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Quotable: "On any honest account of 21st-century Britain, most of the problems derive from the unThatcherised sectors, in which the post-war, centralised, bureaucratic conventional wisdom still holds .. Forget all the strikes in that "winter of discontent", and try to remember how well Britain worked when things were going well. In a "globalised economy", would you still want to be trying to get an extra phone line from the old GPO? Would you want them regulating your access to the internet? The things that don't work in post-Thatcher Britain are not in those areas where she followed her market instincts, but in those where she didn't .. Mrs Thatcher privatised British Telecom, British Airways, British Leyland. But we still have a nationalised British political culture: the reflexive gripe that, if something's wrong with your local hospital or your local school, it ought to be fixed by some secretary of state in a Whitehall department. It never will be. But the way to get some dynamism and creativity into the system is to denationalise the problems, and make them local issues to be solved locally, in a thousand different ways. As Mrs Thatcher recognised, the British are an inventive people. Unfortunately, though she freed them to apply that inventiveness to their economic life, they're artificially prevented from applying it to everything else. It's time to complete the revolution." Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack