Campaign For Public Ownership

Seumas Milne: It's not too late to save the NHS from the barbarians

2012-01-27T11:23:00.002Z

This piece by Seumas Milne appears in The Guardian:

Unless decisive action is taken in the next few weeks, the National Health Service is heading for disaster. The battle over the coalition's plans to turn England's NHS inside out has been going on so long, the details are so arcane and claims of concessions so regular, it would be easy to imagine that the worst had been averted and common sense prevailed.

.... Cameron and Lansley insist they don't plan to privatise the NHS, of course. But that's exactly what's happening on the ground even before the bill hits the statute book. The first private company to take over an NHS hospital, the Tory-linked Circle Health, won the contract to run Hinchingbrooke hospital in Cambridgeshire in November, even as it admitted it may not be able to "provide a consistent level of service to its patients".

And the government has been in talks with international health corporations about taking over 20 more, while private companies are already running local doctors' services and preparing to administer the clinical commissioning groups of GPs due to take over the purchaser role in the coalition's new market model. Facts are being created on the ground.

You can read the whole article here.

Neil Clark: Help fight fare rises and push for railway renationalisation

2012-01-02T19:59:00.005Z

This piece by CPO co-founder Neil Clark , appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

The latest price increases show Tory serial privatisers got it very wrong in the 90s. Join the protests to put things right

“Whichever way one looks at it, privatisation is a giant asset-stripping process. It is a very efficient way of taking money out of taxpayers' pockets". Gwyneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP who uttered those words during a debate in parliament on rail privatisation in February 1995, deserves some sort of posthumous New Year honour for calling it exactly right.

While Tory ministers claimed that selling-off the railways would bring "benefits to passengers and taxpayers", and scoffed at opposition concerns, the latest above-inflation price increases in Britain's rail fares – already by far and away the highest in Europe – shows once more that the serial privatisers of John Major's Conservative government got it very, very wrong.

You can read the whole article here.

"Rail fares are TEN times higher in UK than in Europe"

2011-12-30T17:12:00.003Z

The Daily Mail reports:

Rail passengers in Britain pay up to ten times more for their tickets than their European neighbours, figures reveal today.

They come as passengers brace themselves for a fresh round of fare rises of up to 11 per cent from Monday, and against a background of worsening train punctuality.

Critics say consumers are being ‘ripped off’ by an alliance of greedy train companies and tax-hungry Treasury ministers while passengers on the Continent pay significantly less for their journeys.

CPO Press Release on the sale of Northern Rock to Virgin Money

2011-11-17T19:14:00.004Z

The Campaign for Public Ownership strongly condemns the government’s decision to sell the publicly-owned Northern Rock bank to Virgin Money for £747m, meaning an effective loss of between £400m and £650m to the British taxpayer.

The history of privatisation is littered with examples of the government short-changing the taxpayer and this is yet another one.

The government could have kept the bank in public ownership. Failing that, it could have returned Northern Rock to the mutual sector, but only at a time when the transaction would have made taxpayers a profit. While the profitable part of Northern Rock is being sold off, the taxpayer is left holding Northern Rock (Asset Management), into which was placed the company‘s bad debt. It is a classic case of privatising the profits, while nationalising the losses.

The Coalition’s NHS changes ‘to cause irreparable harm’ say doctors

2011-10-04T08:19:00.003+01:00

The BBC reports:

The overhaul of the NHS in England will cause irreparable harm, according to leading public health doctors.

In a letter to peers, who will debate the changes next week, nearly 400 public health experts said the changes must be rejected as they represented a risk to patient care and safety.

The doctors suggested it would fragment services, possibly threatening vaccination and screening campaigns.

The revelation that such influential members of the public health community have put their names to the letter comes on the day Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is to address the Conservative Party conference.

The Campaign for Public Ownership calls for peers to listen to the views of the medical profession, nurses, NHS workers and the general public and to reject the government's bill when it comes to the House of Lords next week.

Save the NHS! Write to your MP ahead of next week's vote

2011-09-02T21:33:00.003+01:00

There's just a few days to go before the Third Reading of the government's appalling NHS Bill.

The BMA have made clear their opposition to the bill here.

It is clear that the troubled passage of the Health and Social Care Bill reflects real concern over the future direction of the health service in England…….
the BMA continues to call for the Bill to be withdrawn or, at the very least, to be subject to further, significant amendment......
We believe there continues to be an inappropriate and misguided reliance on "market forces" to shape services.

If you haven't done so already, please sign the 38 Degrees Save the NHS petition, and also write to/email your MP ahead of next week's important vote.

As Guardian commentator Seumas Milne says, we cannot allow the abolition of the NHS in all but name.

Neil Clark: Bring Back British Rail- a surefire vote winner

2011-08-18T09:01:00.003+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the First Post.

Back in the 1990s, supporters of privatisation claimed it would lead to a reduction in the amount of government subsidy to the railways - in fact it has led to the very opposite, with private companies sucking in around five times more in public funds than the state-owned British Rail did. Effectively, taxpayers' money is going to help to boost the privately-owned rail companies' profits - no wonder Richard Branson is regularly pictured with a huge grin on his face.

If Ed Miliband were to move decisively to end this 21st century legalised version of the Great Train Robbery, he would reap a sizeable electoral dividend.

You can read the whole article here.

UPDATE: You can sign a petition to the government, calling for the renationalisation of the railways here. Please try and spare a minute or so to sign, and also tell your friends about the petition too.

Age of the £10,000 train season ticket: 'Scandalous' 30% fare increase will hit millions

2011-08-17T09:03:00.002+01:00

Isn't rail privatisation wonderful?

The Daily Mail reports:

Rail fare rises of up to 30 per cent over the next four years were denounced today as a ‘national scandal’ that will price millions of people off trains.

The increases will herald the era of the £10,000 annual season ticket.

Passengers enduring overcrowded and late-running trains will face average rises of 8 per cent next January.

You can read the full story here.

British Gas shareholders receive bonus while customers suffer

2011-07-31T21:16:00.000+01:00

The Daily Telegraph reports:

Centrica, which owns Britain’s biggest gas and electricity company, announced profits of £1.3 billion for the past six months, including £270 million for British Gas.

The company is going ahead with a 12 per cent rise in payouts to shareholders, despite the price rise for its energy customers.

Centrica said that the rise, which comes into force in the middle of next month, was vital for the company to make a profit in the second half of the year.

Nine million residential customers are preparing for an 18 per cent rise in gas prices and a 16 per cent rise in electricity prices.

The rise will add about £190 to the cost of customers’ average annual bills, which will now be £1,286.

More on this story here.

Neil Clark: The Coalition's Public services proposals will not mean more choice

2011-07-20T19:19:00.005+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

Neil Clark: David Cameron wants us to believe that rolling back state provision will benefit the public. The opposite is true.

Thirty-two years after Margaret Thatcher swept into Downing Street promising to roll back the frontiers of the state, the neoliberal drive towards a fully privatised Britain is entering its final stages. The government's new Open Public Services white paper, revealed by David Cameron last week, may have passed under the radar somewhat due to the scandals engulfing the Murdoch media empire, but it's an important document nonetheless.

You can read the whole of the article here.

‘A good day to bury bad news‘-full speed ahead for NHS privatisation

2011-07-19T20:52:00.001+01:00

The Guardian reports:

The government will open up more than £1bn of NHS services to competition from private companies and charities, the health secretary announced on Tuesday, increasing fears that it will inevitably lead to the "privatisation of the health service".

Labour questioned the policy, which the shadow health secretary John Healey said was "not about giving more control to patients, but setting up a full-scale market."
His colleague Emily Thornberry, the party's health spokeswoman, added that "today is a good day to announce the policy because everyone is preoccupied with telephone hacking. (They) hope no one will notice it". This theme was picked up on Twitter with a stream of comments about "it being a good day to bury bad news"

Neil Clark: It's time to renationalise British Gas

2011-07-13T17:09:00.000+01:00

You can hear Neil Clark, co-founder of the CPO, make the case for renationalisation of Britain’s energy companies on the Emma Britton Show on BBC Radio Somerset.

The discussion comes at 32 minutes into the programme of Tuesday 12th July.

British rail travel four times more expensive than on France's state-owned network

2011-06-27T16:38:00.002+01:00

The Morning Star reports:

British rail passengers are having to fork out £4.6 billion a year more than travellers on France's public owned railways, transport union RMT revealed today.

Fares on Britain's privatised network are four times more expensive than their French equivalent, according to an RMT report by research firm Just Economics found that lower and middle-income families were being "completely priced out of the rail market" following years of fares rises.

Overcrowding on British railways was also far worse than in other countries, including France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: "Like the McNulty review, this study compares privatised UK rail with European services, but, unlike McNulty, it has not turned a blind eye to the huge social and economic cost of privatisation.

"We already knew that Britain's railways are the most expensive in Europe, but this study exposes the shocking degree to which UK rail users are being fleeced by the greed and stunning inefficiency of the rail privateers and made to suffer unnecessary overcrowding."

You can read the whole article here.

Scottish Power to raise gas bills by 19%

2011-06-08T16:01:00.002+01:00

The Guardian reports:

Household budgets face further pressure after a leading energy company said it was raising gas bills by 19%.

Scottish Power, which will also raise electricity tariffs by 10%, said it would add 48p to the average daily combined gas and electricity bills of its 2.4 million customers, an extra cost of £175 a year.

You can read the whole report here.

More on this story here.

Press Release on the Sale of the Tote

2011-06-03T22:05:00.002+01:00

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE CAMPAIGN FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP ON THE SALE OF THE TOTE

Today is a very sad day for British horse-racing.

Announcing the sale of the Tote, Britain’s publicly-owned bookmaker to the private bookmaking chain Betfred, gambling and racing minister John Penrose said ‘Most people can’t understand why in the modern world, the government should be even part owner of a bookie.‘ But the Tote is no ordinary bookmaker. Since its foundation in 1928 by Sir Winston Churchill, it has helped British racing develop into the wonderful sport it is today. Last year the Tote gave £19m to racing and sponsored over 700 races. The Tote’s profits are ploughed back into the sport and it largely because of the Tote and the generous support it gives racing, that we have such diverse racing in Britain, with no fewer than 60 racetracks.

The Tote is no failing business, but a much-loved institution that has carried out its duties in support of racing perfectly well for the best part of a century. For a comparatively small sum- £90m, the government is selling-off another national asset.

There is no logical reason to sell the Tote, no one in racing was calling for its privatisation. The long-term effects for racing, a sport which employs over 100,000 people directly and indirectly and which brings pleasure to the lives of millions of people are likely to be disastrous, with Tote betting shops likely to be closed and small tracks threatened by the likely ending of the Tote’s subsidy.

Neil Clark: Selling off the Tote marks a race to the bottom for the sake of ideology

2011-05-25T09:30:00.002+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in The Guardian.

Britain's publicly-owned bookmaker keeps horseracing diverse. Without it, smaller courses would struggle to survive

Sir Winston Churchill will be turning in his grave. For 83 years, the Tote, Britain's publicly-owned bookmaker, set up by Churchill when he was chancellor of the exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government in 1928, has been an integral part of the British horseracing scene. Now, however, the institution endearingly known as "the Nanny Goat" is to go the way of our railways, our buses and our utilities and be transferred to the private sector.

While free-market enthusiasts will no doubt be pleased to see a further shrinking of the state, the sale is likely to prove disastrous for a sport which employs more than 100,000 directly and indirectly, and which brings joy to millions of people's lives.

The whole article can be read here.

Neil Clark: Put Britain's trains back on track

2011-05-23T13:05:00.001+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Sunday Express.

IMAGINE a detective arriving at the scene of a murder and failing to question the person caught holding a blood-stained dagger over the body. Imagine, too, that the detective then makes no mention of said person in his report.

Far-fetched? Well, overlooking the obvious is exactly what happened last week in relation to an inquiry into Britain’s railways.

Sir Roy McNulty, former chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority, was appointed to investigate why our railways are the most expensive in Europe.

His report found 10 main barriers to efficiency and made a series of recommendations, including cutting staff at stations and allowing some train operators to assume responsibility for maintenance.

The most noteworthy thing about Sir Roy’s report was what it did not recommend.

The reason why our fares are the highest in Europe is because, unlike other European countries, our railways are privatised.

You can read the whole article here.

Government defeats Labour challenge to NHS plans

2011-05-10T08:44:00.002+01:00

The BBC reports:

The government has fought off a Commons challenge to its controversial plans to shake up the health service in England.

MPs rejected a Labour call for the proposals to be abandoned, but the coalition's parliamentary majority was cut by more than a third.

Labour called the changes "damaging and unjustified", and the Royal College of GPs said they risked "unravelling and dismantling" the NHS.

Ministers are promising "substantive" changes after criticism by Lib Dem MPs.

The Health and Social Care Bill would give GPs more control over NHS budgets, and give the private sector a greater role.

More here.

Neil Clark: Privatised Britain is not a fait accompli

2011-05-06T11:15:00.004+01:00

This piece, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark,appears on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website.

Keep standing up for the state – a leaked memo shows the coalition fears public reaction to outsourcing of public services.

"A return to the 1990s with whole-scale outsourcing to the private sector – this would be unpalatable to the present administration" Tuesday's leaked memo of a meeting between business chiefs and Francis Maude, the minister for the Cabinet Office – which reveals how the coalition is having second thoughts about the scale of its ambitious and ideologically driven programme of ending the "state's monopoly" of the provision of public services – is undoubtedly welcome.

But supporters of public ownership shouldn't be popping the champagne corks just yet.

The whole article can be read here.

Doing nothing to the NHS IS an option

2011-04-28T15:56:00.001+01:00

This column by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in the Morning Star.

.. According to David Cameron "the risk" to the NHS is "doing nothing."
The status quo is simply not an option, the government tells us. Yeah, right, Dave.

How many people have you seen marching for radical reform of the NHS?

Everyone I have met who has had treatment on the NHS in recent years has been very satisfied with the way they were treated.

When I had to have a minor operation a few years back, I not only received exemplary care and attention in hospital but I received a text the day from the NHS to check if I was all right.

