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| quote: | Originally posted by Kia Kaha
Yeah the UK is so ridiculously behind the 8 ball with internet access its ridiculous, it's all bloody BT's fault, I mean the UK is the only civilised country on earth to charge for local phone calls - for as long as BT have their monopoly on telephone lines and charge by the minute it's hardly in their best interest to upgrade the internet. Slow connection = people stay on line longer = BT get to milk their cash cow even harder.
Tony Blair had to virtually hold a gun to BT's heads to even get them to free up local exchanges to third party ISP's a couple of years back, who were in turn still getting charged by the minute from BT for our access, which is why most of the first generation attempts at flat-rate 56K access fell flat a couple of years back.
Even now, the idle money-grubbing pricks reckon they won't finish upgrading the phone exchanges for ADSL for another few years ... ffs it shouldn't take more than a few WEEKS to sort out the entire country if they had their priorities in order. They will make sure to extract every last precious penny from us 56K'ers before they release their claws  |
A lot of these problems came from the Thatcher era, she completely fucked this country up and we are still paying the price.
She was the ultimate capitalist, she privatised everything. She had this whacky idea that everyone could own a business, that absolute competition produced absolute value, and she was proven tragically wrong. She failed to realise the benefits of moderation, that competition was good but so is economies of scale. What she also failed to realise was that 99% of businesses think about one thing: "money!". They will shirk any responsibilities, including customer satisfaction and even safety if it serves their own pockets (my uncle was killed in a rail accident; the owners of the tracks, the stations and the trains all argued over who was responsible for safety! Five years on, and five fatal crashes since, the problem of responsibility has still not been resolved).
There are some things which must be left to the state, however costly that may be. Another problem was the destruction of the regulatory bodies who ensure privatisation works.
If you leave the market to private enterprise, you must regulate the market to ensure competition remains high and laws are adhered to. Otherwise capitalism breaks down. These UK bodies (the Competition Commission, Monopolies and Mergers Commission and Office of Fair Trading) are better than they used to be, but still pretty farcical compared to those of our neighbours.
We are gradually recovering from the destruction of the 80s and the Thatcher era (she also brought unemployment to it's highest in decades), but we still have some way to go.
I think things are improving though, the UK's supermarket industry for example, a huge industry it is indeed, is more competitive than ever and the regulatory bodies seem to be doing a good job.
People always assume the reason petrol is so much more expensive in the UK than in the US is because we "accept it". This is absolute nonsense. The reason, besides the absolute gridlock in London (the average car in central London drives at just 11 mph!) and the 80% tax of the government, is that the suppliers collude anyway. What a lot of people don't realise is that what happens in the middle east has no effect whatsoever on the price of oil in the UK! British suppliers (eg Esso, BP, Shell etc) get their oil from the North Sea, they have their own supplies. Only supermarket garages get their oil from the open market in Holland, where Opec trade. Everyone exploits this ignorance anyway though, and whenever there's trouble in the middle east, they jack up the prices.
We need more nationalisation in certain areas and regulation for certain industries. Our public transport would run at a loss if it was nationalised, but so what? Everyone else's does. As I see it, this is the only way forward...
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