Adam Harmsworth, Coventry Socialist Party
It has been estimated that around £200 billion has gone into the pockets of shareholders controlling privatised services since the 1990s. Billions of pounds every year that could have funded our services, increased pay, created jobs, has instead disappeared into the bank accounts of the wealthiest 1%.
What we receive in return are public services getting worse and worse, and costing us more. Our NHS on its knees, water companies pouring sewage into our rivers, poorly run train and bus services, Royal Mail cutting deliveries. Bills and prices have soared, while workers in these privatised services have their pay and conditions attacked over and over.
Every way you look at Britain’s lurch towards privatisation, it has been a failure.
That’s why the Socialist Party calls for the full re-nationalisation of all these services. And given how much they’ve taken from us in profits already, nationalisation must be with no compensation for the super-rich. Only those investors who would genuinely suffer without compensation should get it, on the basis of proven need instead of some mythical ‘market value’.
We desperately need public ownership to end this theft by private profiteers. But, we don’t think for a second that nationalisation alone can fix the crises in our services. Plenty of workers in state-owned services have taken strike action in the last few years over the unacceptable situations in their workplaces.
Labour in power, like previous Tory governments, is acting in the interests of the capitalist class. That means when they aren’t selling off our services to the capitalists, they’re running them on shoestring budgets while adding bureaucracy and top-down control to keep workers in their place. We need workers ourselves to have democratic control of our services, to guarantee they are run in the interests of our class and not for profit or penny-pinching.
Imagine what we could have. Water security without gallons of pollution. A functional, fully staffed transport service. A dependable NHS without months-long waiting lists. Gas and electric cheap or free so impoverished pensioners don’t freeze in their homes, while transitioning to renewable sources so the environment is not destroyed. That’s what privatisation is preventing, and that is what socialist nationalisation could achieve.