What terrible service from an organisation which free-market fanatics like to label a "Stalinist bureaucracy"!

Because most people are happy with the NHS the way it is, the neoliberals have to hype up its failings.

Yet when things do go wrong they are invariably caused by the introduction of so-called "market principles" and privatisation into our health-care system.

You can read the whole article here.

Please sign the Petition to Save the NHS!

2011-03-30T10:44:00.003+01:00

You can sign the 38 Degrees petition to Save the NHS here. Already they’ve got over 240,000 signatures- let's help them achieve the 300,000 mark!

Neil Clark: Don't privatise our libraries

2011-03-13T08:53:00.002Z

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

The government's cuts threaten the future of much-loved public libraries. But we should be wary of its zeal for privatisation too.

"Save our libraries" has been one of the slogans of 2011, as local residents fight to preserve much-loved community assets against the government's cutbacks. But there's another threat hanging over Britain's public library service: that of privatisation. The idea of privatised libraries would have been unthinkable in the mixed economy and genuinely progressive 1960s and 70s, but it shows how far down the road marked "neo-liberal extremism" we have travelled since 1979, that they're now very much on the agenda.

The whole article can be read here.

'NHS reforms will turn health service back to 1930s'

2011-03-07T20:33:00.001Z

The Daily Mail reports:

Plans to reform the NHS could return healthcare provision to the days of the 1930s and 40s, one of Britain's leading doctors has warned.

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association's hospital consultants committee, criticised health secretary Andrew Lansley's plan to make NHS hospitals compete with private companies.

Opening NHS care in England to 'any willing provider' could result in the closure of local hospitals and see some patients denied care by private providers because they are expensive to treat, he said.

The Health and Social Care Bill, currently going through parliament, will see £80billion of the NHS budget handed to GPs, enabling them to commission services.
Dr Porter told the Guardian: 'Very deliberately the Government wishes to turn back the clock to the 1930s and 1940s, when there were private, charitable and co-operative providers.

'But that system failed to provide comprehensive and universal service for the citizens of this country. That's why health was nationalised. But they're proposing to go back to the days before the NHS.

You can read the full article here, and the original Guardian piece here.

Victoria Coren on the legal 'extortion' of Britain's privatised railways

2011-02-28T20:57:00.003Z

Everybody knows what's happened to the trains since they were licensed to private companies: impenetrable rules, incomprehensible fares, crazy fees if you have to make a short-notice decision. It has nothing to do with any "true price" for the journey, only the vast amounts they can get away with if you have no choice.

Let's be honest, it's extortion. A medieval landlord could name his own tithes if people had nowhere else to go and East Midlands Trains is clearly inspired by those happy days.

We've all been stung by this sort of thing. We all know what we want as a nation: safe, fair, affordable national transport. Nobody sees any justice in these punitive onboard fares, yet we have no recourse; our national feeling is irrelevant because the railways aren't "ours" any more. Oh, how we look forward to the selling off of the Post Office.

You can read the whole of Victoria Coren's Observer article here.

Cold Comfort Britain: British Gas announces 24% rise in profits

2011-02-24T15:20:00.002Z

The BBC reports:

Operating profits at British Gas rose 24% in 2010 to £742m, its parent company Centrica has said.
The news comes two months after the UK utility announced a 7% rise in domestic energy bills, which it blamed on rising wholesale prices.
British Gas said it had increased its number of customers by 267,000 during the year to 16 million.
The results helped Centrica to achieve pre-tax profits of £2.8bn, with operating profits up 29% to £2.4bn.....
The 24% rise in British Gas's operating profit was largely because of an increase in profit per customer, with the number of customers up just 1.7%, as revealed in the group results of its parent Centrica.

Victory! The government drops its plans to sell-off England's forests

2011-02-17T20:36:00.003Z

The Guardian reports:

David Cameron has ordered ministers to carry out the government's biggest U-turn since the general election by abandoning plans to change the ownership of 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland.

Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, will announce on Friday that a consultation on the sale of forests will be ended after a furious backlash that united Tory supporters with environmentalists and the Socialist Workers party.
"The consultation is going to be terminated," a government source has said. A No 10 insider added: "It's a cock-up. We just did not think."

The Campaign for Public Ownership welcomes the government’s decision to listen to public opinion and drop their plans to sell off England’s publicly owned forests.

We call on them to do a similar U-turn on the unpopular sell-off of the Royal Mail, and to halt any plans for any future sell-offs of publicly-owned property, including that of the state-owned bookmaker The Tote and of our air-traffic control system.

We also call on them to use their statutory powers to intervene to save Britain’s public libraries, threatened by government spending cuts and privatisation by local authorities.

There is no public support for privatisation, and in a democracy the government ought to be carrying out the wishes of the majority of the people and not be unduly influenced by big business and right-wing think tanks.

Woods sell-off bad news for rare wildlife

2011-02-15T20:56:00.001Z

Adrian Roberts reports in the Morning Star.

Campaigners raised concerns today over the fate of threatened wildlife such as red squirrels and nightjars in woods which could be sold to private companies under government plans.

Wildlife trusts say that woodlands classed as "commercial" forest in proposals to offload the country's public forest estate to business, charities and communities still support rare wildlife which could be put at risk.

The plans put out to consultation last month divide the Forestry Commission's 258,000hectare public forest estate into large and small "commercial" forest which could be sold on a leasehold basis to timber companies.

But Kent Wildlife Trust has raised concerns about forests classed as small commercial forests which are home to rare species ranging from nightjars and firecrests to Heath Fritillary and Duke of Burgundy butterflies.

You can read the whole of the report here.

Family's fury at Virgin rail 'bullies'

2011-02-10T18:00:00.006Z

Aren’t Britain’s privatised train operators wonderful?

This report by Claire Ellicott appears in the Daily Mail.

When Stephanie Spacey’s family accidentally boarded the wrong train, they presumed it would be a mistake easily remedied.

But after Virgin Trains demanded they buy new tickets, threatened her 14-year-old son with three months’ imprisonment and led a ‘campaign of threats and intimidation’ against the family, she decided to act.

The company director was travelling from Coventry to Euston for a friend’s birthday with her husband, son and two friends on March 20 last year.

Her friend had booked tickets to travel on the 9.51am train, which came to a total of £95, but the group accidentally boarded the 9.31am train.

A ticket inspector, who refused to give his name to the group, told them they had to buy new tickets costing £270.

Mrs Spacey, 30, is suing the company and demanding a full apology.

The family appealed against the penalty fare, but Virgin wrote back to say they would have to pay the £270. They even sent a letter to Sir Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Trains, but the reply was the same.

THE CAMPAIGN FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP SAYS RENATIONALISE OUR RAILWAYS NOW!

LET'S REINTRODUCE SIMPLE EASY TO UNDERSTAND DISTANCE BASED PRICING AND END THE
GREAT PRIVATISATION RIP-OFF!

Think our post is bad? Here's how it could soon get worse

2011-02-07T12:13:00.003Z

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, on The Netherlands’ unhappy experience with postal privatisation, appears in the Mail on Sunday.

Hundreds of campaigners recently marched through David Cameron's Oxfordshire constituency to protest against Government plans to sell off the Royal Mail.
'The planned privatisation is an unnecessary ideological move which will damage postal services for ever,' said Billy Hayes, leader of the Communication Workers Union.

While Hayes believes the sell-off of Royal Mail - in State hands since its inception in 1516 - would mean an increase in prices, a decrease in services and mass Post Office closures, Business Secretary Vince Cable claims the move will 'secure the services that consumers and businesses rely on'.

Of course, they can't both be right. To find out what a privatised postal service really would be like, we only have to look across the North Sea to the Netherlands. And Holland's unhappy experience should give us all grounds for concern over what is about to happen in Britain.

You can read the whole of the article here.

Save our Public Libraries!

2011-02-04T20:10:00.003Z

Over 450 public libraries in England are threatened with closure.
Details about tomorrow's Save Our Libraries day can be found here.

Please join the day of protest in defence of public libraries and join the fightback against market fundamentalism!

Market fundamentalism, this madness that's infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days. The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that's all. What he doesn't understand is enterprises that don't make a profit, because they're set up to do something different. He doesn't understand libraries at all, for instance.

Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. We're coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we thought was safe and solid. "Everything solid melts into air," he said. "All that is holy is profaned."

You can read the whole of author Philip Pullman's wonderful speech in defence of public libraries here. An abridged version also appears in The Guardian.

Neil Clark: Margaret Thatcher's extremism has already been outdone by this coalition

2011-02-03T09:22:00.006Z

This piece by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, on the coalition government's free-market extremism, appears on the Guardian Comment is Free website.

Ask any genuine socialist or progressive which was the most extremist British government since the war and it's long odds-on that they'd say one of the three administrations of Margaret Thatcher. But I believe that is now an outdated judgment. For when it comes to political extremism the present government has already outdone Thatcher.

The coalition, which its supporters ludicrously claims occupies the centre ground, seems hellbent on privatising the entire British state.

Everything must go: our publicly owned forests, our postal service, our state-owned bookmaker, our air traffic control. And though the government denies that its health bill represents the privatisation of the NHS, there can be little doubt that its real aim is to open the door for profit-hungry private companies to take over surgeries and hospitals.

You can read the whole of the article here.

Sign the Petition to Save England's Publicly Owned Forests!

2011-02-01T18:36:00.003Z

The 38 Degrees petition reads:

The government is planning a massive sell off of our national forests. They could be auctioned and fenced off, run down, logged or turned into golf courses and holiday villages.

We can't let that happen. We need to stop these plans. National treasures like the The Forest of Dean, Sherwood Forest and The New Forest could be sold off. Once they are gone, they will be lost forever.

A huge petition will force the government to rethink its plans. If we can prove how strongly the public are against this, they will have to back down. Please sign the petition now.

The petition has over 380,000 signatures. Please sign it today!

Save England's Forests from Privatisation!

2011-01-23T14:37:00.002Z

From The Sunday Telegraph:

In a letter published in The Sunday Telegraph and signed by almost 100 dignitaries, the Coalition sale is branded as “unconscionable” and “ill-conceived”.

The signatories to the letter, organised by a new campaign group, Save England’s Forests, include Dr Rowan Williams; Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate; Dame Judi Dench, the Oscar-winning actress; and Bill Bryson, the author and president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

The Government has already announced its intention to sell off 15 per cent of all land owned by the Forestry Commission in the course of this parliament in the hope of raising as much as £100 million.

A consultation launched this week by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will put forward plans to sell off the remaining 85 per cent. A clause has been inserted in a new Public Bodies Bill that will give the Environment Secretary permission to transfer ownership of all the land.

CPO comment: It’s good that more and more people are waking up to the fact that we have the most extreme neo-liberal government in our history- a government that won’t rest until every last remaining public asset is privatised.

Medical profession warn of the privatisation threat to NHS

2011-01-18T18:31:00.001Z

The Daily Mail reports:

Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association's GPs Committee, warned there was 'chaos developing around the country' ahead of the reforms to the NHS.

He said: 'We were told before the election that there would be no further reorganisations of the NHS and yet we are just about to embark on one of the biggest reorganisations in 60 years.

'We're already seeing Primary Care Trusts imploding and GP groups are having to step up to the mark to fill the gap that is being left behind just to keep the NHS running.

'This is chaos developing around the country. It's a great concern because the primary plank of the reforms is to increase competition and improve the opportunities for large multinational companies to take a stake in running and providing services within the NHS. That's not good for patients.'

Happy New Year:Commuters hit as rail season tickets soar by up to 13%

2011-01-03T12:50:00.004Z

The Daily Mail reports:

Rail passengers returning to work tomorrow have been hit in the wallet with inflation-busting increases of up to 13 per cent for their annual season ticket.

The cost of a yearly ticket rose by an average of 6.2 per cent, nearly double the consumer price inflation rate of 3.3 per cent and almost three times the typical pay rise of 2.2 per cent.

But on certain lines increases reached 12.8 per cent, leaving travel on some commuter routes costing more than £5,000 a year – a fifth of the average salary of £25,000.

For Sale: All of our forests

2010-12-24T17:30:00.002Z

John Vidal reports in The Guardian:

We now know, thanks to the junior environment minister Jim Paice's frank evidence to a recent House of Lords select committee, that the government is considering the sale of not just "some", or even "substantial", amounts of woodland as the public was originally led to believe, but of all state-owned English trees across the commission's 635,000-acre Forestry Commission estate.

Paice also accepts that foreign companies might want to buy up the trees, and that foreign-owned energy companies might want to cut the whole lot down for renewable energy.

The sale is clearly ideologically-driven, a statement that the private sector – traditionally the large landowner, but now the corporation – should maintain the environment.

As such, we should see the sale as further evidence of the dismemberment of conservation in England, the approach that has marked environmental stewardship in Britain and most European countries for the last 60 years.

You can read the whole of John Vidal's report on this alarming story here.

Neil Clark: Why we should nationalise our airports

2010-12-21T20:17:00.003Z

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

"The government's objective with this bill is to liberate airport management from political interference … to enable airport operators to respond to the needs of their customers, rather than to the shifting priorities of politicians and officials," declared the Earl of Caithness as he moved the Thatcher government's 1986 airports bill in the House of Lords, which was soon to become the 1986 Airports Act. The privatisation of the state-owned British Airports Authority (BAA), we were told, would ensure that "better services are provided for all airline passengers".

I wonder if the Earl of Caithness (or even Margaret Thatcher herself), would have the courage to pop down to Hounslow and tell that to the tens of thousands of holidaymakers stranded at the BAA-owned Heathrow airport for the past three days.

The whole of the article can be read here.

Royal Mail, not for sale!

2010-12-16T17:01:00.001Z

The Morning Star reports:

Angry postal workers took police by surprise and blocked a major street near Parliament today in a mass protest at Con-Dem plans to sell off the Royal Mail.
Waving union banners and placards, hundreds of communication workers union CWU activists staged the demo just yards from the scene of last week's police battles with students.

