Re: Peter Hitchens tells a funny story about Tony Blair Archived Message
Posted by Ken Waldron on July 6, 2023, 7:03 pm, in reply to "Re: Peter Hitchens tells a funny story about Tony Blair"
"Often, public assets were sold off quickly with little understanding of their true value..." Those who organised this knew how much they were worth all right: that was the whole point. What was emphasised was how much could be saved by "private" efficiency: of course this magic efficiency was mainly bullshit. Mostly what they did was sack employees & produce a reduced service then charge more: for as you say, it was now a private monopoly rather than a public one. Another especially heinous scam was PFI or PPP: both were essentially encouraged by (Tory and Labour: the latter being the worst culprit )central government to push local authorities into supposed partnerships with private money and business instead of utilising much cheaper central government money to build public utilities. Too often the local authorities were well out of their depth (or indeed brown paper envelope merchants) and signed up to projects that ended up costing many times their actual worth. Even worse these were often tied to ultimate private ownership of the utility with rental and maintenance contracts running years.
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