Private companies can do many things well – running public services isn’t one of them. Privatisation has failed to tackle the challenges of the twenty-first century: we won’t get the decent public transport, green energy, clean rivers, fast broadband coverage or the good hospitals and schools we need without public ownership. And most of the British public know it: public ownership is extremely popular with both Leavers and Remainers, with young and old, across regions, social classes and political divides. Even a majority of Conservative voters want public ownership of rail and water.*
Popular support for public ownership increased substantially during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. After forty years of neoliberal consensus, the 2017 Manifesto brought public ownership into the mainstream. By 2019, support for bringing the railways and water, Royal Mail and buses into public ownership had increased by 6, 7 and 9 percentage points respectively. This increase in support took place in the context of a constant onslaught from the right-wing media. Every day during the 2019 election, newspapers wrote stories insisting that public ownership would cost too much. That was simply a well-resourced lie. The UK is wasting £13 billion on privatisation every year – money that’s going towards shareholder dividends, inefficient fragmentation and the higher cost of borrowing in the private sector.
In the election, we saw what it looks like when a political party challenges vested interests and stands up for working people. The establishment fought back with every means at its disposal to try to stop any redistribution of power – of ownership – to ordinary people. Of course, the day after the election, the share prices of privatised utility companies soared as the threat of a Labour government evaporated. Clearly, we must reform media ownership if we ‘re going to get the government and services we need: social media platforms that work for people and democracy, not profit; a properly funded BBC that can be held accountable by its users; and new laws to rein in the right-wing press.
But it is also important to remember how far our campaigning has already shifted the consensus on public ownership. In the 2019 election, while scare stories about Jeremy Corbyn were rife, no one was defending privatisation. Not even the mainstream media could bring itself to defend rip-off rail fares, the pollution of rivers and beaches, the exploitation of care workers, or the corruption of academy headteachers. They weren’t defending Richard Branson suing the NHS, excusing the failures of G4S or bemoaning the collapse of Carillion. How could they?
This consensus is clearer than ever within the Labour Party. During the spring 2020 leadership contest, all of the leadership candidates signed up to the We Own It pledge tracker of campaign group We Own It, confirming their commitment to public ownership in ten key sectors: the NHS, schools, water, energy, the railways, buses, the justice system, Royal Mail, council services and broadband. Members and campaigners will, of course, need to hold the new leader Keir Starmer to account for these promises and ensure they are prioritised. But the tone of recent discussion suggests that Labour is finally committed to ending the longstanding con that sees taxpayers’ money flow directly into shareholder pockets.
The growing consensus for public ownership has touched Tories too. Northern Rail was the second railway franchise, after East Coast, to be taken into public hands by a Conservative government, even before COVID-19 forced it to implement an emergency rescue package for private rail companies across the country. As The Times’ deputy business editor Graham Ruddick conceded shortly after the 2019 election, the corporate world has not won the argument on public ownership.
Rail is the classic example of a market failure, but the arguments for bringing rail into public ownership apply to other public services as well. Railways are natural monopolies that deny consumers real choice, and where marketisation therefore fails to drive down prices and drive up service quality; the same argument applies to water and the energy grid. The railway is a network comprising busy central nodes and less busy – but no less essential – radiating spokes, and it therefore makes sense to cross-subsidise investment throughout the network. The same argument applies to buses, Royal Mail and broadband. The ongoing improvement of the railway requires continuous reinvestment as opposed to profit distribution; the same arguments apply to our NHS or to the justice system. Railway operators must be accountable to passengers – just as academy schools or council services must heed parents, teachers and communities.
After the 2019 election, We Own It commissioned new polling to find out why people support public ownership. The two most popular reasons were: people want money to be reinvested in services rather than going to shareholders; and people believe ‘privately owned companies prioritise profitable areas over providing a good service to everyone.’ Most of us believe that public funding from the taxes that we all pay should go towards improving services. And we understand that private companies running public services have the wrong priorities, cherry picking which services they provide rather than providing a genuinely universal service.
The world changed on election night, as the vision put forward by Corbyn and John McDonnell seemed to evaporate into thin air, much to the delight of the utilities investors. But in the last few months it has changed again. The coronavirus pandemic has shut down normal life and made us feel scared and overwhelmed. Many of us are afraid for our loved ones, many are struggling to get by. The mobilisation of public and private resources undertaken to tackle the coronavirus has been likened to wartime, and while the powering down of the economy is different in crucial ways, the post-pandemic economy, like the post-war economy, will take time to recover and new political space will open up. Once the ‘war’ is over, the left must create a new narrative from the wreckage, one that does justice to the public sphere.
