No doubt everyone was surprised to read this:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publi...113539,00.html

(LU reliability significantly reduced since privatisation - which confirms
an observation in an earlier post of mine).

I heard 'Lord' Falconer interviewed on this this morning: his 'spin' was to
suggest that reduction in reliability was due to historic underfunding (i.e.
he didn't attempt to address the fact that things seem to have gone
seriously wrong since privatisation).

Seems to me a case of the bleeding obvious that, if you fragment
responsibility for delivery between umpteen private sector companies (and
their sub-contractors), write a million pages of contracts, appoint more
solicitors, accountants, directors, non-execs, Chairmen etc. (all of whom
are on 6 figure salaries) than you can shake a stick at, bring in top
management who have no experience of the system (etc. etc. etc.) it is not
entirely surprising if things go wrong. But I'm just an interested member
of the public.

Falconer said that funding is now going into the system. He failed to
address how much of that funding will be soaked up in payments to the above
mentioned execs, lawyers etc. etc. Seems to me that privatisation
generally is something which makes perfect sense to economists (firms
competing in an open market, perfect information and so on) and very little
sense to those of us who live in the real world. It's a bit like that other
example of economist's dogma - Marxism. Makes perfect sense on the page,
none at all when the greed, fallibility and unpredictability of real human
beings is taken into account.

Hey ho.

Andrew