Apologies for the slow response. I don't doubt there is an awful lot of fear involved, especially around healthcare. Indeed, the politicization of it makes it so bloody difficult to improve. The American system is incredibly dysfunctional and the 'socialization' accusations are frankly absurd, but then so too are the 'privatisation' arguments made here. For instance, in Germany, all primary care is privately provided, and half of hospitals are private (a mixture of non-profit and for-profit). There is literally so much going on in the space now that the private sector can't be locked out. There's an effort underway, for instance, to do an enormous analysis of ~100,000 genomes, together with all of the medical data associated with those individuals to get a better understanding of how we tick, build better treatments and intervene much earlier. A worthwhile thing that Britain leads the world in, yet it is done entirely outside of the NHS (run by UK Biobank - a charity - if you're interested). Spending is irrelevant as a measure though imo, as America spend far more than anyone on the planet, and no sane person would ever dream of attempting to copy their model.
With universities, every single statistic that I've seen shows that more disadvantaged youngsters are going to university than ever before, so the notion that they're being priced out is absurd. The thing is, I think it's a distraction more than anything. There's a strong argument that much of the problems we see today are a result of people feeling disenfranchised, not being respected. We haven't seen this kind of populist uprising in countries where technical education has remained strong, yet it's been devalued in Britain enormously. That's something that can rectified but it's relatively mundane and not as sexy as 'scrapping tuition fees'. Likewise, the need for lifelong learning is more important than ever before as technology has a more pronounced impact on the labour market, yet the government's own research shows that despite opportunities existing, the poorest folk are often the worst at exploiting the opportunities. The reasons they give aren't financial either, it's more lack of time, lack of interest, lack of confidence. These are policy wonk stuff rather than revolutions.
Likewise, I've said many times before that (EU) funds exist to help local communities with changes to their population due to migration (whether internal or external), but these funds are ignored by the UK government, with little offered in their place. Couple this with heavily centralised government and you have communities unable to adapt to change. Again, this doesn't require revolution, just better governance.
The trains are frustrating, not least because most of the data I've seen suggests that the fares are comparable with Europe, providing you get the right ticket (buy in advance, use railcards etc.) So a simplification of the ticket system would be a wonderful (wonkish) thing that could happen. In most other industries though, costs are lowered through the use of technology. Hand on heart, could you ever see a Corbyn led railway using autonomous vehicles, for instance, and stare down the inevitable union strife that would cause? There is also the challenges presented by Britain being the first with the railways and having a track infrastructure that is, I believe, unique in the world. This makes it difficult to work with OEMs because they have to build unique things for our network so we lose economies of scale. That issue is already in state hands (via Network Rail) but fixing it is far from easy.
And that's kinda the point. A lot of the disenfranchisement of society is that the remarkable loss of trust in those that were traditionally in authorities. Trust in government is incredibly low because they lie and cheat so much. Trust in the (mainstream) media is equally low, and it's resulted in the situation we face, not least on here, with Brexit, Trump etc. whereby no amount of facts or evidence will sway people because they've completely lost faith in that. I don't believe Corbyn to be a dishonest man (although his behaviour around Brexit is slippery politicking at it's worst), but I do think his election manifesto was utterly bonkers. Even if you support what he wanted to do, the notion that he could nationalise several industries, remake our economy and all manner of other things whilst also dealing with Brexit was frankly bonkers, so it would almost certainly lead to a whole lot of broken promises.
This is key, because there are solutions to the problems we face but they are difficult and they are often quite boring, which is the opposite of the revolutionary and easy sounding (and guaranteed to succeed) statements you get from Corbyn.
