Also, by your own numbers, we have: 33% to the right of the Conservatives; 17% to the left of the Conservatives; 60% voting for other parties, mostly the Lib Dems and Greens who are also to the left of the Conservatives, typically followed by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, also to the left of the Conservatives, and a few percent of random others most of whom are also to the left of the Conservatives.

A party that is to the right of (let's say) 55% of the electorate is not in any useful sense a centre-left party.

> Labour's support for far-left ideology is so intense they're reacting to continuously dropping approval numbers by doubling down

This is laughably different from anything that is actually happening. For instance:

> They'd rather drive their own party into the ground than compromise on modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration

Here is an instance from each of the last five months of the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wgrv7pwrzo "Sir Keir Starmer has promised the government's new immigration measures will mean net migration falls "significantly" over the next four years." and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-immig... "Sir Keir Starmer unveiled drastic plans to slash migration on Monday (May 2025; these are about the same white paper)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-small... "Sir Keir Starmer has signalled a new hardline approach to tackling illegal immigration by limiting visas for countries which did not do enough to tackle the irregular migration crisis, like taking back failed asylum seekers." (June 2025)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/10/starmer-and-... "Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will announce a “one in, one out” migration deal on Thursday that will involve the UK accepting some cross-Channel asylum seekers but returning others to France." (July 2025)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/04/starmer-hires-of... "Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced a £100 million investment in border security which will pay for the NCA to get an additional 300 officers to work on organised immigration crime." (August 2025)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y5379djl3o "Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time the government is looking at digital ID as a way to tackle illegal immigration." (September 2025)

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that these are all things that would please or satisfy your, or the typical Reform voter's, preferences around immigration. I am sure it is true that the Labour Party is less opposed to immigration than you would like it to be. But it is flatly untrue that they would do anything rather than compromise on unlimited mass immigration; if they want unlimited mass immigration at all (which all the evidence suggests they don't) they are compromising on it rather a lot. In other words, doing exactly what you say centrists do and far-leftists don't do.

[qcnguy]

These are polls asking who people would vote for tomorrow. They're usually pretty accurate. Maybe it's comforting to think that all those people would "really" unite behind a single party to keep Reform out, but there's no sign of that today. It's a wish, not the current situation.

> the Labour Party demonstrating, or at least claiming, that it does not want unlimited mass immigration

Yes, they lie about it because they know it's incredibly unpopular. And then they refuse to do anything that'd actually solve it. That's what non-centrist parties look like. A centrist party would be panicking over their immense unpopularity and trying to actually stake out the center ground with real policy movement.

Your list of links is a good example of my point. In turn:

- Publishing a white paper.

- "Vowing to take tougher action".

- An announcement that didn't have any effect on the ground (there is no one-in-one-out happening in reality).

- A commitment to spend more money! This is at least a believable commitment from them. It's been tried many times before and doesn't work. They know this already.

- An announcement to look at something.

Announcements that they will study the possibility of taking action, one day, possibly, is what it looks like when a government likes a situation the voters don't. Here are some things you didn't include which show their actual position:

- Arguing before the court that the rights of migrants take precedence over the rights of native Brits.

- Saying "of course we do" when an interviewer asks a minister if they really believe that.

[lambdaone]

> If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).

If. But since the Labour government has a massive Labour majority that doesn't have to hold another election until 2029, that's not going to happen any time soon. Four years is a long time in politics.

For non-European readers, Reform are the equivalent of Germany's AfD or France's RN - or America's MAGA. It's a populist culture war party.

In response, far from doubling down, Labour has swung dramatically to the political right (by UK standards) of their normal political position in terms of the culture war issues like immigration and transgender rights that have been driving support for Reform.

We're having bad times in the UK, and no-one likes the incumbent government during bad times. (Never mind that the bad times are largely due to factors beyond their control, as is generally the case until a party has been in power for long enough to start turning the ship.)

Reform, meanwhile, are currently playing on easy mode; voters can say anything they like at the moment, and Reform are picking up the fantasy-football protest vote based on making wild promises they are unlikely to be able to fulfil.

None of this is to say Reform are not a serious threat. But the concept that their victory is inevitable is part their schtick, and should be resisted.

[mobiuscog]

> If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).

Only if you believe propaganda. What is the sample size of this poll projection, and what are the election policies being put forward for this election ?

It's clear that Labour are unpopular, but an actual election is not something that anyone is thinking about right now, because it is so far out. Reform would like to suggest they are, but they have yet to show any actual policies other than the usual right-wing rhetoric that may be populist but doesn't fix anything.

Shouting loudly like certain Americans, and pretending you have answers, may be good for headlines, but doesn't convince many real voters.

[qcnguy]

Sample size for that poll was 2615, about normal or a little bigger than normal for a voting intentions poll in the UK. The people being asked who they'd vote for in the next election are thinking about it, at least. Reform announced specific legislative policies on immigration at a large press event just recently.

[midnightclubbed]

> modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.

Ahh and there we are. It's the immigrant's fault. Once all those illegals are out the of the country we'll be great again - the world will once more bend to Queen Victoria's will and Bobby Charleston will again lift the world cup for England, it's rightful owners (hard /s btw).

No major party on either side of the Atlantic are pro-illegal immigration or advocating unlimited mass immigration (or anything close to unlimited).

[qcnguy]

I didn't pass any judgement on that policy, nor blame immigrants for anything. I only observed that it's a deeply unpopular policy across the political spectrum yet they won't abandon it because it's seen as non-negotiable by a small class of very left wing people.

Labour following their desires instead of trying to boost their polling numbers isn't "centrism" by any definition.