Tim Black in Spiked (bereits am 16. August) über die Folgen der britischen Eisenbahnprivatisierung, die ja auch hierzulande gerne als Musterbeispiel für die Verfehlungen des "Neoliberalismus" herhalten muss:
"Far from the state cutting loose what used to be a nationalised state asset,
and slashing public expenditure in the process, precisely the opposite has
occurred: public
spending on the railways has actually increased since privatisation in 1994.
The state hasn’t given free rein to the market; it has had to regulate and
intervene more thoroughly, dishing out cash with one hand, and setting
performance targets on the other. So according to a Department of Transport
report released last year, public subsidy of the supposedly privatised rail
service has not fallen since the sell-off; it has actually increased by £1.7
billion between 1996-97 and 2009-10. Incredibly, in 2006/7, £6.8 billion of
public money was used to prop up the supposedly privatised rail industry –
that’s nearly 50 per cent of the the rail industry’s total costs. This figure
now stands closer to £4.5 billion but it still represents significant state
intervention into what is supposedly a privatised industry.
To grasp the customer-unfriendly hodge-podge that is Britain’s railways in
terms of some free-market attempt to make loadsamoney, and, just as importantly,
save the state a fair bit, too, misses the point. Privatising the railways was
never really about rolling back the state as the lazy Thatcherism-cliché pedlar
would have it. The key dynamic here was all about the state cutting its
responsibilities, not public services. It didn’t want to save money so much as
save itself accountability. Hence the paradox: state responsibility has lessened
while public expenditure has risen.
The reason for the state’s willingness to keep itself apart from a national
service like rail travel is the profound crisis of authority, of legitimacy,
that has afflicted the British state since the Cold War drew to a close and
deprived the British state of one its last raisons d’être. In fact, so
lacking in confidence, in direction, has the state been, that it hardly feels
itself to be capable of organising the proverbial brewery drinks party, let
alone running a national rail-network. The solution has been to pass the buck,
be it to assorted, heavily subsidised rail operators, or Network Rail (formerly
Railtrack), the track-management company.
Of course, this erosion of state authority and the concomitant attempt to
outsource responsibility to the private sector is not limited to the rail
industry. One can see the same process at work in the health service, in the
military, in prisons. As Patrick Hayes
reported earlier this year, it is even affecting the state’s ‘armed body of
men’, the police, with core services such as crime investigation and
intelligence management up for tender. (And while this is happening, state
expenditure as a percentage of GDP is not falling; it is remaining steady.
During the 1980s, it averaged 44 per cent - a couple of years ago it was up to
nearly 48 per cent.)"
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