Martin Kelly writes:
Anyone who can publish editorials in both 'The Mail on Sunday' and 'The Sunday Times' on the same day, as Neil O' Brien, the director of Policy Exchange, did on 7th March 2010, must be a figure to be reckoned with; or perhaps not.
The fly in his ointment is the public sector, and how expensive and inefficient it is. Snore. While I'm sure he believes it, he's the latest addition to that long line which has stood in front of those who really matter in Britain and told them what they want to hear, that government is too big and the people have been spoiled. Such coming men come and go - indeed many have come and gone before it could be said that they've been and went.
His piece in today's 'Telegraph' seems to proceed from the assumption that the public sector is naturally more inefficient than the private. Never having worked in the public sector, I can only assume that his assumption must be incorrect. If the public services were as inefficient and loaded with time-servers as many of the businesses I have worked for, we'd be at serious risk of invasion by the Faroe Islands.
There is no way of measuring public sector productivity; and perhaps this is not a bad thing. After all, I'm not really interested in a doctor's productivity, but their professional competence. I'm not interested in how productive a nurse is, but in how capably she nurses. Our public sector takes a bad press, much of which may be deserved; but it's better than O' Brien's extremely reactionary alternative.
There isn’t really a private sector, as that term is ordinarily used. Not in any advanced country, and not since the War at the latest. Take out bailouts or the permanent promise of them, take out central and local government contracts, take out planning deals and other sweeteners, and take out the guarantee of customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and what is there left? They are all as dependent on public money as any teacher, nurse or road sweeper. Everyone is. And with public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not being met.
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Exactly. I have had as many problems dealing with private firms as with various public entities. In any event, privatization usually just results in the granting of guaranteed profits to some politically connected private firm anyways, not a whole lot of "competition" and "efficiency" there.
ReplyDeleteMy city just privatized our parking meters and everyone is complaining about how expensive it is to park (rates went through the roof after privatization, surprise surprise), including a bunch of right-wingers I know. Yet they will still complain about the postal service and the public roads, which they don't actually want to pay to improve, but somehow magically want to be fixed at the same time.