For half an hour nothing moved along Victoria Street as the protesters spread right across the road outside the office of Business Secretary Vince Cable, chanting: "Royal Mail, not for sale."

You can read the whole of the report on today's anti-privatisation demonstration here.

UK government set to privatise national coastguard service

2010-12-13T17:42:00.000Z

The Herald reports:

The UK Government was last night accused of putting lives at risk as expectations grow that it will announce the closure of more than half of Britain’s coastguard centres and the privatisation of the nation’s search-and-rescue helicopter service in a bid to cut costs.

The Department for Transport – facing spending cuts of 15% over four years – is due to propose reducing coastguard stations from 19 to eight and only three will operate around the clock. The move could see 250 jobs lost and save £7.5 million a year.

In another cost-saving exercise, Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, is expected to press ahead with plans to privatise the search-and-rescue helicopter fleet, operated by the RAF and Royal Navy together with civilian helicopters through the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

Thatcher and Her Blue Children: How Privatisation ruined Britain

2010-11-30T21:56:00.002Z

This article on privatisation and its consequences, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

It's exactly 20 years ago this month that Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, left Downing Street.
Thatcher's negative impact can be seen in many areas. But arguably the most toxic legacy was her privatisation programme.

Thatcher broke with the policy of previous post-war Conservative governments which had accepted the mixed economy post-war consensus, instead embarking on a major series of sell-offs when she first came to power in 1979.

British Telecom, British Gas and British Airways were three of the biggest state-owned companies that Thatcher flogged off.

She also broke up the National Bus Company and Sealink - the highly-profitable publicly owned ferry company.

But the great tragedy was that privatisation did not end with Thatcher's eviction from Number 10 in November 1990.

John Major's government took privatisation even further than the Iron Lady dared to go - embarking on the disastrous sell-off of Britain's railways.

You can read the whole article here.

Privatised energy firms face gas and electricity price review

2010-11-30T20:11:00.001Z

The BBC reports:

Ofgem is to investigate recent energy price rises, as it says they have significantly widened suppliers' profit margins.

The watchdog said that the net profit margin of £65 per typical customer in September was now £90, a 38% rise.

The calculations take into account price rises announced by three of the "big six" suppliers in recent weeks.

The regulator said it was asking if "companies are playing it straight with consumers" after the latest figures showed a 38% rise in profit margins from the typical dual-fuel customer in the last three months

Unhappy New Year: Rail fares set to rocket by as much as 13%

2010-11-24T09:33:00.001Z

From Ray Massey in the Daily Mail:

Rail passengers face ‘astronomical’ fare rises of up to 13 per cent in January – with worse to come.

The increases have sparked a furious row over ‘rip-off’ ticket prices, with rail company bosses accused of hiding the truth while passengers suffer ‘cattle-class’ conditions of overcrowding.

Train firms – which receive billions in taxpayer subsidies – were attacked by unions for the ‘outrageous’ rises.

The umbrella Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) announced yesterday that fares will rise in January by ‘an average of 6.2 per cent’.

This includes the 5.8 per cent Government cap on regulated fares, which account for 46 per cent of the total.

But there was fury when ATOC chief executive Michael Roberts refused to reveal how much the 54 per cent of unregulated fares – which can rise as high as the train company likes – were increasing.

Neil Clark: Paying the cost of Britain's Greedy Firms

2010-11-22T17:01:00.003Z

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in the Sunday Express

DID you think Britain was an expensive enough country to live in?

If so, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. Over the next few weeks things are going to get a whole lot worse… Take energy prices. On December 1, Scottish and Southern Energy, Britain’s second biggest supplier, is raising gas prices by 9.4 per cent. Ten days later British Gas is putting up its gas and electricity rates by seven per cent.

Household bills will go even higher from January 1 as VAT rises to 20per cent. Just what we need to get the New Year off to a good start.

....Then there’s train fares. Britain’s railways are already the most expensive in Europe and fares will rise again by as much as 10.8 per cent on some commuter routes from January.

Far from being a helpless bystander, there’s much the Government could do to alleviate the situation.

Regarding the railways and the utilities, the best solution would be to bring them back into public ownership. With no shareholder dividends to be paid, prices could be reduced to the European average, bringing relief to long-suffering commuters.

In Belgium, where railways are still owned by the state, fares are up to 20 times cheaper than in Britain. At weekends, prices actually drop by 50 per cent, making it easier for friends and families to visit each other.

Railways are a natural monopoly and it is much better for consumers if they are in public ownership.

You can read the whole article here.

Privatised British Gas hikes gas and electricity prices by 7%

2010-11-12T17:30:00.001Z

The Guardian reports:

British Gas today announced it is putting its prices up by 7% for both gas and electricity from 10 December, making it the second major energy supplier to raise its prices in recent weeks.

It is estimated the increase in standard and variable tariffs will affect around 8 million customers, with the price increases adding £53 to annual gas bills and £29 to electricity bills.

Adam Scorer, director of external affairs at Consumer Focus, said: "British Gas and other suppliers respond to forward energy prices, and that will be their argument that price rises are needed. However, wholesale prices are around half of their peak in 2008, and yet in the same period customer's prices were cut by less than 10%.
"Consumers will feel that suppliers didn't make cuts when conditions allowed it, but are covering their profit margins as wholesale prices nudge up. At a time when there are reports of a gas glut it seems that consumers take on all the risk in this market."

British government sells Channel Tunnel rail link to Canada

2010-11-05T19:27:00.001Z

The Guardian reports:

The Channel tunnel rail link has become the latest piece of British infrastructure to be snapped up by acquisitive Canadian pension funds.
Two of Canada's largest pension funds have paid £2.1bn to operate Britain's only high-speed railway line for the next 30 years. It is the first privatisation deal done by the coalition government.

The RMT union slammed the rail link sell-off as "just another act of political vandalism on the UK railways". Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, said: "The most modern section of the UK rail network has been sold off for a song in what amounts to nothing more than a fire sale of the family silver to prop up the financial deficit caused by the bankers and speculators in the first place.

Government to sell-off Britain's state-owned forests

2010-10-24T12:27:00.001+01:00

From The Sunday Mirror:

Half of the state-owned forests could be sold off in a cash-raising scheme by the Government.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman will reveal plans this week to put two million acres of Forestry Commission up for sale.

The sale, which will involve some of Britain's most historic woodlands, could raise between £2billion and £5billion by 2020.

But critics fear the sell-off to private firms will pave the way for a major expansion of golf courses, commercial logging and rural holiday villages such as Center Parcs.

Laws which restrict what can be done in "ancient forests" such as Sherwood Forest and the Forest of Dean could also be changed, giving private firms the right to chop down trees.

......A senior Labour source last night condemned the plan as a move "to sell the crown jewels of the British countryside".

An Open Letter from CPO co-founder Neil Clark to Ed Miliband

2010-09-29T11:07:00.005+01:00

This open letter from CPO co-founder Neil Clark , to the new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, is published in the Morning Star.

Dear Ed - if I may -

Congratulations on winning the contest for Labour leadership.

In your leadership campaign you presented yourself as the candidate for change. You've said that new Labour is "dead" and that a new generation has now taken over.

But in order to convince those thousands of former Labour members and voters (myself included), that the party really has changed from the days of Blair and Brown and will once again put the interests of people before capital, mere words will not be enough.

Nothing could demonstrate better that a clean break has been made with the new Labour years, than for the Labour Party once again to embrace public ownership.

Clause IV, drafted by Sidney Webb and adopted by the party in 1918, stated that the aim of Labour was "to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."

It remains the best definition of socialism I have ever come across. The Labour Party since its inception had always been an alliance of social democrats and democratic socialists, but when the party ditched Clause IV in 1995, it was a sign that it had lurched dramatically to the neoliberal right. To its shame, new Labour when in government continued the Conservatives pro-privatisation policies, despite privatisation's growing unpopularity with the public at large.

The restoration of the original Clause IV into the Labour Party's constitution would be a sign that Labour's privatisation days are over.

But short of that, there are four important areas where Labour, under your leadership, can prove that it really has broken with the failed economic dogma of the past.

First, Labour can campaign for the return of Britain's railways to full public ownership.

In opposition Labour opposed the Tory sell-off of British Rail. But to the huge disappointment of Labour supporters and the travelling public, Labour reneged on its promise when it came to office in 1997 and continued to subsidise profiteering private rail operators.

Rail privatisation, as all but the most fanatical free-market ideologues would agree, has been a total disaster.

Despite Britain's privatised train operators receiving around four times more in public subsidy than British Rail did in the last years of its existence, British rail fares are easily the highest in Europe, with commuters paying around twice as much as other Europeans. Trains are frequently overcrowded, with commuters who have paid thousands of pounds for season tickets being forced to stand in toilets.

Renationalising the railways would not only save taxpayers' money in the long term, it would be a voter-friendly policy - even a majority of Tory voters support taking the network back into public ownership.

It would also make sound environmental sense - bringing back British Rail and reducing prices to the European average would encourage people to leave their cars and use the most environmentally friendly form of transport.

Second, there is the fight against the privatisation of the Royal Mail, whose sell-off was recently announced by Business Secretary Vince Cable.

Royal Mail has been in state hands since its inception in 1516. It's proposed sell-off shows just how far to the neoliberal right Britain has travelled in recent years.

Shamefully, the last Labour government, of which you were a member, advocated a partial sell-off, but this fortunately was abandoned.

Will Labour now join the fight to keep the Royal Mail in full public ownership?

Again, this would be a voter-friendly policy which would put Labour on the side of the majority and expose the coalition for the extremists that they are.

Third, there is the battle to save the NHS. As the Guardian commentator Seumas Milne has pointed out, Andrew Lansley's white paper Liberating The NHS would, if enacted, mark the end of the NHS in all but name.

Will you give a commitment to unequivocally oppose Lansley's reforms and pledge Labour to defend the NHS and the principle of socialised, state-run health care - one of the party's greatest and most long-lasting achievements?

Fourth, there is the shameless profiteering of Britain's privatised utility companies such as British Gas, whose profits doubled to £585 million in the first six months of 2010, after it failed to pass on to consumers the full benefit of a sizeable drop in wholesale gas and electricity prices.

Before the privatisation of our utilities, household water, gas and electric bills were not the major items of expense for homeowners that they are today.

Last year a survey found that Britain's energy bills were rising four times faster than the EU average, while earlier this month a survey found that Britain's electricity bills - like our train fares - are the highest in Europe. Only renationalisation can end this profiteering and bring bills down for hard-pressed families and businesses.

You will, I'm sure come under enormous pressure from capital and its political emissaries to keep to the same pro-privatisation, neoliberal policies as your immediate predecessors.

It certainly concerned me that in your leadership election campaign you made no commitment to renationalise the railways - as fellow leadership candidate Diane Abbott did. Now though, you have a great opportunity to show that Labour really has changed.

If you do ditch Labour's support for privatisation and adopt a more positive stance towards public ownership, it will be proof that new Labour really is dead. You will be adopting policies that have the support of the vast majority of the British public, who are sick and tired of privatisation.

Supporting public ownership will make your more - and not less likely - to become the next British Prime Minister.

I hope that you will seize this historic opportunity to make Labour once again the party that puts the interests of ordinary people above the interests of capital.

Yours sincerely,

Neil Clark

UK’s sky high train fares now double what Europe pays

2010-08-26T20:07:00.002+01:00

James Fielding: The Sunday Express

BRITAIN’S beleaguered rail passengers are paying twice as much to travel by train as other Europeans.

Fares in the UK, particularly London and the South-east, are already the highest in the EU.

By next January they could be up to 10 per cent higher.

The Sunday Express compared London rush-hour fares with equivalents in Europe. We found commuters here are already being unfairly hammered even without the planned hikes. A day return from Reading, Berkshire, around 40 miles from the capital, costs £34.40.

Commuters from Beauvais and Chartres in France, which are both around 40 miles from Paris, pay the equivalent of £12 and £13.50. In Italy rail travel is even cheaper, with commuters in Latina, 40 miles from Rome, paying £7.50. Back in Britain workers commuting from Luton, Bedfordshire, just 35 miles away, are charged £22.40.

That is only 40p more than the fare from Chelmsford, Essex, a similar distance from London.From Canterbury West, a 100-mile commute is £23.50. Commuters from Eberswalde, 30 miles from Berlin, are charged around £15, while an 80-mile round trip from Toledo to Madrid costs the equivalent of just £9.50.

Diane Abbott: Nationalise now to end rail chaos

2010-08-24T13:59:00.003+01:00

We subsidise train operators to the tune of £1billion a year and subsidise Network Rail by £4billion. Yet managers continue to pay themselves fat, private-sector salaries and bonuses and the companies continue to squeeze the travellers. That is why I believe it is time to take the railways back into public ownership. It was a mistake to privatise them in the first place as it’s allowed private companies to profiteer without regard to public interest.

My opponents in the battle for the Labour leadership are the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham. They all claim that it would be too expensive to bring the railways back into public owner ship but they are wrong, it would actually save the public money. For one thing network Rail is effectively state-owned already. The rail infrastructure was effectively renationalised when Railtrack went into administration in 2001.

It would cost nothing to bring back train operations into public hands. The Government would have two options: either it would not renew the franchises when they expire or, as the companies got into financial difficulties, they could be taken over. Additionally private-sector train operators receive a huge direct subsidy from the Government.

This is just subsidising their profits. It would be cheaper and in the public interest to operate the trains directly. The current mess doesn’t serve the general public, the taxpayer or the rail commuter. The Labour Party that I would lead would start listening to the public for the first time in a long time. On the railways, as on other issues, I would introduce policies that made sense instead of running scared of big-money interests.

You can read the whole of Labour leadership hopeful Dianne Abbott’s brilliant Sunday Express article here.

Neil Clark: Laissez-faire Britain loses another brick in the wall

2010-08-09T15:18:00.004+01:00

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in The First Post.

Non! Neil Clark bemoans the imminent sale of International Power to a French state owned group

.....We were told by the Thatcherites, and neo-liberal think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute, which pushed aggressively for privatisation, that reducing state ownership would improve economic efficiency and be good for the country. But while Britain put up a 'For Sale' sign on our national assets, other European nations have played a far more intelligent game.

