I think we should shoot him as a warning to the rest of the scum. It's a fcuking disgrace that he wants to privatise essential services.

'run outside the public sector'? Nice euphemism for 'privatised'.

Aside from the more rabbid tory ideologues I'm not enitrely sure who he's pitching this at.
Saying you're planning to privitise the NHS and the Fire service seems like a surefire way to lose an election.

I may be crazy but:

in ideal conditions, a public ran service will always cost less to the community than a privatised one surely? just out of the principle that one needs to make a profit and the other one doesnt.

if we have 100 money
public= 100 money used to pay for staff, buildings etc, public gets, land and buildings it owns plus as people's work
private= 100 money, 5-10 gets taken to pay shareholders (then offshored or exported to wherever), some is used to pay rent/ mortgage on privately owned buildings, rest is used to pay staff.

Not crazy. That's what the rest are saying. Nobody else has pointed out that this is just another step towards turning RoboCop into reality.

Just saying...

You could try that logic. But it applied to 100% of the economy of the Soviet Union and that fell apart in every possible way. So you must ask yourself if you have taken every relevant factor fully into account.

For one example, you would have to have a number in there that allowed you to examine whether society suffers more by servicing the demands of shareholders who tend to want an organisation to become more efficient - or those of a public sector union, who sometimes do not.

The logic seems to be that private enterprise is always more efficient than public enterprise and that competition always drives things to be better and cheaper. So therefore private ownership and market competition always trumps public ownership and collective management.

This is obviously true, apart from the enormous mass of evidence that suggests it isn't.

Jon

There isn't true competition really, I mean there's only one train company per lines in most of the country, only one water company, only one hospital etc.
the problem is private lawyers and contract drafters are always smarter than public ones so get better deals out of the government like hospital on a PPP which only have a 25 years service life



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Leading to the reverse, and equally fallacious, reasoning that public ownership is better every time.

The UK has never owned, and therefore never privatised, a major construction company to my knowledge. All those roads, schools and hospitals that get built with public money are constructed by private sector companies. This is not controversial because that is more efficient than it would be to use public sector employees to lay tarmac. You should really be just as angry about this lump of public money going to private companies as you are about private hospitals. Yet for no reason other than this is how it has always been, you seem to accept that this is how it ought to be.

because ...
the public sector provide a required service which we pay for via tax
and is free at the point of use

the private sector charge for services for profit at the point of use regardless of tax payments ...

That's what I've always though, which is why I don't understand Tory policies on the NHS.

Incentives.

If the private company gets paid more for delivering the correct service more cheaply, it has an incentive to do that. If the public sector union gets paid more because it won't allow anyone to lose their job, they have an incentive to prevent delivery of a more cost effective service.

The question of whether the hospital or fire station is owned or operated by Joe Public or Fred Moneybags is a trivial sideshow. Incentives are what matters, get them right and we end up with better services that are better value too. Get them wrong and we have a bucket of [LIFTED], whether that is being served up to you by a public or a private employee isn't really an important distinction.

A pointless argument to make. I never claimed private enterprise was always worse than public enterprise, or that private enterprise is not a valid solution to many problems. I simply stated that the tory dogmatic belief that private enterprise and 'the market' are always by definition better than public enterprise or collective management - and therefore privatisation in one form or another is the first and only solution to any problem in public enterprise - is idiotic and there is masses of evidence to say so.

It is possible to have both within an economy. In fact the best economies in the world have a good mix of both.

So, you know, it would have been better if you'd discussed the point I was actually making rather than the one that was in your head.

The problem is that the private sector has different priorities to the public sector. Look at the out of hours service.

The Govt valued it at £6k per GP (based on historical figure) and decided it could run it for cheaper. What happened was that it would put the contract out for tender. So let's say the west midlands out of hours contract is up for bids. Cheapest bid wins (because of EU anticompetitive laws). If it really costs (figure out of thin air) £100m per year, a group of GPs might bid for say £90m. A private company can bid £50m, undercutting everyone by a madsive margin even if unfeasible. It will then try and run the service as cheaply as possible to maximise profit. What happens is that they can't recruit enough doctors so they hire nurses instead. The nurses aren't trained to be doctors and so struggle with complexities and numbers of patients. To attract more doctors, the company has to offer more pay. So you get GPs who are earning something like £100/hr gross. The long and short of it is that the company can't afford to run it and make a profit (and probably makes a loss), and then shuts down. No local out of hours. Everyone complains to the Govt. Govt blames GPs and incites the media to do so as well.