If you look into the companies that take over public services you begin to see common threads – just a few companies bidding for the work, ex ministers with a vested interest, big money for the shareholders and reduced services. The example of QinetiQ above is one such example.

I was going to use the possible privatisation of water supply as another. Whereby people who couldn’t afford it would be denied the right to water but Janice has commented below with a RL example of that sort of thing in action.

As usual those with all the money hold all the aces.

There is also the key factor of the giving of employment and I’m the last one who wishes to see anyone living in penury and/or out of work but where a public sector contracts, a private sector expands and people adapt. Again, no one wishes to see children sent up chimneys or living in unregulated sweatshops and I’ve seen enough of the current crop of bosses to know that his business is his only concern and not the workers in it, especially in small to medium business.

I also see a freed-up stm business sector, without councils greedily making it uneconomic for local businesses as a large employment provider. Ditto NMW – it has kept many out of work but it also guarantees those in work about two thirds of what they need to live.

The problem with public sector workers – and I was one, in customs and excise – is that it creates a mentality where, if too secure, unlike private workers, it cuts the incentive to provide value. They might think they are but using BT as an example, it’s actually very poor indeed.

Another example is the current dispute with two rail companies I had. One is ex-BR and the other a private company. The ex-BR is shocking, monolithic when it shouldn’t be, unresponsive to outside, i.e. customer pressure, whereas Arriva has a private mentality and actually does respond to customers.

That’s the whole problem with public sector – the disconnect between the civil servant and the end user, the fat cat sinecure for the upper echelons, for no added value and the potential for abuse, costing the taxpayer billions.

The whole problem with the private sector is the unconcern of bosses for employees and the tendency to monopoly. On the other hand, monolithic private companies’ employees tend to enjoy better pay and conditions.

In answer to your actual question, Cherie, I don’t know – possibly something in the middle.

The public services were won, in some cases, by generations of trade union and working class struggle in an effort to establish the basis of civilised existence in a society run for profit not people.

This conflates separate ideas – the idea of trade union activity leading to public services – true, the idea that a civilized existence stems from this – misleading, as a healthy free market is the best recipe for a civilized existence but that is something we don’t have and the idea that profit does not equal people – an assumption not based on the few times, usually in a micro context, when a free market operates.

Incentive depends on a free market but I’d agree – not for the profit of oligarchs. Once free enterprise is crushed by both an unwieldy public sector and the oligarchs, the society crashes, as ours is doing.

you may or may not have read this but I can recommend it-
“A Guide for the Perplexed” by E F Schumacher

keep going, it will all be worth it in the end