It's hard to imagine the French, wedded to a policy of Gaullist economic nationalism, allowing SNCF, their prestigious national railway, to suffer the fate of British Rail and allow foreign-owned companies to operate their train services.

It's inconceivable, too, to imagine Germany allowing an iconic company like Volkswagen to fall into foreign hands, as Britain did with its car industry.

You can read the whole article here.

Neil Clark: Open Wide for Public Service Destruction

2010-08-06T10:57:00.005+01:00

This column by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in the Morning Star.

NEIL CLARK examines the coalition government's plans to carry on the backdoor firesale of our assets.

July 6 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of the great Welsh socialist Aneurin Bevan, the father of the NHS.

Just six days after the anniversary, Tory Health Minister Andrew Lansley announced radical government plans which, if carried out, will mark the end of Bevan's great, humane creation in all but name.

The extent of the reforms, which allow all hospitals to leave public ownership as well as scrapping primary health care trusts and the revenue cap on private patients, shocked many political observers. They were a clear breach of Lansley's own pre-election pledge not to introduce any major structural reform of the NHS.

But those who appreciate that the "progressive" Con-Dem government bats for capital and not for the ordinary British people would not have been surprised in the least.

In January, the Daily Telegraph revealed that Lansley, then shadow health secretary, had received £21,000 for the running of his private office from private equity tycoon John Nash, chairman of Care UK and several other health companies.

In company documents Nash, who also gave the Tories £60,000 in September 2009, enthused over "recent policy statements by the opposition Conservative Party in the UK which have substantially strengthened their commitment to more open market reform to allow new providers of NHS services and for greater freedom for patients to choose their GP and hospital provider."

For privateers like Nash the trouble with Labour was that after the fall of Tony Blair the "open market reform" of the NHS was proceeding too slowly.

Now Nash and his fellow private healthcare providers have got the fast-track "reforming" government they want. But for pro-privatisation politicians like Lansley there remains a problem.

Despite the relentless propaganda of neoliberal think tanks and NHS-bashing columns by right-wing writers such as Janet Daley, Simon Heffer and Richard Littlejohn, the NHS remains an enormously popular institution. It's loved not just by socialists and social democrats, but by Conservative voters too.

If the government announced that the NHS was to be privatised en bloc there'd be a huge public outcry. So Lansley needs to present his reforms as "liberating" the NHS and achieve privatisation through the backdoor.

The government is clearly using the destruction of NHS dentistry as its model.

From the 1990s onwards, private dental chains started buying up NHS practices and converting them to private-only practices. The value of private dentistry grew from £289m in 1994-95 to just under £2bn in 2001-2. And costs for treatments soared - on average private treatments are four times more expensive than those offered on the NHS.

Millions of Britons, unable to pay the higher costs and without an NHS practice in their area, simply stopped going to the dentist altogether. As a result tooth decay, mouth cancer and other oral diseases rose sharply.

As I highlighted in the New Statesman in 2003, "A predominantly private dental service inevitably means a two-tier service: good mouths and gleaming smiles for the rich; disease, tooth decay and emergency extraction dentistry for the rest."
What we are heading for if the coalition gets its way is a predominantly private health service. As in dentistry, that will mean a two-tier service - good health and prompt treatment for the rich, longer waiting times and a second-class service for the rest.

How Nye Bevan must be turning in his grave.

Transport failure

Back in the 1980s, a group of fanatical neoliberals calling themselves the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) called for the deregulation of Britain's bus industry and the privatisation of the state-owned National Bus Company. The government listened to their advice and today Britain has the most expensive buses in Europe.

A decade later the same group of fanatical neoliberals called for the privatisation of British Rail. Despite the warnings of wise old anti-Thatcherite Tories such as Sir Ian Gilmour, who thought privatising the rail network was "crazy," John Major's government listened to their advice and sold off the railways.

The result? Britain has the most fragmented and expensive railway system in Europe, if not the entire world.

You'd have thought that given their disastrous track record - no pun intended - the ASI would by now have done the honourable thing and disappeared from public life.

Not a bit of it. The group is still active today - and still coming out with "free market" claptrap. Their latest proposal is for the TV licence fee to be abolished and the BBC to instead become a voluntary subscription service. Such a move would, the institute argues, encourage the BBC "to compete with the big US studios."

Well I don't know about you, dear reader, but I don't want the BBC to "compete with the big US studios." I only want the state-owned broadcaster to continue to produce the good-quality programmes it has done for years.

Implementation of the earlier "crazy" ASI ideas led to the destruction of the National Bus Company and British Rail. Let's make sure it doesn't claim a third scalp with the BBC.

Energy rip-off

"Why does NO-ONE step in and do something about these big companies robbing customers. I struggle with my gas especially when it's cold and it really at times has been a choice between being warm and buying food/paying other bills etc ... it's criminal and something really should be done about it," wrote a commenter on the Daily Mirror's website.

They were responding to news that British Gas had almost doubled its profits to £583m in the first six months of 2010.

Public anger with the corporate profiteers is certainly growing. It will continue to grow as living standards for the majority fall, due to the government's swingeing cuts in public spending. More and more people are waking up to the fact that the battle is not between the middle and working classes, but between a small gang of corporate profiteers and everyone else.

This gang of profiteers is screwing all of us and it will continue to do so until we make a clean break with neoliberalism and bring back into public ownership all the assets which have been privatised in the last 30 years.

How Privatisation-crazy Clegg and Cameron are pissing off Middle England

2010-08-03T21:10:00.003+01:00

CPO co-founder Neil Clark writes:

The most interesting thing about British politics at present is the way that the ruling coalition's extreme neo-liberalism has put it on a collision course not just with the 'old' left, but with conservative Middle England. Aside from the Morning Star, there has been no daily newspaper more unrelentingly critical of the new government than the Daily Mail - the authentic voice of the country's small 'c' conservatives.

With the economic future so uncertain, Middle England wants security and reassurance, which they're certainly not getting from Cameron and Clegg. On the contrary, the coalition's ideological mission to privatise the British state, using as an excuse the need to cut the deficit, means four years of major upheavals. And it's the reforms to health care which are causing the most concern.

The whole of the article can be read here.

Railway Privatisation blamed for Potter’s Bar crash

2010-07-31T19:11:00.000+01:00

From the Morning Star (Paddy McGuffin).

Rail unions have laid the blame for the 2002 Potter's Bar transport disaster firmly at the door of privateers skimping on maintenance and basic safety procedures.

A jury at the inquest into the fatal crash found that the incident had been caused by points failure caused by maintenance failings.

Six passengers were killed in the crash in Hertfordshire on May 10 2002. A seventh victim was walking nearby and died after being struck by debris.

RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: "Basic failures of inspection and of maintenance, driven by the greed and fragmentation of rail privatisation, led us to Potters Bar. Those responsible for creating that lethal culture, the politicians and their business associates, will never share the pain of the victims of their gross mismanagement.

"They have escaped prosecution for their role in this avoidable disaster."
He said cuts being made on the railways "are dragging us back to exactly the same poisonous cocktail of conditions that led to Potters Bar."

British Gas profits rocket by 98%

2010-07-28T18:40:00.001+01:00

From The Daily Mail:

Profits at British Gas have almost doubled after the firm cashed in from a bitterly cold winter that left millions struggling to pay for heat and light.
News that the company made £585million in the first six months of the year has triggered outrage among customers.

The figure was up 98 per cent on the same period last year and helped its parent company, Centrica, boost profits by 65 per cent to 1.56billion.

British Gas and other power suppliers cashed in last year after they failed to pass on the full benefit of a sharp fall in the wholesale price of gas and electricity.

We cannot allow the end of the NHS in all but name

2010-07-15T21:00:00.003+01:00

In reality, Lansley's health white paper opens the door to the comprehensive privatisation of healthcare and the end of the NHS as a national service. If the plans are taken to their logical conclusion, by 2015 the NHS will be little more than a brand. From a major public service with a million employees, it will have become a central fund with a minimal workforce, commissioning services from a string of private companies in a fully-fledged healthcare market.

"The bottom line of this is the abolition of the NHS," Dr David Price of Edinburgh University argues. "It will remove the government's duty to provide a universal healthcare service." His colleague, Professor Allyson Pollock, believes it will lead to "full privatisation".

You can read the whole of Seumas Milne’s article on the threat to the NHS posed by the Coalition government’s new reforms, here.

All Aboard the Gravy Train

2010-07-06T11:02:00.003+01:00

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

What have Britain's privatised railways got in common with the England football team? Every time you think they can't possibly get any worse, they prove you wrong.

The state of the railways during New Labour's period of office can be compared to England's performance against Algeria - desperately poor.

But just two months on from the election it's clear the railways during the era of the Con-Dem coalition are going to be more like England v Germany - a total catastrophe.

Labour, to their shame, accepted privatisation. Under their so-called rail price formula they allowed train companies to raise prices by 1 per cent above the level of the RPI measure of inflation.

But at least there was some form of restriction on raising ticket prices.
The policy of the "progressive" coalition, however, is simply to let the privateers do what they want.

The rail price formula is likely to be scrapped, meaning that commuters, already forced to pay the highest train fares in Europe, face increases of up to 10 per cent in the new year.

While Labour renationalised the failing east coast rail service after NXEC, a subsidiary of National Express, attempted to get its contract renegotiated, the Con-Dems advocate giving such profiteering rail companies longer franchises.
National Express, which Labour had threatened to bar from making new franchise bids, has already been allowed to keep its C2C and East Anglia train services.

Back in February, it was reported that the National Express chairman John Devaney met with members of the Conservative transport team to discuss the rail franchising market.

It seems the meeting was a huge success for him.

The fanatically neoliberal Transport Minister Philip Hammond has since announced a value-for-money review on Britain's railways.

"Passenger and taxpayers will rightly ask why it is that our railways ... are so much more expensive than those in Europe," he said.

But we all know the answer to that one Mr Minister. It's because Britain's railways - unlike in mainland Europe - are privatised.

Dr B Ching's excellent Signal Failures column in Private Eye points out that the review's scoping report doesn't mention private firms' duty to maximise British rail profits.

An examination of why Britain's railways are so expensive which doesn't look into the ownership of them is rather like having a review into the causes of World War II which excludes any mention of Adolf Hitler and the nazis.

A reason to invade

"As soon as I hear a "rogue state" declared by the US I reach for my 1993 Encyclopaedia of World Geography, turn to the page on the latest declared enemy, and study the box which lists 'major resources'," wrote Felicity Arbuthnot in her excellent Star article last week.

Felicity found natural gas, coal, iron ore, beryllium, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, sulphur, chrome and copper when she looked up Afghanistan prior to the US invasion.

If we look at Kosovo, another target for a US-led military campaign, it's a similar story. The former province of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia possesses Europe's second largest coal reserves.

It also has sizeable deposits of nickel, lead, gold, silver, tin, zinc, magnesium, kaolin, quartz, asbestos, limestone, chrome, marble, and bauxite.

Under Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist administration, Kosovo's mineral wealth and indeed the valuable assets of the rest of Yugoslavia, was held in social ownership.

Today, most of it has been privatised. In the same way that the invaders of Iraq made their priorities clear by making a bee-line for the oil fields, so NATO forces in Kosovo made their motivation clear by forcibly seizing the huge Trepca mining complex from its workers and managers shortly after the 1999 war.

The "official" line is that the US and its allies liberated Kosovo because of Serbian persecution of Kosovan Albanians. If you believe that one, you'll also no doubt believe that the war in Afghanistan is about making our streets safe from terrorism, and that Iraq was attacked because the West thought Saddam had WMD.

Meanwhile if you have a few spare moments this week, look up the major resources of Iran - and it'll become clear why the Islamic Republic is the latest country in the line of fire.

Royal Mail under threat

1516 was the year that Thomas More published Utopia, King Ferdinand II of Spain died and the Ottoman Empire invaded Syria.

It was also the year when Henry VIII founded the Royal Mail and for 494 years the service has been in the hands of the British state.

Yet today it's threatened with 100 per cent privatisation by Britain's uber-Thatcherite coalition.

To sugar the pill, and to maintain the pretence that the privatisation is a "progressive" measure, postal workers are likely to be offered shares in the company again (former chairman Allan Leighton having pioneered the idea in 2006).
It's a confidence trick that Robert Maxwell would have been proud of - as of course, postal workers, in common with the rest of us, already own the Royal Mail as British citizens.

One newspaper said that the sell-off would present an "early test" for the new Labour leader as if Labour opposes it, the coalition would "seize on it as evidence of a shift to the left."

How very interesting. The neoliberal grip on British politics is now so strong that opposing the sell-off of a public institution which has been in state hands since the 16th century is regarded as a "shift to the left."

I wonder what Lord Salisbury, Arthur Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill - and all the other Conservative Prime Ministers in history who would have recoiled in horror at the prospect of selling off the Royal Mail - would have thought of that.

Ticket price rise misery for millions of British rail users

2010-06-29T18:42:00.002+01:00

The Daily Mail reports:

Millions of rail passengers face higher than expected annual fare rises of up to 10 per cent as the Government considers scrapping the formula for raising ticket prices.

Commuters and families will feel betrayed by rises which have put ministers on a collision course with rail unions, who vowed yesterday to 'stop the Government in their tracks' if train fares increase and investment is cut.

Passenger groups say UK train fares are already the highest in Europe.

The fares system, imposed by Labour, already guarantees inflation-busting rises by allowing train companies to put up prices each New Year by 1 per cent above the level of the retail price index from the previous July.

However, Conservative Transport Secretary Philip Hammond signalled yesterday this formula may have to be broken - allowing fares to rise even further if, as expected, his department is forced to bear the brunt of budget cuts in the Government's October review of finances.

Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT union, said his union's annual meeting in Aberdeen this week will 'be planning the fightback and a mobilisation of rail workers and rail users that will stop the Government in their tracks'.

He added: 'We could see fares jacked up by as much as 10 per cent while passengers are crammed into ancient carriages running on creaking track.'

