Nationalisation V Corporate Grifters

A balanced view

Privatisation

There has recently been speculation about the next potential Labour administration re-nationalising the rail network in the UK. As I was pondering this I realised that you had to be a certain age to remember what things were like before privatisation took place back in the 1980’s.

I am old enough to recall the world before the Thatcher government took office in 1979 (I was 23) and what happened soon afterwards.

I also want to clarify right here that I am not a fanatical supporter of either privatisation or nationalisation, I prefer to remain open minded and aware of the advantages and drawbacks of both systems.

However, here’s my rough appraisal.

Water.

This was a massive, embarrassing, corrupt and disgraceful disaster. 

Clean water and a reliable distribution system to deliver it is a critical piece of national infrastructure we all rely on. What happened to our once adequately functioning water system has been an unmitigated mega-grift.

The people who sucked vast sums of money out of the system are beneath contempt, they should have their wealth re-nationalised and then serve long prison sentences. 

I don’t care if ‘some of them are not so bad,’ it was a totally corrupt grift by scabby supporters of the Tory party who have made a fortune and filled our rivers with effluent.

We should all hate them all for the rest of their lives, and the two bit shyster politicians who ripped us all off and made this absurd mess possible.

However, pre privatised water supply was not much better. Sewage disposal was dealt with by more than 1,300 county borough and district councils under the Regional Water Authority and in the latter years of this system there was chronic underfunding and slow decline, most of it deliberately inflicted by various right leaning governments.

However, I still think it should be privatised just to depress the shabby con men who have been bleeding the general public for the last 40 years.

Telephones.

This used to be run by the general post office, the GPO. In 1969, when I was 13, it became Post Office Telecommunications, but still a nationalised company. You couldn’t own a telephone, you had to rent a big, heavy Bakelite phone with a dial and pay quite a lot of money to talk to anyone. I can’t remember how much but my mother would keep all telephone calls very short because of the cost.

In 1980, aged 24, pre telephone privatisation, I moved into a small apartment in Islington, London. After I had unpacked my meagre belongings I walked to a nearby phone box and called British Telecom as they were commonly known, to try and get a telephone in my new apartment. I was told I would have to wait a year, yes, you read that right, 12 months minimum, as they, and again I’m not making this up, “Had run out of numbers in my area.”

The day after the Thatcher government privatised the phone network in 1981, (selling off assets we had all paid for through tax, and letting scummy Tory party supporters once again rake in massive amounts of money) I rang Mercury Telecom, a sparkling new company formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless. By that afternoon I had a telephone in my flat. Seriously, it was all so quick. The phone worked and I rang my mum.

So privatising telephones was a massive win as far as I’m concerned, Mercury Telecom went under in 1997 because technology changed so fast and even some private companies couldn’t keep up. But I firmly believe that what happened in telecommunications in the UK would not have taken place in a state owned, top down control organisation. I’ve written about this before but no one working for a state run company in Russia came up with any technological innovation unless it was devices to kill people, sorry, I mean defence technology.

Electricity.

Pre Thatcher era electricity was supplied by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). This was a state run system responsible for electricity generation, transmission and bulk sales in England and Wales from 1958 until privatisation of the electricity industry in the 1990s.

After all the shenanigans about selling shares to ‘regular hard working families,’ the private companies that took over were all run by proper capitalists with investments from off shore shell companies, hedge funds and big pension funds.

However, one thing that might not have been foreseen by the rabid free market fanatics of the Thatcher regime was the emergence of proper capitalist, successful companies run by people with a genuine commitment to changing the electricity generating system. These folks, the likes of Dale Vince from Ecotricity, Greg Jackson from Octopus and  Stephen Fitzpatrick from OVO energy have not only thrown down the gauntlet to the old fossil burners, but they have done so and grown enormously, taken a massive slice of market share and made money. They have invested billions in renewable energy generation and shifted the public perception of new technologies and smart grid systems.

I don’t believe any of this would have happened under a nationalised system, so once again, against many expectations, I think this segment of vicious free market theft of a national asset has tuned out to be just about okay.

Gas

I can’t be bothered to go into too much detail about the UK gas industry. It used to be ‘town gas’ that was made by extracting a super toxic gas from coal. In the late sixties, due to extraction of methane gas from under the north sea, this really filthy gas was replace by what was laughingly called ‘natural’ gas. It’s methane gas, it’s still a toxic nightmare. 

So it was sort of privatised and it was a nightmare then, it’s a nightmare now, and the sooner we can stop relying on this ridiculous dated fuel the better. I don’t think it should be nationalised, I think it should be shut down.

Railways

Slightly different opinion here. I am too young to remember the railways before nationalisation, that took place in 1948, but what I do remember is model railways when I was a kid were often in the livery of companies that built and ran the railways from mid Victorian times. They had a certain glamour, the steam trains were clearly machines that inspired pride among the people who worked for those companies.

British Rail (the nationalised network) may have been many things but it was never glamorous. There were ample jokes about British Rail, particularly the sandwiches which I don’t remember eating. I can recall often catching trains and they were generally running okay, they were a bit old fashioned and everyone working on them and using the trains looked fairly miserable. A reminder that a popular personality of the period who made many British Rail adverts was Jimmy Saville. Yes, eeeeuuuuuw.

However in the mid 1970’s, everyone looked fairly miserable regardless of what they were up to, so I can’t rave about British Rail or say it was a disaster. 

One thing I can understand now is I was a genuinely penniless hippy in the early to mid 1970’s and yet I could afford to catch trains. 

Since the rail network has been privatised it has become steadily less reliable and now, incredibly expensive. For readers outside the UK, the cost of a family of four to travel by train from London to Manchester (163 miles or 262 km)would be around £284. 

That’s about €330 or $357. You can rent a car and drive there, including fuel, for less. It is an utter disgrace and even with recent problems, most countries in the EU have exemplary rail networks, and oh, gosh, they are mostly nationalised.

I have ridden on trains in Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland and Italy. All those countries have nationalised railways and they are all much more affordable, popular and reliable than the tatty ‘corporate’ wreckage we have in the UK. I’ll be very happy for our trains to be run, quite badly, by the state. It certainly won’t be worse, and the shame of the demise of a once proud, and dare I say it, original train network will continue to dog us.

Nationalise it now, don’t give any scummy shareholders a dime, maybe them weep.