The water utilities have been so badly mismanaged that polluting rivers with raw sewage has become a normal activity, as normal as sending all the dividends to owners in tax havens abroad. The railways are now arranged so that they are almost the single most expensive method of getting from A to B but are unreliable to boot. These too, are often foreign-owned, by railway firms nationalised in their home countries.
I noted the other day that France is considering banning all internal flights and it could easily happen. Their network is extensive, economical, clean, fast, and reliable. Here in Britain, it's much cheaper to fly from London to Manchester for example than buy a railway ticket, even if you can figure out the pricing structure. Spain has the world's second-largest high-speed rail network in the world (the AVE service) after China, with over 3,200km (2000 miles) of high-speed railway lines while we struggle to construct a relatively short distance between London and Birmingham using HS2.
This is mainly because the costs for HS2 are eye-wateringly high at about £320m per mile. By contrast the average cost per mile in Europe of 20 high-speed railway networks is about £50m per mile. I am not sure anyone knows why.
The energy grid is a complex mess, a dog's breakfast of different providers, and distributors where it seems most time is spent fixing billing problems for the poor unfortunates who tried to switch suppliers. Having switched once, we now have a Scottish Power smart meter (labeled clearly as being their property) but we're being supplied by EDF (a French state-owned company). The number of different tariffs is absolutely mind-blowing.
There seems no coherent or consistent strategy for electricity infrastructure either. Lots of solar power companies are racing to install massive solar farms, we have lots of off-shore wind turbines although on-shore ones are known to be cheaper to install and easier to maintain. Nuclear stations are being built by the French and the Chinese at a massive cost and I'm not convinced anybody has an overriding strategy anyway, it's like the Wild West. And yet we still need to top-up with imported energy from Europe.
The point of this rant isn't necessarily about privatisation although partly it is.
NATS (the National Air Traffic Service) is partly owned by the government (49%) and the rest by the airlines (42%), Heathrow (4%), and the employees (5%) so it isn't really private, or public for that matter.
What I conclude from all of this is not that privatisation has failed, although it obviously has. Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative party were convinced the answer to Britain's problems as the sick man of Europe in the 1970s was to bring in private companies to run our infrastructure. She thought these businesses could provide services better and cheaper than the then-nationalised industries.
Fifty years on and I think we can safely say that the privatisation experiment has proved conclusively that this is not the case. Where the service provided might have improved (BT for example) it's certainly not cheaper, and in many cases (Water) it's neither better nor cheaper.
The arguments for wholesale re-nationalisation seem attractive on the surface but I'm not sure much would change since the management would probably remain the same anyway. But the case to consider each industry separately is compelling and if it was felt there were advantages to being government-owned owned we should bite the bullet and do it.
However, I think the big solution would be to adopt PR (proportional representation) so that we don't get the massive policy swings that all too often result in increased costs with no improvement. It probably doesn't really matter whether an industry is privately or publicly owned, the people running it and making day-to-day decisions are going to be the same in either case.
What matters is consistent policies and funding and clear objectives. And to achieve that, we need PR.
Switching governments, ministers, ideologies, and policies every few years is the root of so many of our problems particularly in long-term infrastructure projects. We just can't seem to get them right.
