A depressing read but a book which everyone who cares about public services like health and education should read. We've had to suffer 40 years of the neo-liberal mantra of private enterprise good, state provided public services bad that it's about time we woke up to the truth of what has been happening. Meek does this by not blinding us with complex facts and statistics but allowing ordinary people, both consumers and managers of the services, to tell their stories. The ludicrousness of the situation we are now in is best summed up by the fact that successive governments can't seem to see the absurdity of taking our railways out of British state ownership so that they can be run by the Chinese and French state-owned railway companies instead. But the real tragedy is the total mess that has been made of such an essential to life as housing. And the disaster of selling off council housing (half of which has ended up in the hands of rapacious private landlords) is now to be compounded by the government selling off housing association properties! ( )