Yes, OK, it won’t cover all of it. But a few of the more obvious candidates for nationalisation, the ones that might well work better as a whole than a set of competing fragmentary parts – the railways, the sold-off bits of the post office, the utilities – well, I am sure it would help.

By the way, in my imaginary manifesto I have another model. Government as ‘superbrand’ – so there’s a government gas company, a government phone company, a government ISP, which has to compete with the rest of the players in the market and prevents a monopoly (never healthy). The difference is we are all by default shareholders – whether we choose to be customers or not. Before you fall off your bar-stool laughing, the model already exists – the BBC.

Only an idea..

Fair enough, CD. I was almost all the way up my own whatsit by the end of my last post.. apologies. Yes, there’s a net cost, be it stairlift or NHS.

Dunno, Bruce. Is there any more reason to assume the two will co-incide again, any more than Slade and the Austin Allegro making a comeback at the same time? I don’t know if you’ve had much dealing with unions lately, but they are a VERY different animal from what they were four decades ago.

I have no understanding of the ‘Public health service as a business’ school of economics, this is true. I must have missed those lessons. OK, if you decided it was a business you might conclude it a rubbish one, but you are surely comparing apples with oranges if you do?

If you can point to where the money is ‘lost’ by sole virtue of it being a public service I am all ears. I know that there are inefficiencies whereby some of the money that could have been spent looking after patients has been spent on management consultants and rebranding exercises etc.

It will never make a ‘profit’ as it is not a business. So how can it make a loss? You can’t have it both ways.

We require production, added value, call it what you will, for our economy to flourish. So paying people to not work – whether its 30 quid a week or a thousand – is not a way forward, and no left-winger I have ever met, read or heard of would ever, in a million years, claim it was. It just isn’t part of any model.

However, seeing a public service, manned by tax paying consumers, as some kind of net loss to the nation is equally fallacious when you think about it. Yes, it is money that could be invested in industry, that is true. And it is – while it passes through the system – ‘dead’ money. But so is money sitting in your pocket. In the meantime (unlike what is sitting in our pockets), this money is improving the quality of people’s lives – which surely is the point of money?

Or is just to have it in our pockets? Let me put it another way. You improve the quality of your mum’s life by buying her a stairlift. Do you hang your head for making a ‘loss’? Are you now a loss making industry? Why is the NHS any different, as a collective version of this?

Got to agree about the coal mines though. Not at all sure that would be a profitable move for anyone!

Couple of things. Corbyn is lukewarm about the EU, at best.

No, the NHS is not ‘loss making’ – for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Saying it is loss-making because it doesn’t make a profit on a balance sheet like a business does is following up a ‘category error’ with a fallacy. It’s like saying a song does not smell of feet and so will never drive a car.

It is a service (the clue is in the name) that we once thought of as a badge of honour, a mark of civilisation hard fought for and won. But it doesn’t need a speech.

Peculiar twist of logic there.

RBS made a massive loss, and yes it was bailed out by us, the taxpayer (not sure how that tallies with the idea of the ‘free market’, but there ya go). It dragged itself out of the crash and back into profitability while thus publicly owned, and it is now being cheaply sold back into private hands when it is making clear money in a move that makes no economic sense. It would remain a profitable nationalised company, helping to balance the budget, and its continued existence as such would make the myth of this being impossible that much harder to sustain, even by the most rabid of ‘newspapers’.

No, it’s not British Steel. Or British Coal. As Snafu said, it’s not just old trade unionists who are stuck in the seventies, it is much more those who can’t see that things have indeed moved on and associate anyone advocating publicly owned assets – just like RBS – with the activities of those old trade unionists (not to mention the attitudes of management back then). The two things are not the same.

Is it? Why? I would like to refer you to the case of RBS.. currently being given back to private hands as it is proving an embarrassing model of public revenue.