Why is socialism viewed so negatively in politics and media?

[Vix150]

Why do people not like socialism?

To me it doesn't seem disastrous but it's portrayed in the media as a horrific way for a society to run.

Any thoughts?

I would give up work if we were to move further towards socialism. What would be the point in keep trying to better myself.

Silly little cartoon for kids that sums it up nicely. Grossly simplistic, but demonstrates why socialism is coercive.

Giving up work either through early retirement or reducing hours because of high taxation is where you start to question whether it is really worth working given what you take home and is increasing common.

Preceding this step is where workers stop really caring about their work (what I term as "can't really be arsed anymore ") where you can't afford to early retire or cut your hours but high taxation resulting in low take home pay results in demotivation.

Both of these severely impact UK worker productivity.

The LDP is a big Tent party, involving left of centre liberals, the right wing too... its equivalent over here would be the "one nation" Tories, last seen under Edward Heath and John Major.

I note you use the phrase "...but with a strong state intervention twist"

Wonder what another name for that is.........

Btw UK worker productivity has fallen off a cliff compared to our more socialist European neighbours, started under the Tories but funnily enough has started to creep up in the last 2 years.....

Sorry but you re wrong on the ONS charts, the first one until 2021, shows no real terms growth.
They then point out, since Covid, uk wealth has fallen by 19%, due to very high inflation (under the Tories) & falling house prices.

A drop in wealth of 1/5th is massive and is clearly shown on your link, you obviously got excited about the 1st chart, up until 2021/22 but then failed to read on any further.

You're quite right that I didn't read on, apologies. The chart I'm referring to went up to 2022 which is the l last available 2022 figure.

You then quoted a fall between 2022 and 2024 from a left wing think tanks research.

Most economists would not look at a short term fall after a long trend of stability or rise and draw too many conclusions from that.

I'm quite prepared to accept that wealth has fallen if presented with up to date accurate figures showing a trend. I think that's very likely to be an accelerating trend under this Labour government's taxation and spending commitments.

UK private sector productivity is back at pre Covid levels and has been for some time.

Public sector productivity is not.

One more reason for people to dislike the State taking over the means of production.

In nearly every Sunday morning, "Tory Laura" Kuenssberg has concentrated on highlighting Labour mistakes.

Funny that the right wing are not highlighting the death of conservatism.

I think you'll find that Laura Kunsbrrg spends every Sunday morning highlighting the mistakes of the goverment. You know, the ones actually responsible for what's happening on any particular Sunday morning?

Conservatism is far from dead, do you mean the Conservative Party?

Yes back to very poor levels of productivity, its not much to shout about.

Very difficult to bring up public sector productivity, when the means to do so is totally dependent on what the state does in terms of funding, esp in the NHS, where the NHS has no control on what the public do with their own health.

People dislike State production? You mean like the vast majority want the state to take over failed railways, water companies, steel works...

Or private companies building HS2... stella success.. signed off by the Tories, then cancelled by the Tories - cost the tax payer £29 billion..... £29 billion would increase the defence budget by around 50%.

I'm not against the private sector, not at all but when its left to its own devices, it can sometimes run amok and cost the state ie the tax payer, a great deal.

Can we discuss successful socialist countries?

Very difficult to bring up public sector productivity, when the means to do so is totally dependent on what the state does in terms of funding, esp in the NHS, where the NHS has no control on what the public do with their own health.

It's not very difficult at all.

The private sector returned quite quickly to pre Covid levels of productivity.

The public sector, even when very little else had changed, did not and has not.

Your comment about health and funding is spurious. Productivity is cases dealt with in a day. More cases means bigger backlogs, not lower productivity.

Or private companies building HS2... stella success.. signed off by the Tories, then cancelled by the Tories - cost the tax payer £29 billion..... £29 billion would increase the defence budget by around 50%.

HS2 is a Public Sector managed project. The Public Sector has demonstrated time and again how crap it is at negotiating the contracts, budgeting for these big projects and how useless it is at managing them to come in on time.

