Privatisation, a long and ugly word with a bad reputation, will not feature strongly in this election campaign. But it ought to. The Tories promise £8bn in tax cuts, with hints, from their Treasury team, of far more before the end of a full parliament. If public services are then to be maintained at their present levels, as the Tories insist they will be, there is only one answer: to introduce some element of private charging for schools and health - a fee for visiting your GP, for example, or some compulsory private health insurance scheme, of the sort that is common elsewhere in Europe. William Hague judges, almost certainly rightly, that any such suggestion would lead to a Labour landslide on a scale that would dwarf 1997 - not least because the private costs (assuming there would be means tests) would fall disproportionately on the middle classes. So, what could be a sharp, and entirely legitimate, argument must be fudged.

The same applies to privatisation in another sense: the use of the private sector to build or manage public services. Here, all is fudge and muddle. Privatisation, in the public mind, is now almost as tainted as nationalisation once was; it is associated with the greed and short-termism of the Thatcher years. The rail industry has become a national disaster; even British Telecom, once regarded as the biggest jewel in the privatised family silver, has blundered its way into heavy debt. The Tories have no interest whatever in suggesting that they may usher more services into the private sector. But equally, Labour has no interest in reviving its preference for public ownership - largely because, if run-down and under-resourced services such as the national railways, the London Tube and the air traffic control system are placed in the private sector, ministers can escape the blame for rail crashes, mid-air collisions and the like.

Yet privatisation need not always be negative: it is as foolish for the left to regard the public sector as invariably superior, as it is for the right to take the same view of the private sector. All that matters is to get good, well-funded services. What ought to be important to the left about the NHS is that it is tax-based and universal, not that it maintains battalions of workers within the public sector, making it (now the Red Army is gone) probably the largest employer in the world. Nor are local authorities' powers necessarily enhanced by the numbers of people they employ: on the contrary, their policy-making might be considerably wiser and more effective if they were not bogged down in the minutiae of employment relations. This is a point better understood in the rest of Europe: Scandinavian local authorities have powers that their British counterparts would kill for, but employ hardly anyone. If primary schools had classes of 20 or fewer, or if arthritic hips could be replaced within a week, would anyone care if the necessary teachers or doctors had been whistled up from the private sector?

As Martin Taylor, chairman of W H Smith, argues in a foreword to a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (partially leaked to the Guardian), privatisation in Britain has been used in almost entirely the wrong way. Many public-private partnerships are simply devices to get capital spending off the Treasury books. But the solution is short-term; the taxpayer must eventually meet the bills and, since the private sector must always borrow at higher cost and since its shareholders will expect a profit, the bills will be correspondingly larger. National debt may, in the technical sense, be reduced but there is a burden on future generations all the same. Nor does it make much sense to privatise services such as rail and then to continue subsidising them; or to bring in the private sector purely as a sort of fire service to mop up public sector failure, as in the schools; or to set up "partnerships", such as the education action zones, in the belief that the private sector will help out the public sector as a favour.

The role of the private sector, if any, must be to provide specialist services, thus freeing the public sector from onerous management responsibilities - an example would be the "hospital workshops" to carry out routine operations, proposed in the Labour manifesto. Quite possibly, the private sector can also provide better and more flexible management because it follows the dictates of profit and customer satisfaction, rather than the standardised rules and procedures required by public sector accountability. It is precisely because it is not accountable in the conventional sense that the private sector may do a better job.

None of this is to deny the importance of Will Hutton's "public realm" (see page 34) or the value of "the public sector ethos" of which Mr Taylor's foreword is far too dismissive. It is merely to propose that the left re-examine its obsessive belief that public ownership is a good in itself. But such matters, needless to say, are for the grown-ups, not for mere voters confronted with an infantilised election debate. The IPPR report will not be published until after the election because, the New Statesman was told, it might become "a political football". That judgement speaks volumes about the state of political debate in Britain.

More angels needed

Here are the headlines from the first week of the campaign. William Hague launched his manifesto first and took "the initiative". Labour "hit back" and slowed his "momentum". Michael Portillo committed a "gaffe" by going to the west Midlands in a BMW; Margaret Beckett committed another by failing to remember two of Labour's latest "pledges". Oliver Letwin created Tory "disarray" on tax cuts. Labour "piled on pressure" and forced him "into hiding". Millbank revealed its "cynicism" by forcing Shaun Woodward, the renegade Tory, on St Helens. Peter Mandelson showed "disloyalty" by writing an impenetrable article in the Independent. And the polls showed no movement in public opinion beyond what could be explained by statistical error. Is it possible that nobody is listening? Are politicians and the commentators talking a language as comprehensible, to most people, as medieval Latin? Some people have gathered on the head of a pin. Unfortunately, they are not angels.

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