"My word, McGrath, you really have swallowed the Tony Blair spin, haven't you?"

You really must have been seriously overdoing the speed reading Eagle.

Or maybe I should have spelt it out more fully. I sometimes tend towards the gnomic. So I'll spell it out now: I was suggesting that, with traditional big givernment, you can get the power freaks going for wasting money by spending it foolishly; with private enterprise, they tend to go in for diverting it into hyper-inflated salaries and so forth. Either way the public gets ripped off.

And when you combine the two in Tony's "Third Way" we can end up with the hyper-inflated salaries and perks of the private sector and the waste that sometimes (by no means always) characterises the public sector.

I somehow don't think that's what Tony Blair's spin-doctors are trying to persuade us is the case.

And for an example of how private companies can screw up seriously when they are handed a public enterprise )at a knockdown price), look no further than what has happened to the British Railway system since it was privatised. Massive subsidies, shoddy services, fragmentation, accidents because the whole thing has been run down to give maximum dividends to shareholders...