Debate and Definitions

A few weeks ago, I asked the question "what to do with the railroad?" There doesn't appear to be a clear solution but, as DK notes, talk of privatistion and nationalisation hides the fact that the railways weren't transferred back to the private sector under Major:

And that's all I wanted to point out: that the railways are not privatised. But maybe, just maybe, we might look at whether proper privatisation could work.

But it would have to be proper privatisation—without the constant and crippling interference and condition-setting, occasional nationalisation (e.g. WWI) or commandeering (e.g. WWII) or the companies and network that the state has indulged in almost since the very inception of the rail industry.

Quite. The railways weren't privatised properly; it is disingenuous to refer to them as privately owned and privately operated. And it isn't just the missed classification of the railways. Across the board, words and phrases are being twisted in their meaning to allow the government to get away with murder. For example, we've heard a lot about the failure of free market capitalism since the recession began - something that hides the fact that we have a mixed economy in this country that is anything other than free. We are constantly told that the banking sector needs to be regulated - yet it already was massively regulated when it went tits up and strangled the rest of the economy. We hear about how the War On Terror is about increasing our security and bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to other parts of the world, even though it does anything other than achieve security, freedom or democracy.

This bastardisation of terminology may sound like a tedious point of semantics, but it really isn't. It allows the ruling elite to control the debate with our democracy through misusing simple words. Privatisation can be painted as a bad thing based on the failure of the railways; even though they haven't been privatised. The banking crises can be used as part of the argument for regulation - even though regulation did nothing to prevent the collapse of certain banks. And so on, and so on, and so on. Until the terrified and terrifying rictus grin on Gordon Brown's face sums up the "progressive" movement in this country, and the ever preening David Cameron apparently leads a "conservative" party offering nothing other than utterly empty concepts of "change".

It isn't even a question of arguing with our elected elite; it is more about telling them to shut the fuck up until they learn what very basic terms mean and use then use those terms correctly.