Public Failures

One of the oddest things about the Political Class's hatred of the public sector is that so few of the former's members have worked much, if at all, in the private sector that they are nevertheless utterly convinced would be so much better at delivering public services, despite not only the dearth of evidence to that effect, but now the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Could it be that if they actually knew anything about the private sector, then they would know that, whatever else it might be good at, it is wholly inappropriate to these particular tasks?

No member of the present Cabinet has ever worked in the private sector. Not one. Ever. Of everyone who was ever a Cabinet Minister under Tony Blair, only two had ever done so: John Prescott, as a ship's steward in the 1950s; and Alan Milburn, the obsessive privatiser of the NHS, running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope".

As for Blair himself, Peter Hitchens, in particular, was never able to trace anyone whom he had ever represented in court. Has anyone out there ever been either represented in court, or taught as a student, by Gordon Brown?

All in all, our lords and masters seem to hate the public sector, not out of ignorance of it, but because they themselves were rubbish at doing what it does. So they want to make what it does rubbish all round, by handing over those functions to people and organisations whose expertise is entirely elsewhere.