Privatization

Privatization is the great scam of our era. The right presents it as government yielding ownership to the people, but it's really ownership going from all the people to a privileged minority. It tends to make things seriously worse, especially with utilities that have monopoly status. Private business must not be put in a position where it's protected from competition:  when monopolies are under the government, the government will be answerable in a democratic nation.  A private monopoly is answerable to Mickey Mouse.

I'm particularly annoyed by the privatization of British utilities. This happened under Margaret Thatcher and John Major in the '80s and early '90s. It resulted from sheer bloody-minded ideology and was clearly a disaster for electricity, gas, water and train services. (When Thatcher became Conservative leader, she said her goal was to destroy socialism. She wasn't a builder, she was a destroyer.)

The most objectionable thing about privatization isn't that it works badly, but that it doesn't have to work well!  No matter how badly it works, it's a sacred cow.  When Tony Blair's New Labour finally ousted the Tories in 1997, they made a point of passively accepting even the most destructive privatizations as permanent, and even throwing in some more privatizations on their own part. Their argument was that they could solve all the problems that could be solved through better government regulation, but this was clearly wishful thinking.  In all fairness, Blair inherited this policy from his immediate Labour predecessors: John Smith insisted that it didn't matter who owned what. (Funny, it mattered to the Conservatives.  Did that make them less smart than Labour, or more so?  It certainly made them more effective.)

Julian Barnes, in one of his glib, overrated "Letters from London" published in The New Yorker, argued that New Labour was accepting force majeure on the matter of privatization. Stuff and nonsense! Renationalization was (and is) completely feasible, and would be quite popular with the British people. What it's really about is that New Labour has always been determined not to anger big business. Privatization was bad for the people, but renationalization would offend the Big People, and guess which group was more important to Blair? New Labour was essentially a power grab by the party's ruling elite at the expense of the grassroots, and they've been consistently determined not to grant any "victories" to the party's left wing. What lies behind this is the cynical assumption, "The left has to vote for us anyway, so we may as well curry favour with our enemies."

Five or ten years ago "pragmatic" Labourite Roy Hattersley wrote an article in The Observer pointing out that improved utility regulation simply hadn't worked. Yet he added in the last paragraph, "Nobody in his right mind thinks that renationalization of utilities is still possible." Speak for yourself, coward! As that quote suggests, defenders of New Labour's passivity tend to hide behind a fake "consensus." Who's the bigger fool, the fool or the one who follows him?

The "Stop privatization" slogan isn't good enough for me. I say reverse privatization now!