9 ms·

It's not inevitable, but the current government appears to move in that direction intentionally. - The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way

It's not inevitable, but the current government appears to move in that direction intentionally. - The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening. - The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service. Some accuse the government of doing this as a form of sabotage, so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because: a) Brits are very proud of the NHS as a nation (or at least that's the dominant narrative in my news bubble) b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster - ticket prices have skyrocketed, and service quality took a nosedive in some areas.

thu2111 6y ago
The US is hardly some low regulation capitalist utopia. The US regulatory code is enormous. Plenty of self-proclaimed "Europeans" think it is, but in my experience they often know relatively little about the issues in question and are just parroting cultural talking points they picked up elsewhere. Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it. Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS. Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices). Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move. But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.
- james-bcn 6y ago
  I feel like I've lost a few brain cells reading that.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Thanks for making my point for me about how the left react to discovering what other people believe.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I'm sure some people in the UK believe those things - just not very many.
  - macinjosh 6y ago
    What a thoughtful response /s.
    - james-bcn 6y ago
      Well, I could have spent time creating a post linking to refuting data, but do you really think it would make any difference to the thu2111's opinions?
- pydry 6y ago
  >For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it. >you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having. 56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it. >The NHS is a socialist anachronism This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too. Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view. Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.
gadders 6y ago
You realise that salad in the UK is already chlorinated, right? I don't see that being an issue. It's just protectionism.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/09/chlorine-washed-chicken-vs-chlorine-washed-salad-leaves-whats-the-difference/ https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/09/chlorine-washed-chicken...
Reason077 6y ago
> "b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster" Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019) Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. And fares, of course, generate revenue to reinvest into expanding capacity. In any case, UK rail operators are now de-facto nationalised due to Covid. This has been recognised by the ONS, with rail operator's debts now counted on the government balance sheet. ONS recognises full nationalisation of the UK railways: https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c19d https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c...
- rainingmonkey 6y ago
  > Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is. Passenger numbers (and fares) are hitting records, and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'. Privatisation has led to massive corporate profits at the taxpayers' expense, without providing the investment the railways need. How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators? When the East Coast Mainline was renationalised (after the franchise holder claimed it was impossible to run profitably), it jumped from the most expensive line with the least customer satisfaction to the line with the highest customer satisfaction. The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure. The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised. https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/ https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    > and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail' Some are, some aren't - Cross Country had plenty of new rolling stock when they were Virgin owned, and GWR have replaced many of the 125s in the last 5yrs
goatinaboat 6y ago
The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million. The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situation won’t be made a permanent part of its budget!!
- iso1631 6y ago
  > The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million. Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than France Germany Sweden Switzerland And get this -- THE USA In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen. The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Spending is irrelevant, the success lies in outcomes. You brought the US up, and it’s a good example here: very high costs, poor outcomes.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      Outcomes of a health system are tricky to measure compariatively, let alone put a dollar value on, which I guess is why people like them. Broadly though, UK, Germany, France, Sweden health systems tend to have the same ballpark. UK has always cost far less than those countries though.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - Nimitz14 6y ago
    And the coverage sucked. The care provided by the NHS is very poor while paying its employees very little and forcing to work with garbage equipment.
iso1631 6y ago
> The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km 1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b Since 1997 that's a 90% increase. France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%. Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on) By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on) It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting your figures from. Here's a more representative view: https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsidise-railways/ https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid... Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation. That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general. And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with? Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures. The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains. Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration. So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically. Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.
DanBC 6y ago
> so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because: There are a couple of other reasons: The Lansley reforms were about increasing non-NHS provision. They mostly failed because private providers simply can't do the job for the money the NHS gets paid. Where we see private provision (for example, specialist commissioning in mental health services, or learning disability and autism services) we see terrible standards of care. Winterborne View, Whorlton Hall, St Andrews, are all non-NHS providers. Cygnet Health have had a bunch of inadequate CQC reports.
Dma54rhs 6y ago
Alright, but how can you nationalize these businesses under EU laws and regulations? I'm rather sure your Labor party (at least Corbyn) was constantly attacking EU/Brussels and often dutch for neoliberalism. If your political position is re-nationalisation then it's easier to do it outside the EU unless you think the Conservative party stays in power forever.

