And across the board I see over-hasty libertarian ideology being imposed on systems which have grown up organically over time, interwoven with our society: imperfect, complex, but surprisingly effective.
The NHS might well be, in terms of the results it delivers with the money it gets, the most efficient health service on earth. And yet the Tories are convinced that hasty and sweeping organisational reforms will make it even more so.Things that have happened lately have shown there are serious drawbacks to the commercial approach: the banks, the pension funds, BP.
The credit crisis-induced recession, a disaster brought on by monumental private sector inefficiency – if inefficiency is a sufficient word to cover that thoughtless spiral of hedonistic incompetence for which no proportionate retribution has been exacted.I think we need to move to a less risky, less profit-seeking, approach; obviously that's not going to happen. But surely, we shouldn't be piling the risks on when we don't need to. There is so much that can go badly wrong, again, in the private sector.
I'd even be opposed to an incautious precipitous plunge in the 'right' direction (the right direction as far as I am concerned), because of the organic interdependence of our systems mean it could so easily misfire. What I see behind the scenes at the moment is just reckless, thoughtless ideology without any reference to reality, and it's an extreme and mistaken ideology too in my opinion.
(quotes above from David Mitchell in the Observer. I wrote this, then went to read his article, and found he was making some of the same points)
