How did they get away with privatising public services?

[Newname85]

Whoever thought it was a good idea to privatise rail services, airports etc - how exactly did they get away with it?

How did anyone believe that adding profits on the top will somehow result in better service/ ROI?

I returned yesterday from a short trip to visit family. At the airport, you are asked to throw water away for security check. But, you are forced to buy it at £3.50 for a small bottle. How is this fair?
Restaurants serve ridiculously expensive food, but no obligation to serve water. wtf ??

The other day, I saw an advertisement from SouthEastern. Why exactly do they need to advertise!??? SE trains are the only option I have !!

People voted for it . HTH.

Airports have water bottle filling stations - take a bottle through and fill it after security.

Public service trains under British rail were absolutely awful. That’s why they could privatise it. I don’t agree with that, better funding and management structures were needed though.

Further to my last, do remember that for all the modern human rights crap among the middle classes, those same people are only too keen to ignore the slum living conditions of those of us forced into renting damp mouldy vermin-filled flats at high prices - often off the same people. This is perfidious Albion in action, the country and power that gave us the Peterloo massacre, the Jarrow march, Old Corruption and the reality of working class life in the Victorian empire. It’s quite familiar - neoliberalist economics are after all merely the ‘new’ liberalism from Victorian times (liberalism refers here to the liberty of wealth to do whatever it wants).

The fact of the matter as I see it is that public services cannot be adequately invested in, maintained and developed and make money. They were viewed as a drain on the public purse rather than necessary for society to operate. The clue's in the name, services. The Tory government of Maggie Thatcher decided they should be someone else's problem because it went against their ideology to get the public to pay more for them via taxes. They were then sold under value otherwise no business would have touched them.

@CranfordScones All very well to blame Thatcher, but that misses the context of why all those originally private companies were nationalised in the first place! None of them started out as public corporations.

Which companies are you talking about? The untilities were a mixture of private companies and Corporation/Council undertakings - e.g. Watford Corporation was still responsible for water and sewerage right up until 1973. A similar situation existed for local transport - Corporation-run buses were a common sight before de-regulation and privatisation. Council housing was never commercially-owned. Telecoms and the postal service were government-owned - by the GPO.

If you mean a company such as British Aerospace - this was an attempt to consolidate British aircraft, rocket and satellite manufacture, and as the government was the major (or really the only) customer for these, it made economic and security sense to control this. Railway nationalisation was also for reasons of securing investment in vital infrastructure (before the 1960s there were very few private cars and lorries were small - and road freight was also nationalised), investment that could not be provided by the private companies. Sealink (mentioned above) was also a part of the railway system - again, nationalised in order to protect freight routes to and from the Continent.

"It's not a failure of private enterprise, it's really a failure of government to regulate them effectively. Given that much of the failure rests with governments (of all parties) - what makes you think that a government can run them better? There's no evidence to support that."

I'm in some agreement here with regard to the failure to regulate effectively, but there is plenty of evidence from other countries that government-backed, but independently-run entities can be run well. Most utilities in many European countries operate as mutuals, guaranteed by the government. Even the much-envied health systems of countries like Germany and Austria are run like this. The problems start when politicians like Hunt and Gove try to dictate to professionals and when they are driven by political beliefs rather than by the needs of the customers.

I should probably emphasise the dissolution of local councils that had the power to challenge central government a bit more. All others started creeping around tugging their forelocks to central and the idea of local government being equal partners and the first stage of representation of the people in a democracy, died. I speak as an entry level worker in council work at the time and one familiar with records of how the local councils operated over the 20th century. The power they had in the 1930s through the 60s compared to the asset stripping of Thatcher and New Labour both has to be read to be believed. While anyone interested reads up on that, perhaps they can also read some local newspapers to compare the quality of information available then with now too.

In short the government of the day co-opted opposition and removed any possibility of organised opposition, allowed the wealthy to take control of information sources, and bought off what little was left. That’s how power struggles always work.

@Havanananana Profitz go to shareholders. Who are they? Pension companies for a start. Do you really want the state to control and pay for everything? We are where we are.

This is true. Also were airports ever publicly owned?

Whilst I agree with most of this you may not remember quite how bad things were before when everything was publicly owned. Trains were probably worse. Electricity certainly was.

I wouldn't hold out too much hope of renationalisation improving things.

