Soldato
- Joined
- 16 Aug 2009
- Posts
- 8,102
My recollection of the nationalised utilities was that they were mostly pretty good.
Particularly on the day of my Grandads funeral in the late 60's when we woke up in the morning to find that we had no electricity because the main cable under the front garden had failed.
Despite being a Saturday, the (Inefficient/nationalised) electricity provider had an emergency over head supply up and running by lunchtime!
Tell me that would happen today!
As for the improvements quoted in the Guardian article.
How many of those improvements are because of prviatisation and how many of them are simply down to improvements in technology that would have happened anyway over the same period.
EG speed with which new lines are installed.
Then. A phone line was a physical connection that went from your phone all the way back to a terminal on a relay back at the exchange.
Unless there was a "Spare" wire available on the pole outside your house, this would all have to be installed all the way back to the exchange in order to provide your new line. No wonder new lines sometimes took a long time (Using "Party Lines" was a way of mitigating this, but it had its downsides)
Now-All that might be needed is a new line to the local cabinet. And indeed, the effectively unlimited capacity of the new fiber connected cabinets means that it has been easy to "Oversupply" the big cables to the poles to such an extent that an inability to find a spare connection is hardly ever likely to be a problem. Of course one will be able to install new lines quicker today. Even 15 days seems like a long time really.
But this has ****** all to do with privatisation!
Same with the water supply.
Then-Cast iron and steel pipes that were vulnerable to cracks and leakage causing loss of water pressure and large amounts of wastage.
Now- Far more robust and flexible plastic piping.
Again, nothing to do with privatisation. Just stuff that would have happened anyway (And indeed, might even have happened sooner BT was working on VoD over 30 years ago, if they hadn't been specifically prevented from deploying the technology we could have had BT-TV by the late 80's)
You're viewing everything through the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia. Most people clamouring for those things weren't even around to remember just how bad the raliways were. Nationalised industries were garbage due to underfunding and collosal ineptitude of government that only cares about votes and not how manage anything. Remember the Millenium Dome? Blairs pet vanity project? Yet another colossal waste of public money that was losing millions on an almost daily basis.
Socialism should be left to basic services like collecting bins and not to running industries because it fundamentally fails to know to deal with a market based economy. What happened in the former Eastern Bloc should be proof enough of that. As for Venuzuala and Comrade Corbyn's championing it as a model economy well that should tell you everything you need to know about him and socialism in general. (And just why is the BBC so reluctant to bring that up anyway? If it was May or the govt they'd be all over it like a rash gleefully pointing it out and hammering politicians at every opportunity.)
