I dont agree with selling power/water, but actually most of these monopolies were totally inefficient. Thats governement for you... the bigger the system the more money/red tape thats required. So making them private companies and making competition cuts costs and improves systems on the whole.

How? There is no competition for consumers in water, buses, or rail. For power, gas and telecoms, you can technically choose a supplier, but the physical pipe is the same and providers are clearly operating a cartel because prices go up in lockstep and do not fall when the wholesale price of gas/electricity/bandwidth falls. On the telecoms side, Britain is dense enough for 100Mbit fibre to be basically everywhere but the hills of Scotland, yet I am stuck with a <1Mbit connection on the top tier.

Something like mobile phones can be competitive because four independent physical networks operate and consumers have free choice which holds prices down.

I agree government monopolies are inefficient, but just putting the word private on them doesn't change that. There has to be meaningful competition between independent providers. Privatisation also makes the companies completely unaccountable - Thames Water is losing millions of gallons of water in leaks and they don't care; whereas a Government organisation could be made to change via political/media pressure.

The Coal mines, well lets be honest they are totally a waste of money. We can buy coal and get it shipped from Australia than digging up our own coal. When something is that inefficient there is no point keeping it going. Open coal mines are the most efficient, but we dont have the room over here to do that. Personally i would rather us waste that money we would spend on getting coal out of the ground on solar panels on every house.

Solar panels? In Britain? lololol. No, what we need is lots of new nuclear as a stopgap to clean nuclear fusion. Nuclear is now safe, in addition to being reliable and scalable unlike renewables.

Selling council houses actually helped house hold income and gave people more spending money - so it helped the economy, the *BIG* problem was that no one (conservatives or labour after) had considered building any more. So a bubble was created. The actual idea of people owning their own houses was fine, it was the rest of it that was the problem. In fact no goverment since the 80's has still fixed the housing issue... were still not building them in anywhere near high enough numbers.

Yep. We need to buld lots of houses and ignore planning regulations. They won't do it because house prices will fall...

Thatcher's dead, yesterday's news. No one really cares. The 1980s were a long time ago.
A flame war between two bitter rivals has dominated the last 2 or 3 pages. A moderator should lock this thread.

Just out of curiosity. Would a normal user have been banned if s/he said what Mr Kahn said? The cynic on me wants to know it.

Probably not, no, but it's impossible to really tell unless that situation comes up itself.

It was, however, close to the line, and not the kind of language a moderator should be using. Axumblade and I are having a word with him.

It's good to know that for the moderation team is worse to say that someone is a fanboy than to say "Anyone who stands against that is a class traitor, and they were once dealt with appropriately, in a time when people were bolder." talking about another user.

Political discussions are always more heated, and it's explicit versus implied.