PETER HITCHENS: Privatising water and rail has been a disaster… it’s our DUTY to put it right
What is conservative about privatisation? What has it conserved? How has it helped the nation be stronger and safer?
Though there are many more, I will take just three examples.
Once, Britain had a first-rate nuclear power industry and could build its own atomic power stations. Then we privatised that and decades of experience and wisdom were scattered to the winds.
And now we have to get the Chinese, a despotic menace, to provide the nuclear energy we will so badly need, very soon, thanks to our mad dogma-driven destruction of coal-fired power stations.
Then come the railways, ripped to pieces so that pretend capitalists – sustained by far bigger subsidies than British Rail ever got – could trouser taxpayers’ money for providing a worse service than the one they replaced. In a bitter paradox much of the system is now run by foreign (nationalised) railway concerns. And this is a great British invention we gave to the world.
Thames Water, the vital strategic supply for the national capital and the economically crucial region around it, is now virtually bankrupt
And now there is water. Thames Water, the vital strategic supply for the national capital and the economically crucial region around it, is now virtually bankrupt. Its boss quit suddenly last week. The official version is that the company may simply collapse under the weight of its debts, now £14 billion.
Under one of its recent owners, a foreign bank, £2.7 billion was taken out of the company in dividends, while debts rose from £3.4 billion to £10.8 billion. They have not since stopped rising, while Thames Water has become notorious for unfixed leaks and disgusting discharges of sewage into rivers.
You might think renationalisation is the obvious solution. But it will be hugely expensive, as the pension funds and other shareholders cannot simply be dispossessed without compensation. And here is the fascinating thing. You will not hear any significant voices in Sir Keir Starmer’s very Left-wing Labour Party calling for a full renationalisation.
The modern Left is keen to nationalise childhood and what used to be the family. It defies any attempts to reform the NHS or the schools for the benefit of the public. But it long ago abandoned its 1945 enthusiasm for state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy.
If we want to undo this undoubted catastrophe, then rescue will not come from Sir Keir
But that was in the lost days when Labour was led by patriots who wanted to make the country stronger. They have all gone.
And you might say that if Labour will not renationalise these failed private enterprises, what use is it? And I would agree with you.
If we want to undo this undoubted catastrophe, then rescue will not come from Sir Keir. Patriotic conservatives will have to nerve themselves to admit that the whole thing was a disastrous mistake and pledge themselves to put it right. If they do, they’ll be surprised at just how much support they will get.
There is a desperate race now going on between the greedy, cruel marijuana legalisers and the public interest, as evidence of the evil effects of widespread dope use piles up. Sometimes, I despair.
As I wrote in the Daily Mail on Monday, I recently spent an astonishing week living as a prisoner, among real ex-prisoners and officers, in a decommissioned prison. This was for a Channel 4 documentary. And I have never been more convinced that drugs, definitely including cannabis, are one of the main forces driving crime.
So I applaud France’s President Emmanuel Macron, for ordering police to fine marijuana users on the spot. He announced the initiative during a visit to violence-plagued, gang-scarred Marseilles. Drug gang turf wars have claimed 23 lives there so far this year.
As I wrote in the Daily Mail on Monday, I recently spent an astonishing week living as a prisoner, among real ex-prisoners and officers, in a decommissioned prison
I applaud France’s President Emmanuel Macron, for ordering police to fine marijuana users on the spot
For many years, France’s police and courts have been as feeble as Britain’s on the offence of marijuana possession. Blind eyes are turned, court fines are not paid and nothing happens.
But as President Macron said: ‘People who have the means to consume drugs, because for them it’s recreational, must understand that they’re sustaining criminal networks. They are effectively complicit.’
How true this is. The authorities search in vain for the Mr Big of the international drug cartels, when the truth is that the people who sustain the whole murderous criminal empire of the cartels are the Mr and Ms Smalls who buy drugs in the first place.
Oh, and legalisation does not stop this. Everywhere dope has been legalised, the illegal gangs flourish as before, because they don’t pay tax.
Why is the idea of an adventurous professor so appealing? It certainly is. Wouldn’t we all want to be taught real knowledge by men or women who had been out in the wild, high places of the earth, facing danger, bandits, snakes and mountain lions, rather than taking the bus from the suburbs to the lecture theatre?
Why is the idea of an adventurous professor so appealing? It certainly is. For me, this has always been the appeal of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones films
For me, this has always been the appeal of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones films. And it is why, despite the wearisome, inexplicable introduction of Phoebe Waller-Bridge (I mean, why? She really is suburban) into the series, I shall go in hope to the latest and (I fear) be disappointed.
It’s immoral for doctors and nurses to strike
One of the strange things about living under a revolutionary regime is that things which used to be statements of the obvious become thought crimes.
The other day I said on a radio programme that it was morally wrong for doctors and nurses to go on strike. This seems quite simple and uncontroversial to me. If you are trained to give mercy to the sick or injured, then you cannot refuse to do so.
Christianity, whose founder constantly showed mercy to the sick and suffering, obviously forbids such cruelty and neglect. But I should have thought any decent non-religious code would do so, too.
What’s more it’s absurd, as some claim, to say that such strikes will not hurt patients.
The other day I said on a radio programme that it was morally wrong for doctors and nurses to go on strike
Of course they will. Unless the doctors involved spend their normal days doing nothing, it is impossible that a strike will not lead to postponed operations and examinations, scans etc, with who knows what effect. Yet I was engulfed in a blizzard of abuse on social media. My attackers could not grasp that I was not saying that doctors and nurses should not be well-paid. Nor could they grasp there are plenty of ways of improving pay and conditions without the need to strike.
Strikes are the nuclear weapons of pay bargaining. Good negotiators hardly ever have to resort even to threatening them, let alone calling them. In fact, after seven highly educational years as a labour correspondent, covering the great union wars of the Callaghan and Thatcher eras, I noticed a significant thing. Almost all the industries which had been convulsed by strikes soon afterwards closed down for ever.
Plainly the NHS will not suffer this fate, but I suspect millions, who can, are now reluctantly taking out private cover because the Health Service so often fails them. If these numbers grow, it will pose the greatest threat there has ever been to free health care. Millions of voters will no longer be willing to pour taxes into a system they think has deserted them.
I do not wish this to happen. I think a health service, free at the point of use, is vital to civilisation. But, if doctors’ and nurses’ strikes are added to the chaos and inefficiency already dogging our health system, then I suspect it will happen. And the poor will be left with a third-class service, fraying, rusting and falling apart.
So I repeat. Strikes by doctors and nurses are immoral and they should not take this course.
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