with the Conservative governments of her successor, John Major, undertaking
a complex privatization of the country’s railway system.
The major criticism of privatization has been that these industries were nearly
all natural monopolies, and there is no way to arrange genuine consumer choice
among, for example, water or electricity suppliers. Consequently it is far from
clear that the need to satisfy the profit demands of shareholders, which has been
done most successfully, is any more in the consumer’s interests than the previous
system. Privatization has come to mean, by analogy, any structural reforms
which give financial accountability and management authority to small units of
a state system. The move to allow individual schools to control their own
finances by ‘opting out’ of local education authority control, or to allow
National Health Service (NHS) hospitals to become self-managing trusts, is
seen by some as an attempt to ‘privatize’something that should clearly be a state
responsibility. While managerial efficiency may be improved by many of these
reforms, the emphasis on market forces and profitability introduces serious
doubts about whether these services will continue to be run in thepublic
interest, although independent regulatory authorities, for example in the gas,
water and telecommunications industries, have been established. By the begin-
ning of the 21st century at least one of these privatizations, that of the erstwhile
British Rail, was widely held to be a total failure. Indeed the major privatized
element, Railtrack, which owned and operated the infrastructure, but not the
trains, was forced into receivership with the assent of the Labour government,
and the Conservatives, who had carried out the privatization, were unable
convincingly to attack the government on the issue. Other similar privatized
utilities, notably the air-traffic control system (itself privatized by Labour), were
also clearly in real difficulties.
Programme
A party’s programme is its list of goals for achievement if elected to office.
Often this programme will be enshrined in a document like a partymanifesto,
or in a keynote speech at the beginning of a campaign by the party leader.
There is, however, a wider meaning for programme. The very idea of a
programme involves the assumption that governments ought to have detailed,
systematic and coherent plans, and that the electorate has the job of choosing
between alternative complete plans. It further suggests that a government
should be rewarded or punished in the following election according to how
much of their programme has been fulfilled. The problem with this is that it
ignores two basic facts about politics. Firstly, the unpredictability of economic
and political factors which most often force a government to react to
circumstances, rather than to carry out its pre-planned programme. Indeed
many public-policy theorists argue that government can never take more than
Programme