I am not ideologically against private companies and I’m not even against them providing certain goods and services to the public sector.
Back in the 1980s, my dad owned a barber shop on an American airbase, making sure that the military personnel maintained their strict regulation haircuts. It was the very modest profit he earned that put food on our table, petrol in our rickety old Austin Allegro and paid for our annual holiday to Butlin's.
At the same time as my dad was shaving American heads, the UK government embarked on a programme of privatising swathes of publicly owned assets: Water and sewerage, gas and electric, the trains and busses, council houses, telecoms, airlines and car factories, to name but a few.
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