As Times columnists go, Alice Miles isn’t bad.  She transgresses into casual xenophobia a little too often for my liking, but she’s usually worth a read.  Today especially so – despite, ahem, repeated transgressions into casual xenophobia – as she returns to the Minister’s favourite theme of 21st century Great Britain Limited as a Chancer’s Paradise:

It’s the small things that take you by surprise on returning to Britain after a long break, as I did over Christmas. Not the weather or the headlines or Labour’s plunging fortunes, but things like the speed of cars, the cost of a train ticket, the convenience of cash machines (do we know how much they encourage profligacy?), and the number of newspapers on offer.

For me it was the smallest thing of all that gave me the greatest shock. It was the toilets at Gatwick…

One of the three cubicles had been locked shut, presumably blocked. Another I was told not even to show my daughter into in case it frightened her. I glanced, saw blood, retreated. The sole final cubicle, for which everyone was queueing, wouldn’t flush without a repeated pumping of the button and most people were coming out embarrassed and apologetic that they had not managed it.

Thence to wash their hands in a row of basins spattered with dried-on, encrusted vomit. It was extraordinarily embarrassing. I found myself apologising to… American visitors, saying that Britain wasn’t usually like this — and the words dried up in my throat. Because it so often is. Somewhere, some time, the soul of the United Kingdom lost its pride in itself. Public spaces are dirty, people from ticket salesmen to immigration officials are rude, life operates on some invisible financial level that entirely passes by the needs and desires of ordinary people…

Go to Houston, Texas; you could eat off those loo seats. Go, even, to Belize. You wouldn’t want to eat off them, and you might pay 25c for a bit of loo roll, but then you can at least use them, and flush too, and someone will even wipe the sink after you.

I have no doubt at all that the loos at Gatwick are attended to (or not) by badly paid foreign workers who couldn’t give a damn what an American tourist might think of the UK on first arrival. I know that the airport itself is run by a Spanish company that probably couldn’t give a damn etc. I expect the cleaning of the loos is contracted out to some ghastly low-paying employment agency. And I have no doubt that if I was in charge of cleaning them, even as a British citizen (is this what Mr Brown meant when he said British jobs should be held for British workers?), I would find it hard to take much pride in my work.

But find the reason why the public loos in North and Central America work — a 25 cent financial incentive for someone, or a decent contract, or simply some pride — and why those in Britain are often squalid, and you will find the reason for the dissatisfaction that British people feel in public services and the State today. The complicated mix of public and private, foreign and domestic ownership of so many things that we still consider public services, the jumble of foreign workers, the temporary contracts and the corner-cutting in the drive for productivity, productivity, productivity: these have so muddled the lines of responsibility and removed the traditional British pride and courtesy that no one seems to care who should clean a loo at Gatwick any more.