Everyone in Cheshire knew that the section of HS2 across to Crewe could not be built on the route proposed because of the instability of the land. There were presentations by geologists about it at local clubs. HS2 can be laid firmly at the door of Boris Johnson's vanity.

You mistake capital and revenue.

£29 billion would increase the defence budget for one year only.

Someone upthread mentioned NHS productivity - how should we measure this? If you are using health outcomes then you would have to do a lot of statistical analysis to control for health inputs - comparing (for example) stroke unit morbidity and mortality in Bath vs Glasgow is not valid as the health behaviours / background population general health are so different. Glasgow will do 'worse' regardless of the NHS staff & infrastructure because of higher smoking, alcohol & street drug use, poorer diet & exercise rates & higher obesity levels.

Looking at rates of elective surgery is confounded by overcrowding- if there is no post-op bed for after your planned knee or hip replacement due to high levels of people admitted as an emergency using those beds then your operation is cancelled. There's nothing the orthopaedic team can do expect complain to management about the bed state.

High levels of emergency admissions are due to an increasing number of elderly people, general increase in the UK population, plus population behaviour - alcohol & street drug problems, violence, RTC, failure of social care, inappropriate use of ED for trivial or chronic issues - very little that the hospital can do to influence any of those factors.

The 'inefficiencies' people complain about usually are issues that affect the patient, not the NHS. You not turning up to an appointment is detrimental to the NHS. Offering you a short notice appointment which means you have to take a day off work might be detrimental to you, but it's actually efficient for the NHS. Offering routine services on a weekend is only efficient for the NHS when high value/ short supply resources are being maximised without excessive staff costs - for example using an MRI scanner on a weekend is efficient. Doing elective surgery may not be efficient due to increased staffing costs over the weekend (balanced by maximising use of the operating theatre resource). Doing an outpatient clinic is very unlikely to be efficient due to staff overtime pay being the biggest cost - a clinic room is a cheap resource. Politicians going on about people accessing routine healthcare out of hours are just being populist- that primarily benefits non-NHS employers because then they don't have to give you sick leave for a weekday appointment. It costs the NHS more due to additional staffing costs.

People dislike State production? You mean like the vast majority want the state to take over failed railways, water companies, steel works...

That water companies should never, imo, have been privatised because it's a basic necessity of life.

But water companies are blamed for lack of water when it's Planning restraints that have prevented them from building more reservoirs, people complain about leaks but would not accept the cost of preventing them (nor is it a good use of money to attempt to prevent them all) and the companies are dealing with extremes of weather from climate change that the archaic system was never built to deal with. In large parts of the system water that falls in storms goes into drains that also carry sewage, overwhelming the sewage treatment plants. The water companies have spent huge amounts of money building dwell tanks to cope with this. The failure with water privatisation is largely a result of Ofwat having, or using, insufficient powers.

And that's before we even start to consider what would have to be cut to pay the £10 billion or so that we would be paying in interest on the additional £200+ billion or so that would be on the National Debt if the investments they've made had been out of public funds.

If those investments had ever been made. The fact remains that cross as people are with a falling off of standards recently, the rivers and seas are cleaner now than they were before privatisation.

Steel is an international market and steel production is a national need as well as being pivotal for employment in very localised areas. Steel companies didn't fall because they were badly run, they failed because other countries will sell it cheaper. Globalised capitalism is responsible for us needing to subsidise steel, that very same global capitalism that has put most of the cheap clothes that you're probably wearing on your back.

Railways? You are clearly too young to remember traveling by British Rail.

I've got another one for you. British Leyland. You'll be too young to remember those cars, as well.

Honestly Alexandra, this is all a he'll of a lot more complicated than you think it is. And a lot of us are not in favour of the state owning the means of product because we have living memories of what that means. Low productivity, low quality, poor service.

I have been told in the past that it doesn't have to be that way, that there's no reason why the state can't run an efficient business. All I can answer to that is that as soon as apparently limitless public money is available, low quality, low productivity and poor service are what eventual result.

Alexandra brought in the NHS. I think it's a bad example. I answered only because she said more people being ill affects NHS productivity when it doesn't.

