Public bad, private good was the mantra of Thatcher's junta. Seamus Milne writes today in The Guardian on the way in which New Labour has slavishly followed the Thatcherite privatisation agenda, and the way Ministers have been rewarded for their work. To parliamentary expenses and second jobs, we also need to add the scandal of former Ministers feathering their own nests with consultancies, advisory posts and non-executive directorships in companies they have helped out during their time in office.

There is no end, it seems, to the fiasco of rail privatisation. For the second time in three years, the holder of the coveted east coast franchise has walked away from a contract it can no longer afford.

...For all its rise in passenger numbers, Britain's rail system remains hobbled by the folly of privatisation: overcrowded, unreliable, fragmented and exorbitantly expensive. But far from putting it out of its misery to create a reintegrated publicly owned railway at zero cost, the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, was yesterday insisting the east coast line would be up for tender again as soon as he could manage it.

...In England's health service creeping privatisation is turning into a full-frontal assault as the government strains every nerve to give health corporations a bigger slice of the action: not only in buildings and maintenance, but diagnostics, elective surgery, GPs' surgeries, district nursing, health visiting and trust commissioning – regardless of the views of staff and patients; the evidence on cost, inefficiency and lack of accountability; and the corrosive impact on the NHS ethos.

When Gordon Brown announced his new entitlement for cancer patients to be seen by a specialist within two weeks, he insisted on an entirely unnecessary extra pledge of private treatment if the NHS was unable to deliver. And when a string of private finance initiative projects – whose costs are now estimated to be double what they would be in the public sector – were on the point of collapse earlier this year, the government bailed them out rather than take them over.

Why is this going on, Milne asks, before answering his own question...

The revolving door that propels civil servants into the arms of companies for whom they previously set rules and signed off contracts was well established before New Labour came to power.

What's new for Labour is the stampede of ministers for the revolving door. Since 2006, 37 former members of the government have been given permission to take private sector jobs within two years of leaving office. As with their Tory predecessors, many of these jobs involve working for companies directly bidding for government contracts and privatised services. They include Blair himself, of course, whose £12m annual income now includes multimillion contracts with banking groups JP Morgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, in a sector lovingly protected during his time in office.