The absolute worst thing done IMI was the right to buy. Huge swathes of affordable social housing disappeared forever.
In the 60s I remember the local council used to buy up houses to add to council stock. On a street of 3 bed semis when one came up for sale the council would buy it.
All ended up back in private hands at a massive discount.

The media has long been convincing people that private = good, public = wasteful and inefficient. When often the opposite is true.

Yes you are right.

Those hanging all of this on Thatcher might want to be aware that privatisation of public services is not a British/Thatcher thing. The same thing was happening on an international level at that time, not something Thatcher came up with to punish the little people even more. As the world was discovering after the disastrous previous decades, for some reason public owned services don't seem to work very well.

You know you can refill empty water bottles at every airport? No ones forcing you to buy a £3.50 bottle of water. I didn’t think anyone actually bought those.

I remember well all the power cuts of the 1970s (occasionally these were several times a week and could last for hours - we always needed to have candles handy). I also travelled on trains a lot from the mid 80s to the early 90s, and spent many hours just sitting around in train stations waiting for trains that were cancelled or extremely late. I learned I had to allow most of a day to get somewhere that was only 1h 20mins away by car. I missed a uni exam because I'd only allowed 6.5 hours to do a 2h45 min journey when I really should have known better. But both rail and energy services were utterly dreadful at the time and in my experience things definitely improved after privatisation. Of course private services aren't perfect and I've had a few rubbish journeys amonst my mostly good ones recently, but it's still way better than what I remember of the 80s. I now only use trains a few times a year but I'm still very wary of the government being in charge of rail or energy again, because it really was that bad before.

Not really - the public sector savings were used to keep taxes low, which only benefits those paying high levels of tax.

Ahem! You are forgetting that basic rate income tax in the 1970s was over 30%.

I remember British Rail and BT were particularly shite before privatisation.

I remember waiting over 6 months for a phone line to be installed. Trains cancelled, late, dirty and totally in thrall to the Union.

Public companies were run to benefit the staff, not to provide customer service, who could just fuck off as far as the staff were concerned.

They were truly appalling.

Dh had to leave a few years ago. it was such a shit show and he did not want a death on his hands. He could see the way it was going

All of the actual evidence though shows that the private sector runs services better - more efficiently and cost effective- especially when well regulated. In every single country in the world that is the case.

Yanbu. I can't even get an abandoned trolley picked up or streetlight fixed without dealing with a useless external company. Trolleywise and Enervo are both shite.

The council or supermarket should be dealing with it.

They got away with it because enough people voted for it. It really is a simple as that.

They got away with it because enough people voted for it. It really is a simple as that.

Absolute rot. Does this include the utterly privatised healthcare that was the only option available before the NHS, back in Victorian times? The rich elite hobby doctors who would happily tell miners that their breathing issues were due to drinking stewed tea? Even Thatcher, especially Thatcher, knew of the dangers of specialised knowledge and professional monopolies.

We are seeing the results in our sewage-filled rivers and Ofgem’s current plans (forced by the last Tory government) to make domestic consumers pay for the energy use of private business too.

There isn’t much evidence to come up with about benefits of regulation in the U.K. because we don’t have it here and only got half way there with the birth of the public sector. It did not have long enough to effect real change, enough to undo the issues of an imperial country making the most out of disadvantaged working class lives for hundreds of years.

That's not true. The public sector is poorly managed and many of its properties have been demolished or degenerated into slums. The cost comparison is like for like anyway.

Many studies have shown the differential in build costs. www.building.co.uk/social-housing-costs-a-quarter-more-than-private-built-homes/3053916.article

Building companies will build what people want so they can sell. Councils and housing associations often build impractical homes in inconvenient locations because those making the decisions do not face the same accountability.

Of course some council homes are well built but but so are private properties. Many council properties are extremely poorly built and badly maintained. I grew up in a council estate and they knocked a lot of it down because no one wanted to live there.

And council housing does not provide net income to councils. Its purpose is to house people not provide income.

Ask Sid

"Absolute rot. Does this include the utterly privatised healthcare that was the only option available before the NHS, back in Victorian times? The rich elite hobby doctors who would happily tell miners that their breathing issues were due to drinking stewed tea?."

NHS doctors used to tell people to smoke for their asthma, etc. Luckily we have better medical knowledge now.

Like it or not, the private sector is just much more efficient at providing goods and services. Not to say that everything should be privatised but generally that's how you produce the most value for money.