How did they get away with privatising public services?

The media has long been convincing people that private = good, public = wasteful and inefficient. When often the opposite is true.

This is true. Also were airports ever publicly owned?

Whilst I agree with most of this you may not remember quite how bad things were before when everything was publicly owned. Trains were probably worse. Electricity certainly was.

I wouldn't hold out too much hope of renationalisation improving things.

The absolute worst thing done IMI was the right to buy. Huge swathes of affordable social housing disappeared forever.
In the 60s I remember the local council used to buy up houses to add to council stock. On a street of 3 bed semis when one came up for sale the council would buy it.
All ended up back in private hands at a massive discount.

@Havanananana Profitz go to shareholders. Who are they? Pension companies for a start. Do you really want the state to control and pay for everything? We are where we are.

I should probably emphasise the dissolution of local councils that had the power to challenge central government a bit more. All others started creeping around tugging their forelocks to central and the idea of local government being equal partners and the first stage of representation of the people in a democracy, died. I speak as an entry level worker in council work at the time and one familiar with records of how the local councils operated over the 20th century. The power they had in the 1930s through the 60s compared to the asset stripping of Thatcher and New Labour both has to be read to be believed. While anyone interested reads up on that, perhaps they can also read some local newspapers to compare the quality of information available then with now too.

In short the government of the day co-opted opposition and removed any possibility of organised opposition, allowed the wealthy to take control of information sources, and bought off what little was left. That’s how power struggles always work.

@CranfordScones All very well to blame Thatcher, but that misses the context of why all those originally private companies were nationalised in the first place! None of them started out as public corporations.

Which companies are you talking about? The untilities were a mixture of private companies and Corporation/Council undertakings - e.g. Watford Corporation was still responsible for water and sewerage right up until 1973. A similar situation existed for local transport - Corporation-run buses were a common sight before de-regulation and privatisation. Council housing was never commercially-owned. Telecoms and the postal service were government-owned - by the GPO.

If you mean a company such as British Aerospace - this was an attempt to consolidate British aircraft, rocket and satellite manufacture, and as the government was the major (or really the only) customer for these, it made economic and security sense to control this. Railway nationalisation was also for reasons of securing investment in vital infrastructure (before the 1960s there were very few private cars and lorries were small - and road freight was also nationalised), investment that could not be provided by the private companies. Sealink (mentioned above) was also a part of the railway system - again, nationalised in order to protect freight routes to and from the Continent.

"It's not a failure of private enterprise, it's really a failure of government to regulate them effectively. Given that much of the failure rests with governments (of all parties) - what makes you think that a government can run them better? There's no evidence to support that."

I'm in some agreement here with regard to the failure to regulate effectively, but there is plenty of evidence from other countries that government-backed, but independently-run entities can be run well. Most utilities in many European countries operate as mutuals, guaranteed by the government. Even the much-envied health systems of countries like Germany and Austria are run like this. The problems start when politicians like Hunt and Gove try to dictate to professionals and when they are driven by political beliefs rather than by the needs of the customers.

The fact of the matter as I see it is that public services cannot be adequately invested in, maintained and developed and make money. They were viewed as a drain on the public purse rather than necessary for society to operate. The clue's in the name, services. The Tory government of Maggie Thatcher decided they should be someone else's problem because it went against their ideology to get the public to pay more for them via taxes. They were then sold under value otherwise no business would have touched them.

Further to my last, do remember that for all the modern human rights crap among the middle classes, those same people are only too keen to ignore the slum living conditions of those of us forced into renting damp mouldy vermin-filled flats at high prices - often off the same people. This is perfidious Albion in action, the country and power that gave us the Peterloo massacre, the Jarrow march, Old Corruption and the reality of working class life in the Victorian empire. It’s quite familiar - neoliberalist economics are after all merely the ‘new’ liberalism from Victorian times (liberalism refers here to the liberty of wealth to do whatever it wants).

Airports have water bottle filling stations - take a bottle through and fill it after security.

Public service trains under British rail were absolutely awful. That’s why they could privatise it. I don’t agree with that, better funding and management structures were needed though.

People voted for it . HTH.

People were sold the line that allowing more companies to operate would mean more competition and hence competitive pricing, which was perhaps initially true. The electricity situation was shocking at one point, all sorts of dodgy companies offering unrealistic prices. When they failed we all ended up paying for it, even those of us who didn't touch them!

Two things:

1. it was after the miners strikes and dissolution of any local council that disagreed with Thatcher. If you look at archive footage of the miners strikes, look out for the vastly increased police force performing military manoeuvres. The miner’s strikes were when the working classes took on the elites and lost. Lost badly, in a way that minimised all working class issues for generations and ensured their inability to hit back ever again. We’ve been lied to ever since and kept off edge.

2.The baby boomer generation were paid off. Shares in the privatised industries, council homes bought for cheap sold off or rented out, buy to let enabled and encouraged so they could fleece every generation that came after. No one cared about the future, that generation was huge and it’s only now that we have the numbers to oppose them no matter how much the media pushed the troubles of the millennial class. No one listened to or cared for the initial alarm calls from the bottom of the pyramid because they were too busy living it up. As Blair and many of the middle classes said at the time, “we are all middle class now”. No we were not, and here I still am.

All very well to blame Thatcher, but that misses the context of why all those originally private companies were nationalised in the first place! None of them started out as public corporations.

