Political Commentary: If you can't mend the cooker, get out of the kitchen

FOR SOME months now, the oven part of my electric stove has not been working. It is a Belling 'Compact Four' and it has done daily service for 20 years. This is, I suppose, quite a long time in the life of an electric cooker. The rings on top work all right, though they have been replaced singly at

one time or another. I tried to have the same done with the oven. Electricians

of the Utmost Fame

Were called at once; but when they came

They answered, as they took their Fees,

'There is no cure for this Disease.'

Perhaps this is not quite accurate. The latest electrician to look at the stove seemed to be saying, as far as I could make him out, that the fault was repairable but that such a course would prove troublesome and time-consuming for him, and expensive for me. 'Not worth your while, squire': that appeared to be the message.

And what, you may well be asking at this stage, has this to do with current politics? Madam, everything. Over the last 15 years we have produced a society not only where things fail to be repaired but where the capacity to repair them has also been extinguished. This is connected with the contempt for things, for the fabrication of useful objects, which we have had for a long time, but which was transformed into an article of economic dogma by Lady Thatcher and her crazed acolytes. They thought wealth consisted in passing bits of paper around. Nor is this all. Not only did Lady Thatcher - through a clear causal sequence - render it more difficult to have electric cookers repaired. She also made it harder to follow the advice to buy a new one.

In the old days there used to be spacious shops in advantageous positions called 'electricity showrooms'. Couples would spend hours happily contemplating various pieces of equipment which they might even buy after undertaking several visits to reassure themselves about the prudence of their purchase. The Electricity Board would then disconnect the old cooker, remove it while paying a smallish sum for it, and install the new one. These shops seem to have disappeared from the face of the land or, at any rate, from the part of North London where I live.

Private enterprise does not provide the same kind of service. Certainly it is not provided in the two large stores which I have tried so far. Both were able, indeed anxious, to sell me a cooker. Could they install it? Well, not exactly. But they had an association with these very reliable electricians who could. They had never been let down yet. And could these electricians of theirs complete the process in one operation: disconnect the old cooker, connect the new one, and take the old one away? The assistant was none too sure. She would have to check. Like the man from the People, I made my excuses and left.

A few days later, quite by chance - for I was not trying to make any kind of fuss - I was having a drink with a director of one of these stores. I told him of my experience. He laughed at my discomfiture. He was also surprised at my evident ignorance of modern marketing. The purpose, he said, was to sell as many electric cookers (or whatever) at as high a profit as possible. Installation was a distraction which might lead to all kinds of disputes and was certain to affect profits adversely.

This attitude embodies the philosophy of modern Conservatism. So does the breaking-up of a useful and, in its way, popular public service. So also does the replacement of that service with two or more private businesses which are less convenient and more expensive for the public but add significantly to the sum total of private profit. In this regard Mr John Major has made no effort to mitigate the excesses of the Thatcher years: quite the reverse. We now have public squalor in a sense different from Professor Kenneth Galbraith's. Services which were formerly - and by all rational criteria ought to be - public are provided privately but squalidly, by usually squalid people. The Opposition does not seem to care much.

Thus, hardly a day passes when we do not read of some fresh scandal in a quango which has taken over functions of central or local government. There is not a week when the fiendish Mrs Virginia Bottomley is not required to defend the selfish rapacity of her newly installed health service bureaucrats.

The medieval philosopher William of Occam or Ockham (a village in darkest Surrey where, as we are on the subject of domestic equipment, I once hired a sanding machine, though that is by the way) said that entities should not be multiplied without cause. The present government follows the reverse principle. It multiplies - more, creates - entities which it then hands over to private businesses that turn out to be expensive, incompetent or both. As Jonathan Swift put it:

So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea

Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller yet to bite 'em . . .

So we have a scheme of rail privatisation (sketchy details were published last week) which no one wants, hardly anyone understands, is bound to lead to a worse and more expensive service, and is likely to make us an even greater laughing-stock in Europe than we are already. I also doubt whether my Senior Railcard will be honoured for very long once the forces of private capital are in control. Like Mr Pooter, I am not a wealthy man. But I do not (as it happens) see any very good reason why I should be entitled to a third off most rail fares simply for attaining the great age of 60. Still, that is not the immediate point.

Or why, when we are at last to have a national lottery - a perfectly good idea which should have come about generations ago - does it have to be put into practice by some fly-by-night organisation? Indeed, the Government has acknowledged the risk of disreputability among the firms competing for the franchise (dread word of the Thatcher era, redolent of all manner of impositions and frauds on the public): so much so that a special committee has been established to assess the character and bona fides of those concerns, rather like the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee, and much good does that do.

And why did the Government have to pay pounds 62,500 to that louche character with the blow wave (who has already made a great deal of money advising Lady Thatcher) simply for providing a couple of absurd ideas on how the D-Day anniversary should be commemorated? The Government has shown that it can supply even more ridiculous proposals without external assistance. There is no need, however, for anyone to worry overmuch about my domestic difficulties. When I bought my present house 10 years ago the kitchen already contained a gas stove. 'Leave it where it is,' I instructed. In this small but important area, I was able to insure against six further years of Lady Thatcher, and four of Mr Major.