Eamonn Butler

But generally speaking, we haven't reversed any of those privatizations.

Trucking is still private and telephones are still private and steel is still private and so on and so on.

That's correct, yes.

One of our great failures.

People say it's a kind of religion in the UK that you have to believe in the NHS.

So all politicians say, oh, we do support the NHS.

But it's a top-down Stalinist-style organisation and it's grotesquely inefficient.

We're told, oh, it's the envy of the world, but nobody copies it.

So that tells you something.

There's no reason why every doctor and nurse in the country should be a civil servant, why every hospital should be a nationalized hospital.

We don't do that with anything else.

If people need shoes or clothing, we give them the money and they go out and they buy shoes and clothes.

Why can't we do that with health care?

Well, I would say that considerable reforms in the government system are needed.

You know, we have a huge bloated civil service.

It's a complete spaghetti and nobody can navigate their way through it.

So why don't we just get rid of a lot of that?

Reforming the tax system and making it simple and straightforward, we have the most complicated tax system in the world.

The planning reform, again, need to allow people to do what they like with their houses instead of saying you can't build an extra room and things like that when it doesn't affect anybody else.

But we have a system where a few local residents can block an airport, for example, and that's why it's taken 15 years to build a new runway at Heathrow.