Under public ownership, they were bywords for appalling inefficiency and militant unionist activity. Nearly all of the promise of their original nationalisation under the Attlee government hadn't been realised. And they cost the government a lot in running costs which many people considered to be poor value for the taxpayer.

It's not a failure of private enterprise, it's really a failure of government to regulate them effectively. Given that much of the failure rests with governments (of all parties) - what makes you think that a government can run them better? There's no evidence to support that.

International trade is generally a good thing but losing ownership and control of our infrastructure is a national security issue.

And every airport has free drinking water on the other side I should have added

You don't have to throw away the bottle at the airport, you tip away the water and take the empty bottle through, been the same for 20 years!

Yes, and Rachel Reeves visited China very recently to discuss trade and investment opportunities.

Yep - China is getting into just about everything in the UK. It's pretty ironic that the UK voted for Brexit yet people seem utterly blind to the fact that the government sold most of our utilities to foreign powers.

The upshot is that most of our essential services - water, energy etc - are now in the hands of private equity/overseas investors who have no vested interest in improving the services for the user, only on delivering for their shareholders. And by delivering - I just mean in monetary terms. Despite all the uproar about sewage spills, the water companies are still leveraging debt to pay their shareholders, and they will continue to do so until the services break down irrevocably, at which point they'll be returned to the government/tax payers with enormous debts attached, which we'll also have to pay off. It's an absolute joke.

Yes there's wastage in the public sector, and it's easy to be a bit lazy if you feel your job is totally safe and secure, but outsourcing essential services just doesn't work. My local (Tory) council pays over £70,000 per child per year for kids in care to a private equity firm. More than half of that is pure profit. I very much doubt that those kids are receiving anything like exceptional care for that. Insourcing is needed if we're ever going to have a functional and affordable social care (and NHS) again, and we need to start taking utilities back from foreign investors and private equity before they can do even more damage.

People are unable to hold corporates accountable. If Thames Water floods your back garden with sewage, you have no alternative supplier. If the train company keeps cancelling departures because they won't invest in trains, or in drivers and other staff, customers often have no alternatives.

Natural monopolies should never be in the hands of private companies - it's an open invitation to maximise profits at the expense of service levels and to load the service with debt in order to pay excessive dividends to shareholders.

It is also a mistake to believe that there are only two ownership options - State or private. In many other countries, there is a third, mutual option. For example, the utility companies are "owned" by the customers, and run as businesses but on a profit-neutral basis (i.e. there are no shareholders to cream off dividends) and all profits are put back into the service.

As for providing "solid leadership and administration" there is no reason why this cannot be provided within public utilities, transport, infrastructure etc. Across Europe this is the norm in many countries. You probably realise that many UK utilities and services are actually State-owned - but the State concerned is the French, Italian or German State (and increasingly the Chinese State) rather than the UK State.

Are you old enough to remember when things were nationalised in the 70s? British Rail? The service was shocking and product was crap.

Lol. I have seen plenty of corporates that don't manage that. I have known plenty of people working in corporates who are wildly lazy/incompetent but kept there because of jobs for the boys or similar.

It's not a binary. There are some brilliant people in the public sector (I have worked in both )

@user243245346 "Housing built by councils and housing associations are at least double the cost of those built by the private sector. I agree that we need more social housing but it's unavoidable that the waste and mismanagement in the public sector needs to be addressed."

Please share with us the source of this cost comparison.

The private sector builds cheaply in order to maximise short-term profits. Council housing used to be built to last as the houses were intended to provide affordable housing for the tenants and a long-term, low-maintenence income stream for the councils.

The council houses from the 1950s and 1960s were often of far better quality than many of the current, developer-built new builds that I've seen.

Council housing was not nationalised. Corporation-owned buses, electricity and gas supply were not nationalised. Mutually-owned water and sewerage utilities were not nationalised. Railways were nationalised because they were run down, almost bankrupt and at the time were vital to the economy. The postal service and telecoms services (GPO telephones) were not nationalised - they were already government run. Schools and council-run care homes were not nationalised, but they have been neglected or closed and their services taken out of public control and handed over to Academies or private providers.

@TizerorFizz

You wrote; "We transferred public sector savings into benefits and the NHS." - an assertation that I disagreed with, as I believe that the savings were used to keep taxes low.

You now write; "We did use the savings for other things we wanted. You might need a bit of an economics lesson. Low taxes often stimulate the economy and that can stimulate growth. We did have high unemployment in the 80s but growth meant we got back to decent levels of employment. This is better for everyone. We used money from privatization to pay benefits and stimulate the economy by lower taxes."

There is no evidence that the savings made were invested in "other things" - and certainly not by the government. Any savings were used to reduce public sector debt and for tax cuts.... which is exactly what you've written.

As for a lesson in economics, lower taxes and lower levels of government investment, and allowing private companies to cream off the profits of their natural monopolies while underinvesting in the services they are supposed to be providing are some of the major reasons the UK is in the current economic and social mess. The Free Market does not provide anything other than profits for shareholders - vital but unprofitable services are ignored. "Trickle down" does not work - wealth creates more wealth, leaving those with no wealth even further behind. Taxes in the UK are already low when compared with other European and OECD economies - the UK levels of tax and social security deductions are some of the lowest amongst the OECD countries and well below the OECD average. Underinvestment in welfare, education, training, infrastructure (including housing) and healthcare has held back the UK for decades.