Privatize This!

There isn’t much left to privatize in Britain today, and in a lot of ways to this American, the UK is far more privatized than the US.  Some top of the head examples: the transport of prisoners from jail to trial and back is done solely by private subcontractors, most every airport is privately owned and operated, all utilities are privatized, including those where it is impractical to introduce competition such as water.

One would think that as an American, I would be used to all this privatized malarkey, and in general, I do vaguely believe that where practical and regulated, private enterprise and competition supply better products and services at better prices.  But airports?  It’s not as though competition is all that practical.  Because the three main London airports are inconvenient, all suck in their own ways and are getting suckier, I tend to use Bristol as my gateway off that island.  Furthermore, the only two that are geared towards long haul routes are Heathrow and Gatwick.  Throwing a wrench into the whole “competition is good” argument is that all three main London airports are owned and operated by BAA (itself owned by some Spanish concern).  They also have the corner on the Scottish market, owning Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen.  Even in London, where you may just flirt with the suburbs of a context where airports might just be in competition, when they’re owned by the same operator, what’s the bloody point???  (I should point out that the UK Competition Commission decided in March 2009, after seven painstaking months of analysis, that perhaps this isn’t all that good for competition, and maybe the monopoly should be broken up.  Gee, ya think?)

What I have noticed about Bristol Airport since 2003 is a gradual, but determined, erosion of places to sit comfortably waiting for your flight with more and more overpriced, irrelevant retail outlets.  OK, the airport bar is a sacrosanct institution, and the more the better (though this category has not expanded at Bristol, only become more posh and expensive).  But the rest?  I don’t go to the airport to shop, I go to the airport to get hassled by security and then sit in the airport bar before I board a terrifying flight to somewhere else.  Yet this is how they make money: the more overpriced retail, the less seating, the more likely passengers-to-be will be separated from their cash in meaningless and unnecessary ways.  A publicly owned and operated airport has to break even, so there should be some of this stuff, but American airports seem to strike a nice balance.  Private airports have a different incentive, and that is to squeeze as much profit out of the thing as possible.

Bristol used to be a charming little airport.  It’s now a crowded and cramped little shopping mall that also sells flights.  American airports are a joy to deal with in comparison.  

There was an entire paragraph here ranting about Southwest Water, but I deleted it for brevity.  I’ll just say that I only had a water meter installed at the house I own two years ago, and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

So when I read the Times article linked above yesterday, I became moderately angry (then I had a pleasant pull off of a bottle of Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale, and all was again well in the world).  There are a handful of institutions in the UK that are a credit to the island.  Test Match Special, as cited by a commenter to one of my cricket posts, is one.  The NHS is another (and I have an NHS post in me some day).  

So too the BBC.  Indeed, it can be argued that the British have little idea just what they have in the BBC.  Commercial free, sort of owned and operated by the public.  This comes at a cost, and the cost is probably one of the most regressive taxes found in a western democracy, the tv license fee.   In order to operate a TV in the UK, one must pay £142.50 per year.  (Note, that is per property — the number of TVs on the property is not relevant).  While highly regressive, and as an American poli sci friend commented when he first visited, “holy crap!  There would be a revolution in the US over something like this!”, it is a tax I pay happily.  This is a sentiment I share with many of my British friends / colleagues.

The Party proper is (rightfully) already backing the hell away from this suggestion, but it was made by the shadow broadcasting minister — the very bloke who would be in charge of financing and licensing the BBC should the Tories win in 2010.  I would not put this past Cameron et al., but it would be politically stupid.  The Tories are ahead not so much because of what they stand for (they don’t seem to stand for anything at the moment which is playing the run in by the book in my opinion) but because Labour are tired and Gordon Brown rather unpopular.  When stories like this start to come out, it gives Labour something to work with, as in “they’re going to privatize the BBC, what’s next, the NHS?  Remember how privatizing British Rail worked out?”  Etc.  It’s a tactical blunder for the Tories.

While I agree that Jonathan Ross isn’t £6 Million per year worth of funny, (see here for a less destructive approach on how to handle Ross) privatizing the BBC, even small pieces of it, would be a tragedy.