I haven't a clue how the bean counters measure it.

I think most of the productivity loss that's being recorded is in the big departments where tramadol are easier to count and more standardised.

Tramadol? I expect that's what may be needed for the headache at the end of this discussion but I meant transactions!

Productivity is about getting more output for less input.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/explainer-what-is-economic-productivity/

The NHS won’t necessarily become more productive by giving it more money.

Hilarious! older folk telling young ones what they experienced, what they should be thinking....

I remember BR, it ran well, i used a great deal, stations had staff, innovative trains the 125 Intercity, built in the UK, at Crew, now we import much of our rolling stock.

I also know why Leyland was nationalised, in a vain attempt to save 10s of 1000s of jobs..... the private company that was BL and its predecessors, were disasters companies, much like the british privately run, motor cycle industry, once world leading but collapsed under private ownership.

The water industry, is a lesson on how NOT to privatise an industry, its non competitive, is essential for life and should have stayed as it was, in public hands.
How many billions sent abroad from profits, around 70 billion in dividends!

You seem desperate to prove private is always good, state always bad.

I take a different stance, bad management wrecks companies and organisations, private is essential, public ownership can be excellent too... & of course is always the stop gap when essential private industries screw-up... they run cap in hand to the state

Its a balance, not one or the other, which you seem set on proving.

What?
So more demand but not the resources to look after these people promptly doesn't affect productivity?

You also ignore that as we age, people are presenting with more complex health issues that require more staff to care for.... more and more people deemed fit to live at home, now require 2 carers to visit, for transfers, personal care etc etc all equals less productivity.

Alexandra!!! You cannot say that British Rail ran well!! I took the train to school every day and not once did my train on a busy line arrive remotely on time. The carriages were filthy and much of the stock had those small individual compartments which you couldn't get out of until the train stopped. Terrifying as a girl travelling alone. Once it was privatised things improved immeasurably.

The mistake in that was having separate track ownership I understand. I think still publicly owned but can't be bothered to check so do correct me if Im wrong although it doesn't matter to the point Im making which is that BR was The Pits.

You don't seem to understand what productivity means.

If a coffee shop has a queue of people out the door and down the street, that does not affect how many cups of coffee they can serve in an hour (unless they were working slower than they could and have sped up as the queue gets longer, in which case productivity goes up.

Two of us have also discussed that the NHS isn't a good example to pick because even though the ONS says it's almost 8% lower, it's difficult for us ordinary mortals to know how they are judging that. "The Public Sector" is a lot more than the NHS and many parts are much more standard in their transactions. The DVLC has, in early 2026, now returned to pre Covid levels for most of its work issuing driving licences, but it's done that by automation. In other words, if that automation has been applied pre covid, productivity would now be much higher than pre Covid levels.

This.

Recollections may differ. BR was dirty, late, old trains, missing trains and generally dire.

Alexandra seems to have forgotten that there was no rubbish collection on BR trains, guards were for tickets only. People also died regularly falling out of doors which weren't locked and could only be opened by sliding down the window and using the outside door handle. Toilets used to empty directly onto the lines, sod the health and safety of the line workers. Etc.

I remember BR, it ran well, i used a great deal, stations had staff, innovative trains the 125 Intercity, built in the UK, at Crew, now we import much of our rolling stock.

I suggest you look up its forerunner, the APT if you want another example of badly managed Public sector project that wasted money.

It might also interest you to look up the history of the UK arm of Fujitsu, now so famous for screwing Post Office managers. Everyone working in IT at the time knew that ICL was not a name you wanted on your CV.

You don't know what you're talking about.

The year of record delays and cancellations was in 2024, 1 in 25 services cancelled/delayed.

Remember Potters Bar & Hatfield crashes?

UK also subsidises the rail network now far more than it ever did in BR days, yet we have the most expensive rail fares in Europe..... so much for private efficiency!

No other country has privatised the rail network like the UK has - wonder why!

Of course H&S etc has improved... News Flash... we have airbags and ABS in cars now.....

... Door systems were upgraded during BR days.