The Campaign For Public Ownership's Press Release on the Budget

2010-06-23T13:16:00.002+01:00

The Campaign for Public Ownership strongly opposes the new privatisation measures announced in Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s Budget.

The government has announced its intention to sell off the Student Loan Book, the air traffic control system, and the state-owned bookmaker the Tote, in public ownership since its inception in 1928. It also pledges to introduce ‘private sector investment’ in the Royal Mail.

It beggars belief that after Britain’s disastrous experience of privatisation the government, (which also announced this week its decision to sell off the High-Speed Rail link), still thinks that selling off publicly-owned assets is the way forward.

While selling off the family silver may lead to short term financial gains for the public purse, in the long term we all lose out, as we end up having to pay higher prices for basic services.

A truly ‘progressive’ government would not be announcing further privatisation, but instead be embarking on a programme of re-nationalisation. Such a programme should start with the re-nationalisation of Britain’s railways, a move supported by over 70% of the people.

The Campaign For Public Ownership's Press Release on the Government's decision to sell the High-speed rail link

2010-06-21T19:42:00.004+01:00

The Campaign for Public Ownership strongly opposes the government’s decision to sell the London to Folkestone high speed rail link, which was announced today.
Transport Minister Philip Hammond admits that “HS1 is a national success story and a world-class railway operating to international standards.”. But if that’s the case, why sell it?

Hammond also said: “ The government does not have to run everything directly - we need to take prompt action where private enterprise can provide both a better deal and a superior service to the public." But regarding Britain’s railways, it is abundantly clear that private enterprise has not provided a better deal or a superior service to the public than the state-owned British Rail.

Our rail fares are the highest in Europe, despite private train operators receiving four times more in taxpayers subsidy than British Rail.

Instead of privatising yet more of our rail network, the government ought to be listening to the British public, and bringing our entire rail network back into public ownership.

The tyrants in pinstripe: Neil Clark on the biggest menace to threaten Europe since the Nazis

2010-06-17T19:40:00.005+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in The Morning Star.

Seventy years ago, European countries faced a battle for their very existence as nazi forces swept across the continent.

Now those countries face another battle - against the forces of international capital.

The money men won't be happy until every last publicly owned asset is privatised and in their greedy hands.

Europe's debt crisis, caused in large part by the greed of international speculators, is being used as an excuse for something which the money men and their cheerleaders in the media have long desired - the wholesale sell-off of those assets which remain in public ownership.

As John Foster said in his Morning Star analysis recently, it's a confidence trick so gigantic that it would make even that Olympic champion fraudster Bernie Madoff blush.

Earlier this month, Greece's "Socialist" government announced a major programme of privatisation, including the sale of 49 per cent in the state-owned railway, the sell-off of regional airports, highways and harbours and stakes in the post office and water utilities. The French government has announced a fire-sale of over 1,700 state properties, including many historic castles.

Here in Britain, new Postal Affairs Minister Ed Davey, from the "progressive" Liberal Democrats, has said he is considering the full-scale 100 per cent privatisation of Royal Mail, which has been in the hands of the British state since its inception in 1516.

If the money men have their way then over the next few years, governments in Europe will sell off not only their railways and national infrastructure but hospitals, schools, universities and all other state-owned enterprises.

It's a prospect eagerly awaited by "free-market" fanatics in the media. In the Daily Telegraph, Simon Heffer claims that deficit reduction requires "severe cuts" in the NHS and the privatisation of Britain's motorways. The former editor of The Economist Bill Emmott says that "if this debt crisis were to end up turning Europe Thatcherite, that would be something for us to celebrate."

While Janet Daley, an enthusiast for private provision of health care and pensions, says that the cuts should be seen "as part of an essentially positive, fundamental reconstruction of the way that public services are funded and delivered."

But in reality there will be nothing "positive" about these changes for ordinary people, who will be forced to pay much higher prices for basic services. For the financial elite however, there will be rich pickings.

It's a depressing scenario, but we mustn't lose heart. Things looked pretty bleak in 1940 in Europe, but nazism was eventually defeated.

By organising a mass pan-European movement to oppose privatisation and cutbacks in state provision of health, welfare and education, we can defeat today's anti-democratic, money-grabbing, pinstripe-suited tyrants.

You can read the whole of the article here.

The Campaign For Public Ownership's Press Release on the new Coalition Government's Privatisation Plans

2010-05-20T14:16:00.003+01:00

Thursday 20th May 2010.

The Campaign for Public Ownership strongly opposes the new coalition government’s plans to part-privatise Royal Mail, its plans to allow private business to run state schools and its policy of granting profiteering train companies longer franchises.

Thirty years on from the Thatcher government’s first privatisations, public opposition with privatisation has reached an all-time high. Over 70% of the British public would like to see our railways renationalised, yet our new coalition government, putting the interests of capital before the people, proposes even longer franchises for the profiteering train companies, who receive over four times more subsidy from the taxpayers than British Rail did.

The idea that privatisation will improve the Royal Mail and state schools is naive to say the least: has privatisation improved Britain’s railways- or brought lower prices and better service to gas, electricity and water consumers? The opposite occurred and if we do privatise Royal Mail we will get a worse, not better service- with cutbacks in deliveries and hiked prices.

Every country in Europe that has been foolish enough to privatise parts of its postal service has experienced this.

It’s time to call an end to the Great Privatisation Rip-Off and for all concerned citizens to fight against the coalition’s plans for further privatisations.

BBC Worldwide threatened by privatisation

2010-05-16T10:21:00.001+01:00

The Sunday Express reports:

A new non-executive chairman of the BBC will be installed to act as a board-level watchdog pushing through wide- ranging reform, including the privatisation of its commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide.

The secret plan to appoint a non- executive chairman has been revealed by the former Thatcher minister Lord Fowler, who is chairman of the influential Lords Communications Select Committee.

Lord Fowler said the privatisation of BBC Worldwide would make millions for the Exchequer.

“Even the last Government said there was a strong case to privatise this organisation and I think the new Government will feel that the case is overwhelming. BBC Worldwide is restricted in how it can develop because it hasn’t got the investment, so I think a scheme of bringing in private investment would have the support of those working there.

“You’re talking about raising quite a considerable amount of money, most of which could go to the public coffers. At a time when the Government is concentrating on raising money to combat the national deficit, then something like this is a glaringly obvious step to take. This could be like one of the memorable privatisations from the Eighties.”

The German state buys Britain’s ‘privatised’ trains- and why it won’t stop there

2010-04-22T20:46:00.003+01:00

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in The First Post.

When the sell-off of Britain's state-owned companies started in the early 1980s we were told it would be much better for publicly-owned assets to be transferred to the private sector.

State ownership was bad and inherently inefficient, private ownership was good. That was the Thatcherite mantra.

Thirty years on, however, large sections of our economy are back in state hands - only it's not the British state that's the owner, it's the governments of other European countries.

Today's £1.59bn takeover of the bus and rail firm Arriva, Britain's second largest transport provider, by Deutsche Bahn, which is 100 per cent owned by the German government, is just the latest in a series of deals in which publicly-owned European companies have taken over privatised British companies, or firms running services previously operated by the British state.

Even before today's transaction, Deutsche Bahn already owned Britain's largest rail freight company (which operates the Royal Train) and Chiltern Railways: in addition they have a 50 per cent stake in London Overground and the Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone Railway and, since April 1, have also run Tyne and Wear Metro.

It's not just the Germans who are operating British trains: the Netherlands' state-owned railway, NS, is a joint owner of Northern Rail and Merseyrail. France's state-owned railway SNCF, who missed out on Arriva, are keen to enter the UK transport market too.

As for British utilities, EDF Energy, a subsidiary of the French state-owned EDF, supplies 5.5m customers in the UK. Last year, EDF Energy also took control of the privatised British Energy, the UK's largest electricity generator and operator of Britain's nuclear power stations.

The German state running trains in Wales? The French Government providing your gas and electricity? Such a prospect would have seemed incredible in the mixed economy Britain of 40 years ago, but it's the reality of life in the 'everything is for sale' Britain of today. years ago, but it's the reality of life in the 'everything is for sale' Britain of today.

In the next few years we can expect to see this process continue, as the last few assets which remain in public ownership are put onto the market. In the general election, all three of our main parties advocate further privatisation, with the Royal Mail, the Tote, the Dartford Tunnel, and the Channel Tunnel rail link likely to go under the hammer whoever wins the election.

There is, of course, an enormous irony in all of this. Privatisation in Britain in the 80s was aggressively pushed by extreme neo-liberal think-tanks, such as the Adam Smith Institute, who abhorred the idea of public ownership of the country's assets and who were keen to roll back the frontiers of the state.

In the next 30 years, their pro-privatisation views, regarded as beyond the fringe before Margaret Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street, became 'mainstream' among Britain's political elite - with New Labour dropping Clause Four and the Liberal Democrats, under the influence of their 'Orange Book' faction, abandoning their plans to renationalise the railway network and aping the anti-state rhetoric of Thatcherite Tories.

The rest of Europe, however, has followed a different path. As their powerful state-owned companies buy assets which were once owned by the British people, those European countries who were not foolish enough to sell off their family silver have undoubtedly had the last laugh.

A People's Railway is just the ticket

2010-04-18T10:50:00.003+01:00

This Public Ownership column, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

A People's Railway is just the ticket.

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Rather like the non-barking dog in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic detective story Silver Blaze, the most curious incident regarding our three main parties manifesto promises on Britain's railways is not what they have said, but what they haven't said.

The Labour Party boasts of its commitment to "a new high-speed rail line linking North and South" and says it will "press ahead with a major investment programme in existing rail services." Labour will "encourage more people to switch to rail" and promises to "treble the number of secure cycle storage spaces at rail stations."
The Tories pledge to "reform our railways to provide a better focus on tackling problems that matter most to passengers, like overcrowding." They will "grant longer, more flexible franchises to incentivise private sector investment in improvements like longer trains and better stations."

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, promise a "rail renaissance, reopening closed railway lines and new stations and building a high-speed network to cut journey times to Scotland and the north of England."

Have you spotted something? Not one of our three major parties mentions the single most important measure that would improve our fragmented, unreliable and ludicrously expensive railway network - taking the entire network back into public ownership.
Seeing that over 70 per cent of the public want to bring back British Rail, you would have thought that at least one of our three leading parties would advocate such a measure.

But in the same way that the non-barking dog revealed to Sherlock Holmes the solution to the mystery of Silver Blaze, so the parties' reluctance to even discuss renationalisation reveals to us the sordid truth about British "democracy." Namely, that it isn't the people who decide what gets into party manifestos, but capital.

Let's look to Austria

The difference between how a publicly owned transport system and a privately owned one operates was graphically illustrated to my family and I on a recent journey back from Austria.

We were staying for a few days in a little town in the Alps. We took a train from the town to Salzburg's main railway station. The journey lasted two-and-three-quarter hours and cost just over 9 euros (£7.90) each. The train had plenty of free seats and we had legroom which seemed to be almost double the size of that we get on trains back home in Britain.

We then took a bus from Salzburg railway station to Salzburg airport, a 20-minute ride which cost 2 euros (£1.75) each. The train was punctual to the second, as was the bus.

Indeed, in all my journeys in Austria down the years I have never known a train or bus to be late, despite them sometimes having to deal with atrocious winter weather conditions.

How different to the way transport operates in privatised Britain.

On arriving back at our British airport, we were informed that the National Express coach to take us home would not be arriving as it had broken down. We, along with the other passengers, had to wait another 25 minutes before another coach, picked us up to take us to Luton airport, from where we had to change to get on yet another coach.

Almost every time I or a family member travels with National Express, something likes this happens. How is that Austria's State Railways and the country's Postbuses can operate so efficiently, while National Express is so dreadful?

Neoliberals love to claim that anything run by the state is inefficient and anything privately run is efficient. In fact very often the opposite is true.

What makes the National Express travel experience even more galling is the knowledge that the company has received around £2.5bn in taxpayers' subsidies over the past 10 years - and it pays us back with such an appalling service.

As RMT general secretary Bob Crow says, National Express has been taking us all for a ride - though not a very punctual or comfortable one.

Things could get even worse. Thatcherite fanatics in the EU Commission seem hell-bent on destroying Europe's excellent public transport and in the name of "increasing competition" force through, against the public's wishes, the privatisation of railway and bus services.

The prospect of rip-off, inefficient British companies like National Express running trains and buses in Austria at some time in the future is a truly appalling one. It falls to us to build a pan-European pro-public ownership movement to make sure it never happens.

Targetting Hungarian railways

Hungary's state-owned railway MAV has had a tough time of it in the past few years. Starved of investment by the country's faux-left, ultra-Blairite government, around 10 per cent of lines have been closed and ticket prices have risen sharply. But despite the very welcome defeat of Hungary's corrupt, serial-privatising and pro-war "Socialists" at the weekend, worse could be to come not just for MAV but for Hungary's long-suffering people.

Ninety-three heirs of Hungarian Holocaust survivors have filed a lawsuit at a Chicago court against MAV for $240 million damages and $1 billion non-asset compensation.

They claim that MAV had provided its carriages being fully aware that these would be used to transport 437,000 Jews to the gas chambers in Auschwitz in 1944 and accused the company of looting their ancestors' possessions. The case is due to be heard on April 22.

The Holocaust was an unspeakably heinous crime, but is it right that in 2010 Hungary's railways should be held responsible for the atrocities of Hungary's pro-nazi collaborationist government nearly 70 years ago?

If the lawsuit succeeds it will not only mean the end of MAV and job losses for its 20,000 employees, but, as the railway is in public hands, even more hardship for ordinary Hungarians, who are reeling after years of cutbacks in health care, pensions and welfare provision.

With poverty and malnutrition rising in Hungary, the cuts in public spending which would follow the success of the lawsuit would inevitably lead to the premature deaths of innocent people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the horrible events of World War II.

It's good to hear that Jewish community leader Peter Feldmajer has criticised the lawsuit, saying: "No legal action can be brought against MAV on moral grounds."

