Marian Halcombe article here

Railways – private companies can’t compete easily at a micro level due to the prohibitive barriers to entry. Building new railways or competing with railways by organising new bus services or roads or cycleways would be possible, I accept, and I also accept we already have this to varying degrees in different parts of the country, but it is expensive and requires heavy duty infrastructure that points away from nimble competitiveness. I’m not opposed to private ownership of railways in principle. I think rail privatisation could have worked had it been better executed, but the industry lends itself to vertical integration, similar to the Japanese model, which implies either a public corporation or a large private sector regional provider, neither of which is ‘micro-competitive’, and frankly once you scale at that size it makes little difference whether it’s ‘public’ or ‘private’ because legal formations under both models are likely to amount to quasi-state entities in practical reality – especially if, as is the case in the UK, significant subsidy intervention is needed to achieve market penetration, else you end up with people priced out of travelling. Oh wait, that’s competition! True, you can take one of those cheap long distance buses instead. But I’d rather take the train, because I love the railways. I think that’s the real point underscoring all this: it’s preference. Some of us just don’t want to live in some sort of smoke and smog-choked dystopia with roads everywhere and the poor having to put up with jerky buses that make you sick when they go up and down hills in Yorkshire. We enjoy travelling by train and we can see that the railways knit into the countryside. We can also see the bad economics of roads: any investment in new roads is a basis for induced demand, thus more roads, and a more unpleasant environment.

Housing – I agree but with caveats. First, the housing problem is a population problem. We simply have too many people on these islands and the housing issue can only be resolved fully in conjunction with a determined policy to end mass immigration and reverse it by, first, requiring businesses to invest in technology and training instead of relying on a constant flow of cheap labour, and second, deporting and repatriating the majority of non-white people to their heritage and ancestral lands. We will have to allow those who were born here to remain here if they want to, but those not born here must certainly go. Unless this can be faced up to, what you have is a classic recipe for induced demand with never-ending calls for “more roads” and “more housing”, etc., etc., and the countryside bulldozed over and everywhere becoming more and more unpleasant.

Of course, let me add that the Sebastian Wangs of this world will naturally be permitted to stay. This of course is contingent on Sebastian achieving an A in his Latin A-level, so no more racing round Borehamwood in that Merc his Chinese parents bought him in an effort to impress the ladies – at least, not until results day.

The second caveat is that some regulatory intervention is needed in housing. I have worked in a blue collar trade that requires significant knowledge of legal requirements in construction, and it immediately hits you that the planning and building regulations regime has got out hand. However, some of it legitimately serves the goal of health and safety (for workers and for consumers) and the need to moderate the building environment so that we don’t have ugliness absolutely everywhere. I think a middle course is better in which the various controls and regulations are reviewed and anything not necessary is gradually pruned and phased out over a period of years.

Energy – another area where textbook free market arguments don’t translate well into reality, due to the heavy barriers to entry. The Thatcherites established a ‘free market’ in energy by splitting the power generation and transmission infrastructure from distribution and creating an artificial market of energy buyers (known as ‘retail suppliers’) who bill customers. I believe this structure is illogical and nonsensical and helps explain high prices as much as any green agenda (which I don’t entirely agree with either). I think privatisation was allowed to go too far, and in so far as it had any merit, it should have been executed with a better understanding of the relevant industries. In the case of energy, there is a need to balance productive efficiency with strategic objectives such as preserving working class employment and a reliable domestic energy supply. A structure with ‘retail suppliers’ is a recipe for price gouging and profiteering, which is precisely what has occurred, and was predicted at the start. If there is to be private involvement, it should be vertically integrated for each energy source, nationally or regionally, or even locally, depending on what makes sense. Then, the only meaningful competition would be between, say, choosing gas or electricity, or devolving from the grid and putting solar panels on your house, etc. The current idea of competition, in which I can buy electricity from a retail supplier with a silly name who does not generate the power or even deliver it, never mind anything else, is plainly nonsense.

I suppose the underlying point I am making in all this is that one must apply ideas to reality. There is a tendency on the economically liberal Right, dating back to Thatcher herself, of trying to apply ideas and notions that seem neat and tidy from a textbook point of view but don’t translate well into the real world. There is a tendency to present ‘competition’ as an idealised notion that benefits everybody and to imagine that by sweeping away the dusty, sclerotic state, we will have efficient, cheap and responsive services, but it won’t be like that in reality.