Back to the future on public ownership

In a recent interview, the United Kingdom’s Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, Michael Dugher sent shockwaves through the political establishment when he said New Labour was dead, and that the country’s main Opposition Party was returning to its socialist origins.

"This is not like 1997 [when New Labour under Tony Blair won government], that whole deference to markets and the private sector, that’s gone," Dugher said.

If Labour wins the election, scheduled for May — and many observers believe it will — Dugher says he will be pushing for a partial re-nationalisation of the country’s rail system.

He said he was not talking about going back to the days of British Rail which was fully nationalised from the 1940s to 1980s.

“But I think we’ve got to make the starting point that privatisation was a mess, it was botched,” Dugher said.

“The fact remains that privatisation was a disaster for the railways.”

Stagecoach, the privately-run national transport group, also came under attack with Dugher describing the company’s executives as “boneheads” for opposing Labour’s plan to further regulate the bus network.

In taking this stand Labour has latched on to a growing anti-privatisation movement in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe.

Writing on the pro-public ownership website We Own It, Professor of Urban and Regional Political Economy, Andrew Cumbers said that while public ownership remains anathema to the centre-right in Britain, it finds itself increasingly out of step with the times.

“Public ownership is back on the public policy agenda in much of the rest of the world as the failures of three decades of privatisation become increasingly apparent,” Professor Cumbers writes.

“In Germany and France, but also in large swathes of Africa, Latin America and even the United States, new forms of public ownership at local, regional and national levels are being introduced that take whole sectors back into democratic control.”

He does not advocate a return to the monolithic State enterprises set up in Britain during the immediate post-war years, but “as the failings of privatisation and market deregulation policies create more inequalities and tensions in society, we need to develop new arguments and forms of public ownership to shape the progressive politics of the 21^st century”.

He suggests a role for municipal authorities and local cooperatives in public ownership and points to Denmark where one in seven of the population has shares in wind-farm projects.

It now appears that the Conservative-LibDem Coalition Government led by David Cameron may be listening. It recently decided that the State, through Her Majesty’s Prison Service, would run the new ‘super prison’ currently under construction in North Wales.

This follows a report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons into the 1600-inmate facility at Oakwood in Staffordshire, run by security contractor G4S where, the Inspector said “it was easier to get drugs than soap”.

In Australia the debate is still in its infancy, but a wave of privatisation by conservative governments at both State and Federal level is coming under increased scrutiny, while the Opposition Labor Party brought off a stunning victory in the Queensland election largely based on a campaign to stop plans to privatise the State’s ports and power network.

For too long there has been general acceptance of the conservative mantra that the private sector is always the best manager.  As Professor Cumbers says: “We should be open to the possibilities that new and diverse forms of public ownership offer to create a more equal and democratic economy and society”.