Even if it does win the case, cash-strapped MAV has resigned itself to spending up to 45m forints (around £150,000) on legal fees to defend itself against the lawsuit.

Hopefully common sense will prevail and, instead of facing closure or more cutbacks, Hungary's state railway will win the case and get a better deal from the country's new leadership.

The Final Chapter for Libraries?

2010-03-08T20:05:00.002Z

This column on public ownership, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

The NHS is a great example of socialism in action. Public libraries are another. The idea of a place where all members of the community can go to borrow books which are communally owned is a quite wonderful one and totally at odds with neoliberal ideology, which prefers private - and not public - provision.
This is probably why, in this age of neoliberalism, public libraries in Britain are under grave threat.
A new report by the Valuation Office Agency showed that Britain has lost nearly 200 public libraries since 1997.
The number of books available to be borrowed has fallen dramatically - by 13 million in the period 2003-9. And worse could be to come, with swingeing cutbacks in local government spending likely to reduce the library service still further.
Part of the problem with the decline in libraries is that a new generation of people, brought up in an age obsessed with private ownership, prefer to buy books from bookshops rather than borrow them free of charge from their local library.
In 1979, by contrast, two-and-a-half times as many books were loaned by libraries than were bought at bookshops.
It's revealing that older people - brought up in a more collectivist era - use public libraries much more than younger Britons whose formative years were in an acquisitive society where private ownership became our country's new religion.
To reverse the decline in public libraries, therefore, we don't just have to increase spending on them. We need to change the whole ethos of our society to one where people once again relish sharing communally owned goods.

Hoping for change in Germany

One of the most disappointing political events of the last year in western Europe was the return to government in Germany, after an 11-year absence, of the fanatically pro-big business Free Democratic Party (FDP).
The FDP, a partner in the current Christian Democrat (CDU)-led coalition, favours massive cuts in public spending, cuts in the top rate of income tax and further privatisation.
The new German government has stated its intention to proceed with a partial privatisation of the country's state-owned railway Deutsche Bahn.
But the good news is that the plan has met opposition from within the government itself.
Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer - a member of the Christian Social Union party, the Bavarian sister party of Angela Merkel's CDU - said he was not prepared to "squander economic assets" and blamed privatisation plans for the deterioration in services on the Deutsche Bahn-owned S-Bahn in Berlin.
The battle going on within the German government is one between fanatical neoliberals - the FDP - and the more moderate conservative protectors of the Rhineland model.
Let's hope the latter, with help from unions and the German left, can defeat the former and keep Germany's excellent publicly owned railway on track. And let's hope too that the stay in government of the extremist FDP is extremely short-lived.

Tackling the real problem in the NHS

The script is a familiar one. Before a state-owned enterprise is privatised, it is necessary to convince the public that the enterprise in question is failing to deliver the goods and is in urgent need of "reform."
That's what happened in the 1990s with British Rail. And it's what's happening today with the NHS.
Anti-NHS propagandists have made great capital out of a recent report on the failures at Stafford hospital, where at least 400 patients were held to have died due to substandard conditions and care in the period between 2005-8.
But as Unite's national officer for health David Fleming has pointed out, Stafford's problems were not caused by public ownership but by the obsession with what he describes as the "target-obsessed privatisation culture."
Stafford hospital was run by the Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust. The Department of Health claims that foundation trusts are "at the cutting edge of the government's commitment to the decentralisation of public services" - which is neoliberal-speak for "they are a great back-door way to achieve privatisation of the NHS."
With their commercialised, profit-obsessed approach - and their £180k chief executives - foundation trusts are inimical to the very ethos of Nye Bevan's NHS.
Last month it was revealed that Royal Surrey County NHS Foundation Trust made a profit of over £300,000 in one year by selling abroad £4m of drugs intended for use in Britain.
The best way to make sure that the deaths at Stafford are not repeated is to scrap foundation trusts and restore the NHS to its original, 1940s socialist ideals, where the needs of patients are put before profits. And that also means bringing all ancillary services, such as cleaning and catering, back in-house.

End the annual energy profits charade

It's become an annual event. Britain's privatised energy companies announce enormous profits having failed to pass on the reduced price of gas to consumers.
Cue harsh criticism from Ofgem and expressions of shock and outrage from politicians and media commentators.
Meanwhile things carry on as before, with the privatised companies continuing to fleece the public.
The one thing that will put an end to this annual charade is the measure that none of our three major parties, still wedded to Thatcherite dogma, will even contemplate - the renationalisation of Britain's entire energy sector.
Public limited companies will always put the interests of shareholders before the interests of the general public. If we want the interests of the public to come before profits, we must have public ownership. It really is as simple as that.

Michael Foot: A strong supporter of public ownership

2010-03-05T17:55:00.003Z

"Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology."

Michael Foot, writing in the Daily Herald, 1956.

You can read CPO co-founder Neil Clark's First Post tribute to the late leader of the Labour Party here.

Press Release on the obscene profiteering of Britain's energy companies

2010-02-23T08:19:00.003Z

According to the new report from the energy regulator Ofgem, Britain’s privatised energy suppliers are making more than £100 out of every customer by refusing to cut bills during the record freeze.

They are now making an average profit of more than £105 a year from every dual-fuel customer.

The wholesale price of gas fell by around 60 per cent between 2008 and 2009. But suppliers chose not to cut customer tariffs before the winter - meaning a profit bonanza of £846 million a month.

The Campaign for Public Ownership believes that the only long-term solution to the problem of energy company profiteering is to restore the energy companies to public ownership.

The problem lies in the ownership structure of the energy companies. All of them are Public Limited Companies, whose overriding aim is to maximise profits for shareholders. That's what PLCs do. Instead of reacting with horror to the entirely predictable news that PLCs are putting the interests of shareholders before Britain's long-suffering energy consumers, we should instead be calling for the government to take the one step that will lead to lower energy prices in the long term. Restoring the energy companies to public ownership will mean that prices can be lowered, as there will be no shareholder dividends to pay.

The NHS under threat: the first private operator of a general hospital

2010-02-19T19:15:00.001Z

Will Stone in the Morning Star reports:

One of five firms is set to carve a damaging scar onto the face of the NHS by becoming the first private operator of a general hospital - a prospect experts have labelled as "the last nail in the coffin" for the health service.

Hinchingbrooke in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, lost its only NHS bidder earlier this week in the Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, whose withdrawal has opened the way for one of five private health providers to take control.

Once the contract is awarded by the East of England health authority, Hinchingbrooke will become the first NHS hospital of its kind in Britain to be operated by a private firm.

The hospital has been labelled as "debt-ridden" with a deficit of around £40 million, but Unison head of health Karen Jennings claimed the debt is "no worse than many other trusts" which are bogged down in private contracts.

She described plans to hand over the running of the hospital to a private company as a "dangerous experiment" which flew in the face of the government's insistence that the NHS is its preferred provider.

The unfunny joke of energy policy

2010-02-11T17:34:00.003Z

This column, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark was published in the Morning Star.

Writing in the Observer in 2004, Anthony Barnett told of a little game that the fanatically free-market minister Nigel Lawson used to play when he was energy secretary in the early 1980s.

Lawson would turn up at energy conferences to give speeches entitled "UK Energy Policy" and then proudly announce that the government didn't have an energy policy.
How very droll. What a great wit that Lawson was. Except that now nobody is laughing.

Britain faces a very real energy crisis - and it's a crisis which has been caused by adherence to free-market dogma.

In its recent report, the energy regulator Ofgem - previously so enthusiastic about the "liberalisation" of the energy market - warned that the free-market approach to energy which successive British governments have followed since the 1980s will leave us short of energy supplies by 2015.

Ofgem said that only increased state intervention - in the shape of a new state-controlled energy buyer to sell gas and electricity to consumers - would be able to keep the lights on.

But as welcome as Ofgem's report is, it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Ofgem still envisages a future for our privatised energy companies.

But as long as energy companies remain privately owned, they will continue to profiteer at our expense and put their short-term profits ahead of Britain's longer-term energy concerns.

This winter, the coldest in Scotland since 1914 and the coldest in many other parts of Britain since 1981, the energy companies once again have shown their true colours.

The wholesale price of gas fell by around 60 per cent between 2008 and 2009. But suppliers chose not to cut customer tariffs before the winter - meaning a profit bonanza of £846 million a month.

Public ownership of the entire energy sector would not only mean lower bills, as there would be no shareholders' noses in the trough, but it would enable Britain to make sensible long-term plans regarding its energy policy for the future. Either that or we'd better make sure we're well stocked up on logs and candles.

This week marks the centenary of the comedian and singer Joyce Grenfell, one of Britain's best-loved entertainers.

Grenfell (right), whose aunt was Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to sit in the House of Commons, had a privileged upper-class upbringing, but like so many, her political outlook changed in World War II.

"The more I see people brought up the easy way," she wrote, "the more I incline to socialism. Things will never - can never - be the same as they were before the war."

And things were not the same as they were before the war. A Labour government with public ownership high up on its agenda launched the greatest programme of nationalisation in this country's history.

There are legitimate criticisms to make of the way it went about things, not least the overgenerous compensation that was paid to the railway owners.

But by the end of its period in office the fact remains that around 20 per cent of the British economy was in public ownership.

That remained the case for almost 30 years, until the Thatcher government began its work of overturning the post-war settlement.

Ironically Thatcher came to power in 1979 - the year that Grenfell died.

I'm sure that if Grenfell returned to life today she would be horrified and saddened at how all the achievements of the post-war era have been destroyed.

They've sold off our energy, our transport, our airports and our natural resources.

Now it's time to flog off the few remaining ports that remain in public ownership.

The historic port of Dover is being earmarked for sale, with the Nord de Palais District Council in France reported as being the main bidder.

The News of the World revealed that the government is being advised by merchant bank NM Rothschild. A source at the investment bank said: "This is an exciting sale. Selling Dover to Calais is a very logical move as that is where most of the business is directed."

Well, selling Dover to Calais for £350m may be an "exciting sale" and "logical move" for merchant banks like NM Rothschild, which has made enormous fortunes from privatisation down the years, but for the rest of us it is a sign of how financial concerns trump all other considerations in modern Britain.

Dover is a port which has played a key role in British history. Its white cliffs are a symbol of our defiance against the nazis in World War II, but all that counts for nothing as far as the money men are concerned.

The big scandal is not that Dover is being sold to the French - as the prospective Tory candidate for the town Charles Elphicke seems to think - but that it is being sold at all. Ports are national strategic assets and should be nationally owned.

"The port should absolutely stay in British hands. It always has been and it should always be. It means so much to the boys who have sailed away from it and come back," said Dame Vera Lynn, forces sweetheart and singer of the classic The White Cliffs of Dover. Dame Vera is understandably incensed by news of the sale.
"How could they even think about selling it off? It is not right. Dover is part of England. It simply can't be part of anywhere else."

But for the global money men the whole idea of "national" ownership is anathema. All that matters to them is whether they can make a quick profit.

'"Tories to allow National Express into rail franchise market"

2010-02-08T18:11:00.001Z

From The New Statesman.

The Conservative party will reportedly allow the transport group to re-enter the rail franchise market if it wins this year's election
National Express is likely to be allowed to bid for contracts in two years' time. This would be contrary to the Labour government's plan which has vowed to banish the group from the rail market after the £1.4bn East Coast debacle.
The bus-and-coach giant had to hand its East Coast rail service back to the government after huge losses. It was also ordered to give up its East Anglia rail franchises in March 2011. John Devaney, National Express' group chairman, has reportedly met with Conservative transport team members for discussions.
A Conservative Party spokesman said the East Coast debacle "certainly doesn't make it easy for National Express to make a rapid return to the franchise market at the next round. They will need to work hard to rebuild their credibility".
It is likely that National Express will have to sit out the next round of franchising, but would be allowed to bid for contracts in 2012 and 2013, he added.

Families face shock 20% rise in heating bills as gas giants cash in on Big Freeze

2010-01-17T17:03:00.002Z

The Daily Mail reports:

Families face record winter gas bills averaging £360 as power companies reap a huge windfall from the big freeze.
The 'big six' energy suppliers have refused to pass on a steep fall in wholesale prices to customers.
They are collecting a profit bonanza of £846million in a single month by charging over the odds to keep homes warm.
Householders have had no choice but to turn up the heat to cope with the coldest spell in 30 years, with snow and ice blanketing the entire country.
Domestic demand for gas over the last month is predicted to be 60 per cent higher than in a normal winter.
This increased consumption will result in average bills of £360 for the three-month period from November through to the end of January, compared with £300 a year ago.
Greedy suppliers decided to reduce the tariff to customers by less than 10 per cent - even though the wholesale price of gas came down by some 60 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

Britain's privatised energy firms rip-off the public in the cold snap

2010-01-07T20:58:00.002Z

From The Daily Express

GREEDY energy firms will be the biggest winners of the cold snap, claim analysts.
They say the owners of British Gas will rake in an extra £1.5million every day of the January freeze.
All the major suppliers who refused to cut customer bills before the winter are now enjoying a profits boom as families turn up the central heating to beat the cold.
Gas and electricity bills will rocket by an average £47 per home this month to a record January high of £203.
An estimated 30 per cent surge in the nation’s energy use will line suppliers’ pockets, with Centrica, parent company of leading seller British Gas, set to be the biggest winner.
Richard Hall, of Consumer Focus, wants a Competition Commission investigation.
He said: “Suppliers have failed to fully pass on wholesale price cuts.”

Thames Water customers face inflation-busting price increases

2009-12-05T19:25:00.002Z

The Evening Standard reports:

Millions of Thames Water customers face inflation-busting increases in their water bills over the next five years.

Bills will be allowed to rise by 3.3 per cent more than the cost of living between next year and 2015, regulator Ofwat said today. In today's prices they will rise from an average of £303 to £313, with the biggest annual increase coming in 2012.
Of the major water suppliers, only Northumbrian and Southern will increase bills by more. Across England and Wales bills will rise by one per cent less than inflation over the five-year period.

However, Thames Water initially asked Ofwat to approve a far steeper rise - by 16 per cent more than inflation, to £356 in 2009 prices.

