For The Public Good

'For the Public Good' is usually that catchall phrase touted by the political Right to codify their more draconian and malthusian tendencies, and they invariably hide behind the facade of 'momma knows best' when introducing ever more stringent limits on individual and public freedoms - a pretty Stalinist approach, truth be told: wherefore Libertarianism? - The fact is that the Right wants state control when, and only when, it suits them: not the rest of us.

They ran a good little article in the business byeline of the i today - 'Secret employee', working for the energy-company-on-hold, Bulb, rightly points out the fundamental truth of the privatised power utilities: that is, that the government seems to have no problems in bailing out certain companies in certain sectors - viz Bulb itself, banks etc. - but seems to struggle rather with the concept of nationalisation, which is based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that the industry would be far more efficient and cost-effective if run by the state, as opposed to the rag-tag of private companies lining the pockets of their shareholders at the public's expense we currently have.

Current events have shown that small margins and high dividends make even quite large companies unstable and vulnerable to unexpected rises in costs and interest rates. To be blunt, the privatisation experiment has failed, evidenced no more succinctly than in the case of the railways, which returned to some feeble simulacrum of the 'glory days': a time when competing private companies made running a national network almost impossible. Also, never forget the heyday of the electricity supply gold rush, when networks were local, unconnected and often ran on completely different systems.

What applies to the railways and electricity, also applies to gas, where a national network is not only desirable, but essential - and will continue to be so after the switchover to hydrogen. Yes, certain supply industries would benefit from decentralisation, cutting down on transport costs and environmental impact; but where a nationwide service is mandated, state ownership works better. The costs of running a nationalised system are no greater - and almost certainly less - than the atomised, grossly inefficient (in corporate-speak 'efficiency'  is code for maximised dividends) private sector soup we currently operate under.

Under a national system, pricing systems can be simpler and tariffs/ticket-prices made cheaper as more of the operating profit is be kept within the business rather than feeding the maw of the already wealthy individuals and corporate entities that make up the shareholdings, via dividends and board-level bonuses. The argument always used by the Tories is that nationalised industries are somehow 'shored up' by the general public via the state; but this is simply, deliberately, fallacious: the networks and supply chains would operate in exactly the same way as at present, simply without the middlemen.

Operating costs and profits would be factored into the operation as if it were private - the principle difference being that the Stock Market would not be involved - and the whole kit and caboodle would be run as a business: just a state, and hence publicly-owned, business; returning more of its earnings into infrastructure uplift and customer service than is certainly the pitiful case at present. The ongoing power outages in the Northeast are a good case in point: outdated network plant and under-investment in staff and machinery plus freak weather conditions - climate change in action - equals misery. So far as 'levelling-up' goes, if the same situation had been allowed to obtain in London and the Home Counties for more than a couple of days, a National Emergency would have been declared.

Efficiency and resilience should be the cornerstones of all of these industries, not private profit. And while we're at it, let's bring the NHS back into the public fold, too. Anyone who has lived through the great years between 1948 and the time of the Heath government knows how good our systems, however primitive, were. All we've added since privatisation is a deliberate, cynical perversion of the core aim of those systems: to serve the public good.