Whenever nationalisation of any large infrastructure body has ocurred in GB, the result has been a slow but steady deterioration in quality of service.
This has many causes: after some years, governments eventually realising that they can get away with whittling away at investment, or investing in the wrong features which bring either no advantages, often great disadvantages. Rogue Union leaders who lead their members to believe that they can have unfeasably large pay increases, stupidly short working hours, or other benefits. Strikes and industrial chaos follow. There are organisations which have become so large, that even when privatised, they are regarded as untouchable, until public and other business pressure causes the government to bite the bullet, split them up and make them really work for a living. Witness the painful separation of Openreach from BT, which is now shedding jobs worldwide and looking to recruit more engineers, in part to replace the ones lost to Openreach.
It is a fact that, by and large, Private Enterprise invests and innovates, it has to in order to please shareholders and make a profit. Nationalisation may start with hope and expectation for the future, but in time it all sinks into lower efficiency and mismanagement.
If Corbyn was to form a government and attempt the nationalisation of all the bodies in the Labour manifesto, this country would sink into a pile of debt worse than any ever known. There are lessons from 1947 to be learned: this comes from the “Horse’s Mouth” otherwise known as the Socialist Party of Great Britain – https://tinyurl.com/kerqvx9 – from 1947/48.
Reading those 3 pages (download the PDF, it is worth a read at leisure) will demonstrate what nationalisation cost a war-weary UK, having already ben forced to mortgage the country’s future by paying off the massive expenses of the worst of all wars, the Labour government borrowed even more in order to compensate shareholders and owners. In some cases, even employees. The sums are astronomical for the time: translated by 70 years of inflation and the infrastructure costs of 2017, they would run into the £trillions. Just as in 1947, one must ak, ‘Where will this money come from?’
Taxation, says Corbyn. Soak The Rich, the old Labour chestnut. And The Rich will respond by taking out their wealth and going to be The Rich somewhere else. And the old familiar see-saw of left-right politics goes on and on, with no one able to look at the long game or contemplate any form of thoughtful middle ground.
When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.
.
4,000 will cover a couple of dozen London streets. What next?