Neil Clark: Backtrack or Derail

2009-11-16T08:43:00.007Z

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in the New Statesman.

A pledge to renationalise the railways would be a clear vote-winner. So why do passengers’ demands fall on deaf ears?

Public ownership is a puzzle. Voters are in favour of it, but our three main parties offer little to its supporters in terms of viable policy options. Instead, they remain wedded to a pro-privatisation agenda, trying to outdo each other in making lists of what public assets to sell off next.

In the past two years, the government has nationalised Northern Rock, and has taken large stakes in leading banks. Privatisation has never been so unpopular. But the gap between public opinion and the position taken by our politicians is at its greatest in the case of the railways.

Rushed through by John Major's government, privatisation has left us with fragmented and user-unfriendly railways, requiring around four times the public subsidy received by British Rail. Despite the vast amounts of taxpayers' money that have been handed over to private train operators (for example, Virgin Trains received £294.6m this year for running the West Coast Main Line franchise), our railways are easily the most expensive in Europe, with fares 3.4 times the global average.

Research by the investment bank UBS showed that while a 125-mile, second-class train journey in Britain costs £54.39, it costs just £18.94 in Italy, a country with a similar average income. Since privatisation in 1996, fares for long-distance trips have soared by up to three times inflation. This year alone, fares rose by an average of 6 per cent, with services such as CrossCountry hiking prices by 11 per cent.

Add to the equation that rush-hour trains are often overcrowded, owing to the inadequate number of carriages (another result of privatisation that set up rolling stock companies), and it is not surprising that 70 per cent of the public back the renationalisation of the railways. But their calls are falling on deaf ears. The Tories want "longer, better franchises" for the train operators. They also want Network Rail, the not-for-profit, quasi-public body set up by Labour in the aftermath of the collapse of Railtrack, to lose its monopoly on engineering work.

The Liberal Democrats pledged renationalisation in their 2005 election manifesto but the policy has now been dropped, to the consternation of party activists and some MPs. "Where is it written that we have to abandon good ideas simply because Labour and the Tories have abandoned them, too?" Lembit Öpik asked at this year's party conference, where several pleas for taking the railways back into public ownership were rejected by the party.

Labour's stance is perhaps the most baffling of all. Here is a party that is down in the polls, and in desperate need of vote-winning policies. Labour opposed the sell-off of British Rail when in opposition, with Tony Blair promising a "publicly owned, publicly accountable railway". Yet in government it has happily accepted the privatised system.

Loco motives

What would Labour lose by reverting to its earlier stance and committing to full-scale renationalisation? The answer is nothing. The government's inaction can be traced to the man at the top. "The trouble is that Gordon actually believes all this neoliberal dogma about the benefits of privatisation," a former Labour MP told me earlier this year.

Brown's speech at this year's Labour party conference, in which he attacked "right-wing fundamentalism that says you just leave everything to the market", seemed to signal a move away from New Labourism to a more social-democratic agenda. But the Prime Minister showed his true, pro-privatisation colours when, shortly afterwards, he announced a fire-sale of publicly owned assets - including the Tote bookmakers, the Channel Tunnel rail link and the Royal Mint.

We should not forget the crucial role that Brown played in aiding and abetting the Tory sell-off in the 1990s. In Broken Rails: How Privatisation Wrecked Britain's Railways, Christian Wolmar describes how, in the spring of 1996, the shadow chancellor vetoed his party's plan to scupper the forthcoming privatisation of Railtrack by announcing that, on coming to power, they would replace its shares with preference shares. Labour's initiative was "a genuine opportunity to undermine the [privatisation] process fatally". But thanks to Brown's intervention, the knock-out blow was never delivered.

Opponents of renationalisation say that bringing back British Rail would cost the government too much money. But they ignore the fact that we are in a recession and many franchises are in serious trouble. This year, we have already seen the government renationalise the east coast rail service after NXEC, a subsidiary of the troubled transport company National Express, tried to get its contract renegotiated.

Eight of the 19 franchises expire in or before 2013, which means that at most only 11would have to be bought out by the government - that's assuming no others default, as in the case of NXEC. Renationalising in this way, and setting 2013 as the date for the establishment of a fully publicly owned network, would not only reduce the costs of the process, but expose the hypocrisy of the free-market critics of public ownership, who would be left arguing for continued taxpayer subsidies for a privately owned railway.

A golden age

Renationalisation could, and should, usher in a new golden age for Britain's railways. For that to happen, we need to acknowledge that railways are a public service and not judge them on how much revenue they generate. That means returning to the spirit of Barbara Castle's 1968 Transport Act, which relieved the railways of what Wolmar describes as "the impossible target" of breaking even or making a profit.

It means reintroducing distance-based pricing and scrapping today's market-based pricing, which has led to extortionate fares - such as Virgin's £247 "anytime" return from London to Manchester, or the first fare costing over £1,000 (from Cornwall to Scotland). It means reducing ticket prices to the European average, with 50 per cent reductions of fares at weekends, enabling Britons to travel across the country cheaply. And it also, of course, means more trains.

Nationalisation would have a positive social and environmental impact, and it would also have a wider political significance. It would be a clear sign that the era of neoliberal extremism ushered in by the Thatcher government in 1979 is finally at an end. The sell-off of the railways was the most extreme of all the Conservative privatisations. No other country in western Europe was foolish enough to follow Britain's example - even in "free market" Switzerland, the railways are publicly owned.

If we are serious about constructing a society where the needs of people come before capital, renationalisation of the railways would be a perfect place to start.

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A tale of two commuters

A comparison of the experiences of two commuters exposes the differences in service in Britain and abroad.

Matthew Clark travels to work in London each day from his home in Arundel (a journey of 58 miles each way) on trains run by private operator Southern. He pays £3,280 for his season ticket; an "anytime" return for the journey costs £42. “The price is outrageous. I get a seat because I get on at the start of the journey, but people who get on at Crawley have to stand." What about punctuality? "If I was hypercritical, I'd say that often trains are a few minutes late, but it's not that bad. Once, though, I left Arundel at 6.06am and only got into London at 1.30pm - two trains broke down. It was a disaster."

In Belgium, Andy Assez commutes from Leuven to Brussels (17 miles each way), on the state-owned National Railway Company of Belgium. "I have a season ticket, which my employer pays for. A non-discounted season ticket for the journey costs €991." (£889. A return is €9.60.) “I almost always get a seat, even at peak hours. There are a lot of people who are going in the direction of Brussels, but there are also a lot of trains (around six per hour). Most of the time, I can't really complain about the services on the train." And punctuality? "The train is usually not more than five minutes late, but exceptionally it can be more than 15 minutes delayed."

Britain's privatised trains too expensive for rail firm

2009-11-11T13:16:00.000Z

The BBC reports:

Network Rail is transporting 200 staff by coach from Reading to Coventry for a conference because of the high cost of train tickets, it has emerged.
The rail operator has opted to shun train travel for road transport as it is more than £24,000 cheaper.
If open return tickets were bought for all the staff it could cost up to £27,000 - £135 each. But coach travel, at £12 a head, will cost just £2,400.
The firm said it made no apologies for getting the "best value" for taxpayers.
Network Rail said it looks at cheaper options for journeys as part of cost-cutting, as its workers do not get free travel or discounts.
A spokesman added: "Whilst we have no role in setting train fares, we use rail for the overwhelming number of business journeys.
"Occasionally, if there is a cheaper alternative, we will use that."

Britain's first £1000 train fare

2009-11-03T19:27:00.002Z

From The Daily Mail:

Britain's first £1,000 rail fare has caused a fresh row over the rising costs of train travel.
A first-class 'walk-on' return ticket from Newquay, Cornwall, to Kyle of Lochalsh, Scotland, now costs a staggering £1,002 - making it the first time passengers have been asked to pay such a high price for a UK journey since rail services began in 1825.
The record-breaking fare emerged in a survey by rail expert Barry Doe. It shows that since privatisation in the mid-Nineties fares for long-distance trips have soared by up to three times inflation.
A first-class 'walk-on' return from London to Manchester was £134 in 1995, the last year British Rail set all fares, but has trebled to £387.
Even inter-city fares 'capped' by legislation put in place at privatisation have risen far more than inflation.
In 1995 the cheapest 'walk-on' return to Plymouth was £39, but is now £72. This is a rise of 85 per cent compared with inflation of 45 per cent over the same period.
Rail enthusiast Michael Palin, whose first TV travelogue was a train trip to Kyle of Lochalsh, said: 'The fare is staggering. Fares do seem to be rising and complicated. If you're good on the internet you can spend a couple of hours and get good deals.
'If you're not so good you can end up paying £1,000. This is what happens in a free-market economy where railways have been privatised. I don't think this is a journey I'll be doing.'

Tories to sell-off entire Royal Mail if they win power

2009-10-30T15:28:00.002Z

The Daily Mail reports:

A Conservative government would press ahead with plans to privatise Royal Mail and the party believes there would be more bidders if the striking Communication Workers Union is defeated.

The Tories are keen to sell off the entire service, rather than just the 30 per cent stake that Business Secretary Lord Mandelson wants to off-load.

It has emerged that Ken Clarke, the shadow Tory business secretary, had met potential bidders for Royal Mail and is said to be ready to include plans for full privatisation in the first Queen's Speech after a Tory general election victory.

The Tories are also looking to introduce measures that would ban strike action that was not supported by a majority of all workers being called out on strike.

Forensic Science Service set for sale

2009-10-26T18:53:00.000Z

The Mail on Sunday reports:

The Forensic Science Service, which analyses crime scene evidence in England and Wales, is gearing up to be privatised.
A leaked Government briefing document for those on the panel who interviewed Dr Simon Bennett, the new FSS chief executive, makes it clear that his role would include readying the organisation for a sale.
Mike Sparam, negotiating officer for the Prospect union, said: 'We obtained a document that told the panel that the new appointment would be to drive privatisation in a similar way to QinetiQ.'
Bennett, a former managing director at defence group QinetiQ which was privatised six years ago, started at the FSS just a few weeks ago.
Since then the organisation has announced the closure of three of its seven laboratories with the loss of 700 jobs and announced that the DNA database will be handled by the National Policing Improvement Agency. This means the FSS can be sold without the Government losing control of crucial files.
The FSS's remaining four laboratories will concentrate on specific crime investigation areas, including cold cases, similar to the work dramatised in BBC's Waking The Dead.
Sparam said: 'The company will no longer be able to provide the service it once had after having slashed its workforce by 40 per cent.

Poor Casualties of the new Cold War

2009-10-25T19:41:00.001Z

Fron The Sunday Express, 25th October 2009.

THE second biggest power supplier in Britain is due to announce bumper profits next month.
Scottish and Southern Energy, which has nine million customers, has already forecast that pretax profits for the six months to the end of September will be significantly higher than last year’s £303million.
Speculation is rife that the company could announce profits for the period of nearly £600million. But with average annual household energy bills standing at £1,239 after a 42 per cent rise last year, any rise will enrage consumers.
Power suppliers, many of them foreign owned, say they need to make money to invest in new infrastructure but price comparison website uswitch.com believes there is plenty of scope for another price cut.
Uswitch.com said household bills have fallen by only four per cent from last year’s high, despite energy on the wholesale market being relatively cheap all year. Experts at energy consultancy McKinnon & Clarke have branded the situation “scandalous” and say that the energy companies have a stranglehold on the market.

Britain a democracy? You're having a laugh

2009-10-22T13:27:00.004+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, on the pro-privatisation policies of Britain's three main parties, appears in the Morning Star.

Do you remember the days when political commentators in Britain used to sneer that US "democracy" merely meant the choice between two identical pro-big business parties?

That was when there were genuine differences between Labour, Conservatives and the Liberals on a variety of key issues. But those days are long gone.

The reality is that the Britain of 2009 is to all intents and purposes a one-party state. Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are merely wings of the "capital party" - the same capital party which has governed Britain since 1979.

In 1997 capital decided it needed to change the faces at the top of the ruling junta as they'd got a bit stale, so we got "new" Labour and grinning Tony instead of the old Tories and the grey-haired John Major.

Now capital has decided that in order to keep up the charade that we live in a democracy it's time for another cosmetic regime change and so the "new" Tories, with Dave "Tony Blair mark II" Cameron, will be wheeled back in. Change we can believe in. Not.

Anyone who doubts the thesis should consider the recent pronouncements our three main parties have been making about privatisation.

Two weeks ago Prime Minister Gordon Brown - the man who wants you to think he's a social democrat - announced a fire sale of publicly owned assets including the Tote, the Dartford Crossing, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the student loan book and the Royal Mint.

The Tory reaction was not to criticise Brown over the principle of selling off state assets but to claim that the measures would "do little to solve the problems" of alleged government overspending.

"Given the state the country is in, it is probably necessary but it is no substitute for a long-term plan to get the country to live within its means," a party spokesman said.
The Tories then announced further privatisation of their own, with uber neocon shadow defence secretary Liam Fox telling the BBC's Andrew Marr at the weekend that the Met Office - in public ownership since its establishment in 1854 - may be flogged off too.
And we know that serial privatiser Ken Clarke is simply itching to privatise the Post Office if his party gets into power.

The Lib Dems, like the Tories, have no problem with Brown's fire sale in principle. Their quibble is with the timing.
"Given the state of the public finances, asset sales, at least in principle, make sense," said deputy leader Vince Cable.
"However as we saw with the sale of the defence technology company QinetiQ, this government does not have a good track record in getting the taxpayer a good price from asset sales."
If the Lib Dems do have a share of power after the next election, then even our motorways and major trunk roads may be owned by the private sector, judging by the enthusiastic reaction Cable gave to a recent plan by investment bankers NM Rothschild calling for the government to sell off roads overseen by the Highways Agency.

The Financial Times quoted Cable as saying of the Rothschild plan: "This is an attractive, positive idea which could release considerable resources to the public finances and may have real environmental merits.
"The scale of it is vast - it makes rail privatisation look like small beer."

Let's recap. If Labour wins the next general election we'll get more privatisation, if the Conservatives win we'll get more privatisation and if the Lib Dems win - or hold a share of power - we'll get more privatisation.

