More to do with the excellent and modern infrastructure they inherited and the way in which the privatisation was structured and is regulated.
This is ultimately the only relevant thread in the post.
The national rail system was in dire need of updating WHEN it was privatized, it hasn't gone downhill, it was downhill, we couldn't afford to bring it up to grade, we privatized it and they are charging us to make it better, and as any company, trying to increase profits also.
Comparing the rail, nhs, security to ANY other country is irrelevant. The question is what was the state of whatever particular service when it was privatised, the fact that its crap or good when private or public on its own is a useless measure.
If you take country A with service B which is public, pump billions into it from the start, have the best service in the world, then sell it, you'll almost certainly see privatized version of it do excellently. If you take country C with service D, it was poorly mismanaged, neglected underfunded then sold, if its not doing well when privatized you can't blame the private company and you CERTAINLY can't blame the entire private sector.
The really relevant question is, what state was it in when privatized, what state is it in now, what state would it be in if it were still public and what has changed in the service.
Has the private sector pumped more into the national rail network than the government could have afforded? Has the number of passengers gone up, has usage increased beyond a point an old system can cope well.
Randomly saying service A sucks and it didn't used to 15 years ago is proof of nothing.
I'm not saying the rail service is good or bad.
In terms of security for the games, G4S has made mistakes, did they make mistakes worse than the government would have? Was the 285million still 50mil less than the same service would have cost the army to provide? Would the government have not had enough people and had to last minute go to G4S for emergency personel for the games, and because of the short notice and being over a barrel negotiation wise, could G4S of ended up with a ridiculous amount of money for a far smaller number of people and the total cost of that plus army spending would have been double the 285mil?
No one here knows the answers to any of these but doesn't stop a certain someone chiming in with generic crap threads about anti Tory stuff as always.
Xordium, why do people jump on Stockjoke, quite simply because he is wrong, he didn't come in claiming G4S are a joke, he tried to imply ALL privatized services are inherently worse, and also implied Hunt was seeing the light, when all he's said was he won't consider privatized companies by default, that doesn't mean he doesn't still favour them, will chose them.
Hunt of course is one of the biggest morons around.
