Will have a think and post a comments tomorrow.

I see socialism as the belief that the state should intervene in peoples lives for the benefit of wider society. Although by that definition it means most people are socialists to some degree.

With regard to where the state should intervene, I believe in the existence of the welfare state as a safety net and also to ensure that those in need are able to provide for themselves and their families.

With regard to the economy, traditional capitalist logic dictates that a company that makes a high profit (in the long term) is a well run company that provides a good service. It follows that the company that makes the best profit in the long term is the one that provides the best services. In situations where a private company can make larger profits by providing a poorer service (for example train companies limiting capacity at peak times, or bus companies abandoning unprofitable rural routes) I believe it is the place of the state to intervene.

With regard to common ownership, this is something I'm not quite so comfortable with. One of the best features of capitalism is entepreneurship, the ability to take an idea and turn it into a successful business. In this situation it is the entepreneur who will have borrowed money and taken large risks in order to develop their idea. It would seem to follow that the risk taker should be the person who gets to reap the rewards if the business is a success.

Is it not easier to say "we want to be more like XYZ" and then if people are happier and better off in that other country, we can just copy it? Going by that UNICEF report, we've got plenty to learn.

How does liberty (in the John Stuart Mill sense) fit into this?

But where are you going to draw the line?

Will it be the poorest fifty per cent doing down the richest fifty percent? Of the poorest eighty per cent doing down the richest twenty? Or indeed, the richest ninety per cent declaring war on the ten per cent in the underclass?

Wherever you draw the arbitrary line, there will be plenty of people at the margins who aren't sure which side to take. And having dispossessed the richest ten per cent and redistributed the spoils (fairly thinly) among the poorest ninety per cent, the top ten per cent of the remaining ninety per cent then become the target and so on.

A bit like during the French revolution, where in the end they were just guillotining people at random.

Then I read The Road to Serfdom (for professional/academic reasons) and couldn't take it seriously because of the caricature it starts with about socialism as central planning, and I thought that is right wing authoritarianism, not socialism. Except that a few years later having come to the conclusion, based on working as a consultant in many organisations, where personal and historical reasons so often block what from a broader perspective makes so much sense for overall wellbeing, that party politics actually made a lot of sense, and started to read some Labour Party history, that central planning had been seen as a panacea until very recently, by some. Though even Atlee was famously in favour of a mixed economy. But particularly memories of WWII where planning played a big role in victory were taken too unthinkingly by many to prove its usefulness in peaceful progress.

I have to say (making a connection with my current professional focus) that economic theory has much responsibility for many of the confusions around what makes organisations and economies successful. But fortunately traditional economics is withering away (increasingly few students now choose to study it - choice working again, albeit blunted by too many people still employed to teach outdated theories and unable or unwilling to change) and there is, particularly among the younger generation (not that I'm that old!), a recognition that democratic politics (meaning deliberative processes, not just votes) rather than dogmatic economics is the way to deal with what some people call `wicked issues' that strongly resist conventional policy-led intervention. I think it is in many ways an educational issue, but it is also `scientific' in the sense that the logic is still not well articulated, and actually it is much better done in the private sector, led by US business schools over the past 25 years, than the public sector, where what does work is still poorly understood, but even having understanding would not make change easy because it threatens people's livelihoods, and that needs to be understood and factored in to dealing with the issues.

I remember Frank Dobson saying when he was health minister that he wondered why so many nurses chose to work for private agencies, rather than hospital banks, and they said it was because that gave them flexibility to choose their shifts, which banks did not. And then when the NHS took over a private hospital, albeit in central London, and the biggest problem was reported to be dealing with the pay gap - that those in the private hospital had salaries significantly higher than the NHS, not as many suggest that public sector salaries are necessarily higher, though that may be skill dependent. But by no means are `markets' a panacea, it doesn't seem well understood that markets only ever exist within a regulated environment - it is not a coincidence that the almost (theoretically) `perfect' financial markets are the most carefully regulated!

Areas like infrastructure and healthcare are different because the choices are not the same as with many consumer goods, as are many others, and it seems to me politics is the way to deal with what is sometimes called the `collective action' problem that things that are good for the community can be undermined when individuals have incentives to act in ways that undermine the envisaged solution. That politics is widely regarded as about personality also seem to me to reflect human nature, and something that should be worked with, not complained about. I used to think debating societies and much journalism were a waste of time, the point was to do, not to talk, to make things better; but being human means that talking actually has a lot to do with making things better, not least so people understand and can act to minimise others concerns. Ultimately wealth and the opportunity that results (not least  education and healthcare) come from people's skills to provide things that other people want (either to buy or to vote for) - that's not dogma it's fact. Where it seems to me `the left' differs from `the right' (other than different entrenched interests) in that what we can aspire to is that society does not need to be hierarchical (based on either status, income, education or any other measure) but on mutual respect based on the knowledge that a modern economy thrives on different people in different roles.