There are three ways in which COVID-19 creates new conditions for public ownership. First, privatised companies, sometimes entire sectors, are asking for bailouts – we must ensure that conditions are attached, so these bailouts do not serve simply to enrich private shareholders at the expense of people and planet. We should be calling on the government to take over damaging, carbon-intensive sectors such as oil and aviation, with a view to phasing them out over time and replacing them with carbon-neutral alternatives. Instead of giving Branson another bailout, we could offer to make Virgin Airlines a publicly owned company and manage it in a way that helps us meet our climate targets.
As rail franchises come up for renegotiation and renewal, we should push the government to take the operators into public hands. An integrated, efficient railway with reasonable fares and investment in capacity could be a key part of a public transport network that discourages people from using cars and planes. Passengers should have a real say over the long-term vision for our railways, and play a role in holding the public network accountable. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has indicated that it may become government policy to reduce car use, but this won’t happen without planning comprehensive public transport networks. Investment in reducing car use should also be used to create good jobs for the future – more guards to people on journeys, for example, as opposed to unthinking development of driverless cars with individualised pods, which would see society atomised and jobs cut. We have some leverage now over the future of whole sectors of the economy, and we must use it.
Second, UK economic output is forecast to fall by 15 per cent: the entire economy is being reoriented and when the lockdown is over it won’t be the same again. In such conditions, people may be more receptive to a positive new vision for our society. The pandemic has forced people to realise that the economy is composed of human beings and that the framework and rules are chosen by us – that we could make different choices. Labour’s policy for free, publicly owned broadband, mocked in the aftermath of the election, now looks like common sense as working from home becomes standard. Polling by the Daily Mail found 75 per cent of its readers want free broadband during the outbreak. And while Boris Johnson has committed to delivering broadband across the country, the government’s own report shows that doing this in the private sector will cost an extra £12 billion. The public sector is clearly best placed to deliver the universal services people need now more than ever.
The left must also ready itself to campaign for a Green New Deal as soon as this crisis is over – because the crisis of the climate emergency is only going to escalate. Green public investment can create hundreds of thousands of jobs in energy generation and in new industry supply chains. Wind and solar power can be delivered almost everywhere in the UK, reversing decades of underinvestment in ex-mining communities decimated by Margaret Thatcher. The art and activism organisation Platform estimates that 40,000 oil workers may lose their jobs by 2030, but that we can create employment for three to four times as many people in clean energy industries. Johnson has committed to quadrupling offshore wind power. He could deliver this by setting up a new publicly owned UK company that creates jobs locally while tackling the climate crisis – instead of leaving publicly owned Danish wind power to lead the way.
Public institutions providing vital services like energy, water and transport, if properly constructed, can help us transition to a Green New Deal and weather the storm of the climate emergency. These organisations should involve citizens, workers and communities in their governance structures, giving everyone a real voice.
Third, the COVID-19 crisis makes it crystal clear – often in heartbreaking ways – that we are all connected. The crisis has created space for a reaffirmation of our collective values – of what’s most important to all of us. Protecting human life must be the priority, as opposed to making a profit. Our NHS wasn’t ready for this pandemic because of years of austerity and privatisation: it was left short of 100,000 staff and 17,000 beds. Outsourcing cleaning has left hospitals less safe. NHS frontline staff don’t have the protective gear to look after themselves and their patients, and the government has been scrambling to order enough ventilators to keep people alive. This was all predictable but the government decided not to prepare, choosing instead to continue undermining our NHS.
When the crisis is over, our story must be this: We stepped up, we volunteered, we helped each other and looked after each other. We set up mutual aid groups and checked on older people. Now it’s time for the government to do its part. Reinstate our NHS as a fully public service and fund it properly. We deserve nothing less.
We must also demand, as Corbyn did, the creation of a new, public pharmaceutical corporation so we never again find ourselves at the mercy of rapacious drugs companies across the world when we want to look after our population. And of course the trade bill and the trade deals that follow it must incorporate real protection for our NHS and all public services. If the Tories will not do all this, Labour’s biggest achievement when it next comes to power must be to return the NHS to full public ownership, ending privatisation and outsourcing completely.
Out of the wreckage of COVID-19 we must build a new social contract that recognises the importance of public services as a reflection of our collective values – an expression of love, of how we choose to care for each other as a civilised society. These services must be properly funded, made to work for people not profit, and ready to take their place in delivering the Green New Deal that will be needed before the next crisis hits.
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* David Hall, ‘The UK 2019 Election: Defeat for Labour, But Strong Support for Public Ownership’, University of Greenwich PSIRU Working Paper, 30 January 2020.