Since they sold off our local bus service to a mess of different companies it's got significantly worse in all kind of ways. The same happened with the trains.

That's just an example. I could give more.

The underlying assumption that has especially underpinned policy over the past decades in the UK has been that you just can't get efficiency and imagination within a public enterprise, and that in a private enterprise you are somehow guaranteed to get that stuff. And I think that is just lazy thinking.

Any system in which sizeable resources are diverted from the business itself, including the people working in it, and from the users, and abstracted by outsiders and onlookers, is in my view essentially defective. The aim should be to find ways to avoid the while at the same time preserving the useful techniques that can be associated with that system - initiative and enterprise and so forth.

The form of socialism I would like to see would be based primarily on workers and users cooperatives, ranging from tiny and local to regional, national or even supranational, rather than on the top-down monopolist state socialist model, which was cobbled together essentially as a way of preserving the management structure of the private business of the day.