Responding
to Theresa May’s comment on the Andrew Marr show that “nothing is perfect” in
the NHS, Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, said:

“Yet
again Theresa May has shown utter disregard for those patients languishing on
trolleys, delayed in ambulances in the freezing cold weather or forced to wait
longer in pain and anxiety because their operation has been cancelled.

“A real
apology would be backed up by real action. Instead all we get is a plan to
promote the Health Secretary who has overseen this crisis. Promoting the Health
Secretary would be a betrayal of patients who deserve better this winter.”

Responding to Theresa May’s announcement to drop plans for a vote on fox hunting, Sue Hayman MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food
and Rural Affairs said;

“The Tories have finally bowed to
pressure from Labour and campaigners with this long overdue U-Turn, just months
after the Prime Minister publicly stated her support for a free vote on the
matter.

“85 per cent of the public do
not want a return of this cruel and barbaric activity. The Government must now outline
plans to take tough action against those who continue to conduct illegal fox
hunts.

“The Tories still have a long way to
go to reverse their abysmal record on animal welfare. Labour calls on Theresa
May to now drop her government’s poorly regulated, reckless badger cull across
England, to take action against raptor bird persecution and make comprehensive
commitments on banning the sale of ivory and wild animals in circuses.”

All previous Labour governments have nationalised some state assets. The 1945-51 government did so on a large scale out of ideological conviction.  The Wilson government of 1964-70 and the Wilson-Callaghan  administration of 1974-9 did so alleging it would enable them to pursue an industrial and economic strategy that would lift the growth rate, with a continuous row over how far they should go as the left pushed for a more active strategy. The Blair-Brown governments came to office in 1997 accepting privatisation and saying they would not reverse the large changes from the Conservative privatisation programmes. Later in office they renationalised the bulk of the railway and went on to buy two of the largest commercial banking groups following the failure of their regulatory approach to banking.

The left who argued strongly for more nationalisations argued their case based on three main erroneous propositions. The first was that it would be better for employment and the employees if their jobs came from Ministers and a political process, rather than from competing private sector employers. Instead, as we shall see, the main nationalised industries ended up sacking large numbers of people.

The second was that it would cut out the so called “inefficiencies of competition” – the extra head offices and advertising programmes to sell different brands and services – making the nationalised industries more efficient and better for customers. Instead, monopoly pricing power wherever they had it was used to push up prices to pay for inefficiencies which the monopoly could not or did not wish to remove.

The third was that it would allow rational planning and longer timescale for investment. This they wrongly thought would lead to stronger and better based industries. Instead, the planners usually got it wrong, made large and wasteful investments and ended up having to close their own pet projects or sack their staff.

It would be interesting to hear from those of you who favour complete nationalisation of current railways why the nationalised Network Rail is not delivering a railway you are happy with.

As I will show from  tomorrow from past experience, nationalised industries in the UK developed a bad record as employers, making hundreds of thousands redundant, pushed up prices a lot, and bungled large scale investment programmes badly.