In On Being the Right Size, Haldane worries about how well socialism might run large organisations, but remains silent regarding the ability of capitalism and representative democracy to do the same. He wrote the essay just before the stock market crash of course, and in our own time we have witnessed the substantial failiure of the Western banking system, built around capitalism. So it is at the very least a legitimate question to ask.
By coincidence, it is also one of the questions which drives Matthew Engel's Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain (revised edition, 2010), which I got for Christmas. He makes a whole series of telling points. For example:
- That Bitain's railways, originally created through the competition of entrepreneurial capitalists, are inefficient, poorly organised in terms of routes and stations, and much less effective than the later continental railways. The latter were far more commonly state-planned and delivered - and all the better for it.
- That the influence of politicians, almost universally with short-term interests, on the railways has been pretty much entirely malign or ineffectual - not least because of their relatively short-term planning horizon, which is wholly inappropriate for creating and sustaining a major National infrastructure and service.
- That as a result of both of these effects there has been little or no true strategic thinking regarding the railways in Britain for most of their life. And it truly shows.
And barely needs to be said that many of his arguments about rail could be readily extended to the rest of British life. He's fairly unsparing (although always a good read).
No comments:
Post a Comment