It is also unfair to conflate Labour's policies with those of America. Britain has a full blown welfare state. The debate between the Blairites and the conservative wing of the Labour party is not over whether that should be dismantled but rather how it can be improved. The Blairites seem to fetishize introducing some market mechanisms as a way to make public spending more efficient, the conservatives seem to be knee-jerk rejecting any change. Blair has also massively hiked spending on state health care and on the poor with tangible results on the latter, not too much on the former. On the other hand even the traditionalists aren't truly anti-capitalist - the old Militant faction (full blown Marxist, often Trotskyyist) is dead and buried. The same is true of most West European socialist movements.
America on the other hand is ridiculously right wing on economic policy. That's why I can be just left of center on economic policy in the European context while well on the left in the American one. On pretty much anything related to economic policy in America - taxes, health care, regulations, unions, workers' rights - I want a sharp turn to the left - Kuron's 1989 view in reverse if you will. In Europe that sharp turn happened a long time ago, so as to the fine tuning it's much less black and white for me. I find much of the left of the European left to be conservative with a small c sense of the word - unwilling to accept any modification to a system developped for a different socio-economic time, seeing any change as a threat.
...or that's what they claim. However, this creeping privatisation never worked out as such. Rail privatisation was a mess that required large state bailouts, some PPP projects like the Channel Tunnel Rail Link pushed up prices in advance (i.e. once it got to signing contracts it was slated to cost a lot, which takes away the plua in the fact that during construction there were no cost overruns), the idiotic London Underground PPP scheme (forced through by NuLab against great opposition - there they showed resolve...) hasn't brought anything that wouldn't go without the privates (most of the recent improvements can be credited to the public management). Similar attempts in hospitals only led to cost increases, and I am the angriest about schools - where Bliar allowed (again against great opposition) a small network of private creationist schools to be established, in this idiocy Britain overtook even the USA. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
A passage I particularly like:
If the government is really ready to change course, there would be no better place to start than with a radical rethink of the PFI. Britain is an immeasurably wealthier country than it was when loving attention was paid to the detail of schools, health centres and public housing of the 1930s. The government is forever boasting about how the UK is now the fourth biggest economy in the world, so there is no obvious reason why we can no longer afford what was deemed essential for the public realm then.
On a more general criticism - the history of public housing is rather poor. Neither the council estates of Britain, the HLM's of France, or the projects of the US are nice places to live. Could they do better this time? Maybe. But I could certainly imagine public housing being one area where contracting out stuff wouldn't be a bad experiment.
Personal anecdote: In Poland I lived in model workers' housing built by the Nazis in the thirties. For one person the apartment wasn't bad - more room than I needed, so-so otherwise. But it was intended for a family, and while it would certainly be livable for one, we're not talking particularly good living conditions.
It's worse in the city, where I believe developers are offering social housing out in the sticks to offset exclusive development in the central area.
Still, it was better than nothing, better than the places poor workers lived in before. But should it have been done better? No question. Yet again, was it more of a money question or a planning question? I tend to believe the latter. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The problem seems more about how to keep these places functioning, clean and save after several decades. Maintenance and construction are not the same budget.
PFI grapples with the same issues - what kind of services will be provided for the duration? The HLMs show that rules or regulations from 20 years back are not always applicable - or enforced.
The problem is not public or private ownership, PFI or public housing - it's how to run these things over long periods when there is little benefit (political or monetary) for anyone to do it. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
However, for a few brief years before and after the regime change, at least here in Hungary, things changed: newly built public housing became more liveable, with roofs and fewer floors and gardens and such.
Then again, a few years later, public housing construction came to a virtual standstill. And private investors on the housing market focus on rich customers. Thus the old concrete high-rises remain as affordable housing, one of ever lower quality.
Germany, of course, took a very different path: with incredible amounts of money, the construction of private homes and the dismantling of concrete block houses was supported. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Of course, one real issue is that as Jerome notes, part of the reason many of these areas are still nice is perhaps that they passed out of council ownership in the post war period.
Likewise, there are a whole host of public buildings (swimming pools, health centres and the like) that have lasted seventy odd years. Sure, we're looking at replacing them now, but they provided a lot more value than the crumbling efforts of the sixties and seventies.
It was for Elliott's pointing out that, if we're so wealthy now, why aren't we putting a commensurate amount of wealth into the public realm? His article focuses mainly on education, not the "welfare state". He's talking about how much we're willing to put into public education, and he's comparing to a time when the willingness was greater -- in relative terms, of course (your comparison, 30s/today, of the absolute sums invested omits to mention the enormous overall increase in wealth from then to now). And he's talking about a kind of pride in quality public infrastructure that was neglected in the 60s and 70s before being mugged and left for dead by Thatcherism in the 80s.
Essentially, he's saying that education belongs in the public realm, that it has been skimped on for far too long (including by New Labour's "harnessing" private capital), and that this must change. A1 for me.
But I said (admittedly, implicitely) that IMO that's not true. It is only claimed as the aim, but the real aim seems to be privatisation by stealth: what the Bliarites don't believe they can achieve outright, they achieve by selling it as improvement upon the welfare state. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
For example, over here we don't have socialized medicine at the federal level, although we should. But many states have health care systems that fill in for the very needy. My sister-in-law in Massachusetts, for example, lives below the poverty line but has state medical coverage for her four children. Another example is provision for the homeless. Even in the most conservative parts of the country there are systems for handling this problem. A quote from a homeless person in Colorado Springs: "You can't starve in this town." http://www.csindy.com/csindy/2005-06-09/cover.html
There is a safety net at the very bottom of the economic range.
Similarly, we've had discussions here just recently about ownership of water systems and road systems where it's revealed that France has private versions of these services while America's are mostly public. London Transport's "Public and Private Partnership" is a partially privatized approach to managing the tube system, while NYC's subway is still solidly under governmental control. Some cities in America own their own electric power systems, e.g. Omaha, Nebraska, http://ww1.oppd.com/who/index.cfm while much of Europe's electricity is provided by private companies, e.g. Enel SpA in Italy.
And both economic areas pursue protective tariffs, subsidize farmers, and otherwise manage their economies.
I'm not sure that there is a huge difference between the systems...
