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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

The Conservatives are so brazen about it they'll even spell it out in writing. This is the Google Books synopsis for the book Privatising the World by Conservative MP Oliver Letwin:

"Identifies the reasons why governments in a number of different countries have chosen to privatise their nationalised industries. The opposition to privatisation and the techniques used to overcome this opposition are also analysed."

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Privatising_the_World...

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I'd think the UK population are a bit gunshy about privatization after privatisation of British Rail. I'd also think that the US would have learned their lesson by looking an Enron... but since when have facts gotten in the way of a good story?

The population is quite against it, but that makes little difference when politics and the media are as dysfunctional as they are at the moment.

> "I'd also think that the US would have learned their lesson by looking an Enron... but since when have facts gotten in the way of a good story?"

I'm not sure what you meant by this, can you explain further?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

Overall this crisis, imo, was caused by the pro-privatization advocates arguing for deregulation. The wikipedia article addresses this to some extent.

That synopsis doesn't sound very nefarious. Does the book recommend sabotage as a technique?

To anyone who intuitively understands why the maintenance of human health and well-being might suffer for being corrupted by vested interests who are more interested in said vesting than human health and well-being (ie, "opposition to privatisation"), the disturbing aspect is precisely how non-nefarious and academic the synopsis seems.

"Starve the beast" and other traditional conservative anti-public-service techniques are functionally sabotage, yes. I'm not sure what other concept might succinctly describe "cut as much funding as you can, then highlight the resultant disaster as proof that the private sector can do better". The cultural acceptance of the practice doesn't change what the practice is.

Would you class deliberate underfunding of the public sector in order to build public support for privatisation as sabotage?

You realise the UK has a large deficit, right? And taxes are comparable to other western countries.

The NHS will never not be broke. Your position is typical of the British left but is entirely meaningless: the government could go into Greek style debt to double the budget of the NHS tomorrow and 10 years later it'd be once again constantly broke.

Depends on your definition of "broke". If you think of something that requires tax money to function as perpetually broke then you're only seeing half of the story. Do you agree that, per person, the British spend less per head on healthcare than people living in the US? If so, why do you think this is?

As I said in a different comment, many of the problems in the NHS have come from privatisation. If you want the NHS to cost less, take a look at what's happening with PFI. Just by stopping PFI funding of hospitals and going back to the old funding model of government loans at low interest rates could save huge sums of money.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/11748960/The-PFI-hospita...

By "broke" I mean telling the government that it desperately needs more money or else services will start failing.

Fine, that's your definition of broke. How about the rest of the points from the same comment.

I do agree that the UK spends less per head than the US does and gets more for it. But the USA has one of the world's most dysfunctional health systems. Constantly comparing the NHS to it, or worse, implying that people face a binary choice between the US system or the UK system, is a fallacy that ignores the highly capable and often very efficient healthcare systems in other countries. Which don't seem to suffer the same ills of the NHS.

It's also not the case that the UK vs US comparison is one of government vs capitalism. All healthcare systems have heavy government involvement and distortion of the healthcare market, and this is fine, because developed societies always choose these problems over the much larger problem of poor people being unable to afford healthcare.

PFI schemes have not been good value for money and were essentially a trick to hide the ballooning costs of the NHS from a population that can't treat the topic rationally. Unfortunately, too many people in the UK look at this sort of thing and instead of saying "wow our government is really bad at public procurement, we should give them less power" conclude something along the lines of "oh noes, they should have guessed that trying to buy things from companies would lead to disaster - the solution is a fully state run economy!"

All kinds of organisations manage to procure services and investment from the private sector, all over the world, every day ... without problems. PFI boiled down to a complicated kind of loan that let Labour do what it always seems to try and do: massively increase spending on the public sector without raising taxes. No surprise that they paid a very high interest rate for such a thing.

> "Constantly comparing the NHS to it, or worse, implying that people face a binary choice between the US system or the UK system, is a fallacy that ignores the highly capable and often very efficient healthcare systems in other countries. Which don't seem to suffer the same ills of the NHS."

I'm glad you could admit that the NHS wasn't the worst system out there. As for better systems, I'm not saying the NHS is perfect, what I am saying is that it can be improved by stopping the drive towards privatisation, as this drive is making the NHS less efficient at spending money on healthcare, not more efficient. Furthermore, even with these inefficiencies, the NHS continues to offer a cost-effective service, and I don't even need to use the US healthcare system to compare it to. The UK spends less per person on healthcare than France and Germany, for example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h...

The NHS isn't a money pit, it's a bargain. If you made it more efficient by getting rid of the privatisation efforts, it could be even more of a bargain.

> "PFI boiled down to a complicated kind of loan that let Labour do what it always seems to try and do: massively increase spending on the public sector without raising taxes. No surprise that they paid a very high interest rate for such a thing."

This is where your partisan bias is blinding you. PFI wasn't just popular with New Labour, it's been popular with the Conservatives that replaced them in power. If the Conservatives are supposedly more fiscally responsible, why do they continue to use expensive PFI schemes to fund government spending?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/18/george-osbor...

That article dates from 2011. PFI is being phased out. Look at the graph in section A here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

PFI reached its peak in 2007. Current number of deals being added are at the level they were at in 1995.

It's worth asking why any new deals are being signed at all, but when we're down to the level of 8 per year (vs 65 at the peak of New Labour) it's fair to say that they're much less popular than they once were.

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