Doug wrote:
>Interesting contrast with the quote from Margaret Thatcher on the front
>page of today's New York Times: "We are quite the best country in Europe.
>In my lifetime all the problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the
>solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world."
I hate to say it, but in light of additional information, the problem would seem not to be private vs. public ownership but simply that the UK – with all due respect to Baroness T. – is unusually backward. This week’s Economist (another British beacon unto the world) notes that capital investment in the UK’s rail system has been anemic under both public and private ownership. It states:
“ …the safety technology to make crashes less likely and congestion less dangerous has been around for a long time. It is called an automatic train protection (ATP) system. If a careless driver jumps a red light, the brakes come on and the train halts. It is in use in many American trains; Sweden converted its network in the 1980s; the French and German high-speed networks are being converted to it. Britain has been toying with this for years, ever since the inquiry into the Clapham rail crash in 1988 recommended it. British Rail wanted it in 1994, but the government said no.
“Inevitably, many people will be tempted to blame the crash on the transfer of Britain’s railways into private hands, which began in 1995. Yet though there is much to criticise about the way in which that privatisation was carried out, and much now to be reformed in the way the railways are run and regulated, to draw a connection between privatisation and the crash would be wrong. In public ownership, under successive governments, investment in the railway infrastructure was meagre. There is no reason to think that had it remained in government hands, spending on safety measures would have been markedly higher.”
Carl
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