thu2111 6y ago

The US is hardly some low regulation capitalist utopia. The US regulatory code is enormous. Plenty of self-proclaimed "Europeans" think it is, but in my experience they often know relatively little about the issues in question and are just parroting cultural talking points they picked up elsewhere. Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it. Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS. Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices). Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move. But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.

james-bcn 6y ago
I feel like I've lost a few brain cells reading that.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Thanks for making my point for me about how the left react to discovering what other people believe.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I'm sure some people in the UK believe those things - just not very many.
- macinjosh 6y ago
  What a thoughtful response /s.
  - james-bcn 6y ago
    Well, I could have spent time creating a post linking to refuting data, but do you really think it would make any difference to the thu2111's opinions?
pydry 6y ago
>For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it. >you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having. 56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it. >The NHS is a socialist anachronism This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too. Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view. Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.

gadders 6y ago

You realise that salad in the UK is already chlorinated, right? I don't see that being an issue. It's just protectionism.

kwhitefoot 6y ago
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/09/chlorine-washed-chicken-vs-chlorine-washed-salad-leaves-whats-the-difference/ https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/09/chlorine-washed-chicken...

Reason077 6y ago

> "b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster" Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019) Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. And fares, of course, generate revenue to reinvest into expanding capacity. In any case, UK rail operators are now de-facto nationalised due to Covid. This has been recognised by the ONS, with rail operator's debts now counted on the government balance sheet. ONS recognises full nationalisation of the UK railways: https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c19d https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c...

rainingmonkey 6y ago
> Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is. Passenger numbers (and fares) are hitting records, and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'. Privatisation has led to massive corporate profits at the taxpayers' expense, without providing the investment the railways need. How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators? When the East Coast Mainline was renationalised (after the franchise holder claimed it was impossible to run profitably), it jumped from the most expensive line with the least customer satisfaction to the line with the highest customer satisfaction. The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure. The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised. https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/ https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/
- youngtaff 6y ago
  > and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail' Some are, some aren't - Cross Country had plenty of new rolling stock when they were Virgin owned, and GWR have replaced many of the 125s in the last 5yrs

goatinaboat 6y ago

The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million. The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situation won’t be made a permanent part of its budget!!

iso1631 6y ago
> The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million. Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than France Germany Sweden Switzerland And get this -- THE USA In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen. The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Spending is irrelevant, the success lies in outcomes. You brought the US up, and it’s a good example here: very high costs, poor outcomes.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Outcomes of a health system are tricky to measure compariatively, let alone put a dollar value on, which I guess is why people like them. Broadly though, UK, Germany, France, Sweden health systems tend to have the same ballpark. UK has always cost far less than those countries though.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- Nimitz14 6y ago
  And the coverage sucked. The care provided by the NHS is very poor while paying its employees very little and forcing to work with garbage equipment.

iso1631 6y ago

> The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km 1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b Since 1997 that's a 90% increase. France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%. Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on) By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on) It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting your figures from. Here's a more representative view: https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsidise-railways/ https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid... Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation. That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general. And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with? Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures. The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains. Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration. So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically. Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.

DanBC 6y ago

> so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because: There are a couple of other reasons: The Lansley reforms were about increasing non-NHS provision. They mostly failed because private providers simply can't do the job for the money the NHS gets paid. Where we see private provision (for example, specialist commissioning in mental health services, or learning disability and autism services) we see terrible standards of care. Winterborne View, Whorlton Hall, St Andrews, are all non-NHS providers. Cygnet Health have had a bunch of inadequate CQC reports.

Dma54rhs 6y ago

Alright, but how can you nationalize these businesses under EU laws and regulations? I'm rather sure your Labor party (at least Corbyn) was constantly attacking EU/Brussels and often dutch for neoliberalism. If your political position is re-nationalisation then it's easier to do it outside the EU unless you think the Conservative party stays in power forever.