All this when opinion polls show that it's public ownership and not privatisation that the public wants. Britain a democracy? You're having a laugh.

The sight of our three main parties trying to outdo each other on what public assets they'd flog off shows us quite clearly where the real power lies.
Capital won't be satisfied until every asset currently in public ownership is in private hands.

Privatisation may be terrible news for consumers, employees and for the taxpayer, who is nearly always short-changed.
But for investment banks like Goldman Sachs and NM Rothschild - described by the Financial Times as the "architect of several privatisations" - it's a big money-spinner.
And of course the companies and financial institutions which buy the sold-off state assets, often at knock-down prices, make a killing too.
And then there are the ministers who sell off public assets and then pop up on the boards of privatised companies shortly afterwards.

The question is what can we, the people, do about it?

The realisation that Britain is a one-party state where capital calls the shots may be demoralising at first, but the positive thing is that it can help to frame our response.

We need to focus on direct action outside Parliament and campaign on a local and national level.

Hungary shows us the way.

In the southern city of Pecs, rising anger from local people over rocketing water bills led the town's mayor to send security guards to the city's waterworks in the middle of the night to reclaim it from the French multinational privateer Suez Environment.

The company's spokesman has complained and has threatened legal action, but it won't get much sympathy from local residents, 94 per cent of whom support the mayor's stance. The mayor of Pecs acted because the local people had had enough. It's time we followed their example. Don't get angry, get even, the old adage goes.
But if we really are going to get even with the privateers and stop privatisation once and for all we need to get angrier.

Why should we put up with the highest train fares in Europe and being forced to stand in toilets when we have paid thousands of pounds for our season ticket?
Why should we accept having to pay rip-off bills for our water in a country famous for its wet weather?

We wouldn't sit back calmly and allow a burglar to enter our house and take away our furniture and television, so why should we let corporate thieves get their greedy hands on our public assets?

Working together to fight privatisation is essential. The battle our postal workers are fighting to save the 350-year-old Royal Mail as a public service is one which should involve all of us. The RMT's fight for a publicly owned railway is our fight too. Never forget that we are the many. The pro-privatisation spivs are the few.

Important battles lie ahead in the next few months. It's high time we made our numbers felt.

Conservatives may privatise the Met Office

2009-10-18T20:26:00.003+01:00

The BBC reports:

A Conservative government would consider privatising the Met Office, shadow defence secretary Liam Fox has suggested to the BBC.
The Tories are committed to reducing Ministry of Defence costs by a quarter and this could include selling assets such as the Met Office.
Mr Fox told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show there was a "very strong case" for looking at offloading MoD assets.
He disputed suggestions that 22,000 MoD jobs could go as costs are cut.
Mr Fox said the Conservatives' policy had to be "about giving things to the front line", adding: "We can't afford to have 16% of the whole civil service in the MoD."
'Do these deliver?'
Asked how a Tory government would make savings, he said: "It's also big structures like the fact the MoD owns the Met Office, with all the costs, salaries, pensions."
Questioned about privatising the Met Office, Mr Fox said: "There's a very strong case to look at the assets of the MoD and say do these deliver anything for the front line?"
The Met Office, which provides the UK's weather forecasts, was established in 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade and later became part of the MoD.

CPO co-founder Neil Clark comments: It seems that Labour and the Conservatives are trying to out-do each other over who will flog off most publicly-owned assets after the next election. Even though opinion polls show clearly that the British public want public ownership, not further privatisation.

Privatisation on parole

2009-10-15T16:18:00.003+01:00

This article by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, on the fightback against privatisation in Hungary, appears in the New Statesman.

Twenty years ago, Hungary's decision to open its border with Austria triggered the dramatic events that led to the fall of communism in eastern Europe. But today the country is fighting the neoliberal economic model imposed after 1989.

In Pécs, a historic city in the south, the local authority has reacted to public anger over soaring water bills by sending security guards to seize the local waterworks from the French company Suez Environment and to prevent its management from entering the building.

A 48.05 per cent stake in the city's water company was sold to the French multinational, which supplies water to 76 million people worldwide, in 1995. The company also receives an annual "management fee" of 120 million forint (£419,000).
The mayor of Pécs, Zsolt Páva, has accused Suez of profiteering and a lack of transparency, and the town cancelled the contract with effect from the end of September. Suez is countering with legal proceedings. "If 20 commandos arrive at 3am and occupy somewhere, that is not a European solution, and is undoubtedly illegal," a company manager said.

But Suez, whose turnover last year was €12.4bn (£11.5bn), should not expect much sympathy from local people, struggling to make ends meet in an economy where real wages are forecast to fall by up to 3.5 per cent this year. In a poll, 94 per cent said they supported the local authority.

It's not the first time the French company's record has been challenged. The pressure group Food and Water Watch charges Suez with a "range of abusive practices that place profit before the human right to water", including refusing to extend services to poorer areas, cutting off water if people are unable to pay, and "raising rates to unaffordable levels".

Opposition to privatisation is high, so, with a spring election looming, even neoliberal politicians are having to change their tune: in June, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai said he would prevent privatisation of the water supply. Multinationals may not like it, but 20 years on from capital's conquest of eastern Europe, public ownership, not privatisation, is the vote-winner.

CPO Press Release on the Government's Fire-Sale of state assets

2009-10-11T20:38:00.003+01:00

SUNDAY 11th OCTOBER 2009

The Campaign For Public Ownership strongly opposes the government’s plan for a fire-sale of state assets in order to cut the public deficit.
It beggars belief that after Britain’s disastrous experience of privatisation, anyone still believes that selling off the family silver can improve the public finances in the long-term.
The Tote, the Dartford crossing, the channel tunnel rail link, and the Student Loan book and other assets earmarked for sale by Gordon Brown should be kept in public ownership.
If the government does want to save money, then why doesn’t it listen to the majority of the British public and bring our troops back from an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, which currently costs the taxpayer £2.6bn a year?
It’s time to call an end to the Great Privatisation Rip-Off and for all concerned citizens to fight to stop any further sale of publicly owned assets.

The Pillage of the Post Office

2009-10-10T10:29:00.001+01:00

Martin Kelly writes:

News Corporation (prop. K. R. Murdoch, OA, KCSG, PORNO) has thrown down the gauntlet and issued an ultimatum that the Royal Mail must 'modernise or privatise'. The British economy has been thoroughly modernised and privatised over the past 30 years - they've sure modernised and privatised the hell out of us. Let's see where we are.

One would have thought that the areas in which private economic activity is highest is reflected in the madcap freneticism of advertising. If this contention holds true for the modern United Kingdom, then the only things we are doing all day long are buying car insurance and calling telephone directory enquiry services. If I see another smug, self-satisfied mouthbreathing bastard vacantly chanting about the wonderful deal they got through http://www.carinsurancetartsbehavelikesheep.com/, their tongues almost lolling in ecstasy, or another Slavonic sock puppet of a type that who wouldn't have been funny if it had been put beside Basil Brush or Charlie Cairoli on children's TV circa 1978, the controls might go through the TV.

The real scandal of the Royal Mail is how nobody, absolutely nobody, seems to be focussing on how its pension deficit is the result of a botched Tory law which enabled its management to take a 'contribution holiday', in other words to unilaterally exempt itself from its contractual obligations to its staff, between 1990 and 2003. The 'contribution holiday' was one of those business-friendly botched Tory mechanisms for ensuring that those and such as those do not have to feel that 'we're all in it together'. Whilst encouraging, the Labour conference's motion that the public purse should bail out the deficit is unlikely to make much headway, not if the recent history of the Labour Party is anything to go by. Too many bankers' pensions to pay.

The Deliberate Destruction of the Royal Mail

2009-10-08T11:02:00.003+01:00

By Martin Meenagh, co-founder of the CPO. The article also appears on his blog.

You don't need conspiracies in England. Things just happen.

So, for instance, a government decides that the Royal Mail needs to be privatised. It's about to leave office, those champagne and guacamole parties have to be paid for, and the economy has been ruined. Things would look better from the seat of a privatised company board after the defeat, and it would serve the country to sell off that postal pension fund and pretend the outcome is revenue too.

It goes without saying that your opponents agree with you, since we all have the same economic ideas, and anyway, we're in a crisis, and, well, you can't treat the taxpayers as though they were bankers and subsidise them. That would suggest that they were, well important. Foolish idea.

But, oh, those foolish lobby fodder in the commons for once represent the views of the people and don't go along with you, so what can you do? Provoke industrial action? Replace large numbers of trained and dedicated staff with new people on shorter contracts and encourage them to lie? Run down the service from an efficient, morning-delivery one to some rubbish parody (which, admittedly, you were doing for ages anyway), and then charge people for a fraction of the old standard? Provoke a strike that wrecks small businesses and damages those stone age people who still pay bills by cheque? Trash major deals?

Yes, that'd work. You wouldn't even have to plot it. Motivated by depression, in some bizarre and counter intuitive way--because they didn't get the sense of satisfaction that comes with trousering other people's money and undermining staff that motivates many British managers when your privatisation bill was withdrawn--the administration of the service will do it automatically.

Then people would be so sick of the Royal Mail no-one would oppose a sale. Champagne all round, I think.

Why do people keep falling for it?

Public Ownership Quote of the Week: Roland Hulme

2009-09-27T12:47:00.003+01:00

In response to this post on CPO co-founder Neil Clark's blog, which highlighted how, despite 70% of the public being in favour of renationalisation of the railways, none of Britain's main three political parties supported such a move, Tory blogger Roland Hulme commented:

Hey, I'm a shameless Tory bastard, but even I have to admit that this is a joke. There's no longer a democracy in Britain - just a ruling elite deciding what's best for the plebs.

And shameless Tory bastard that I am, I freakin' LOVE the SNCF of France. I'm all for the free market, but train networks in countries as small as the UK should be owned by one company (and let's be realistic, that's probably a state-owned one.)

I live in New York now (well, New Jersey) and NJ Transit is state owned. If the bloody yanks can get their heads around it, why can't Britain?

Why indeed?

Privatisation of prisons 'morally repugnant'

2009-09-16T12:08:00.001+01:00

Report by Paddy McGuffin in the Morning Star.

The privatisation of the country's prisons would amount to incarceration for profit, the head of the Prison Officers Association has said.

Colin Moses of the POA made an impassioned speech decrying the proposed privatisation of the nation's jails as "morally repugnant," to strong backing by the Trades Union Congress.

Mr Moses stated: "We have spent the last two years looking at public-sector workers being under attack. As a member of the Prison Service I have felt that attack first hand. I have heard people baulk at the idea that they could privatise water but when you talk about privatising prisons you go even further."

He insisted that those prisons currently under private ownership were failing miserably.
"Private-sector prisons are at the bottom of their own league tables. Privatisation has failed throughout western Europe.
"It is touted as being a panacea but there have been no fewer suicides and as many if not more assaults. The goal of private prisons is to smash public-sector unions," Mr Moses stated.

The proposed privatisation would be akin to stepping back in time, he said. "It is about making profit from incarceration and if that is the case we are going back to Victorian times and locking people up for profit and putting debtors in prison. Is that what we are going back to?"

In a direct challenge to the government and Prime Minister, Mr Moses reminded Congress of a comment made by Jack Straw in 1997 in which he described privatisation of the prison system as "morally repugnant."

"What was morally repugnant in 1997 should be morally repugnant today," he argued. "I would like to hear Gordon Brown say stop privatisation now."
The motion was backed by the Civil Service Union PCS. PCS representative Austin Harney said that the privatisation of prisons had been "a catalogue of failure and mismanagement."

He pointed out that the very first example of privatisation in the criminal justice system was transportation to Australia, adding that that had been a disaster.
"Privatisation has been a flawed experiment and nowhere more so than in the criminal justice system."

He concluded by calling on all trade unions in the justice sector to join forces to oppose privatisation - not only of the prison system but also of the courts system, in which many of his members worked.

NM Rothschild pitches motorway privatisation plan

2009-09-13T18:35:00.004+01:00

First they came for heavy industry. Then the energy sector. Then bus and train transport. Then water and air traffic control.

Now capital is pushing for the privatisation of Britain's motorway network.

From Business Times:

A radical plan to raise £100 billion by privatising the motorway network has been presented to the three main political parties by NM Rothschild, the influential investment bank.

Rothschild, an architect of several privatisations, made its pitch in the weeks running up to the summer recess on July 21, Whitehall sources said. Bankers told leading politicians that the sale of the roads overseen by the Highways Agency — all motorways and most big trunk roads — could help revive battered public finances.

Toll-road companies and infrastructure funds would compete to operate and maintain stretches of the network.

In one version of the scheme, the government would pay for upkeep through a system of “shadow” tolls. A more radical, and less politically palatable, option would be for companies to charge motorists directly through toll booths or electronic card readers. The RAC Foundation, a motorists’ group, advocated privatisation in a report last week.

The Rothschild plan has already won the support of Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader and Treasury spokesman.

“This is an attractive, positive idea which could release considerable resources to the public finances and may have real environmental merits,” Cable said. “The scale of it is vast — it makes rail privatisation look like small beer.”

Prviateers take older bus users for a ride

2009-08-19T19:39:00.005+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in The Morning Star.

With pensioners facing means-testing for their bus passes, Neil Clark turns to Belgium. If it can manage decent public-owned public transport, why can't we?

They already have to try to make ends meet on the lowest state pension in the whole of the European Union. They have to live with the fear of having to sell their home if forced to go into care.

Now Britain's long-suffering pensioners face the prospect of a new humiliation - having their free bus travel means-tested.

A recent consultants' report commissioned by the Local Government Association criticised the current scheme for being "targeted too widely" and while both local authorities and the government insisted that they had no plans to introduce means testing in the near future, the economic climate means that free bus travel is likely to be under increasing pressure, especially - if as predicted - the Tories return to power next spring.

But there is one way that local authorities could save money on the scheme and free bus travel for Britain's elderly can be maintained. It's called public ownership.

The reason why the current scheme costs so much money - it cost local authorities £1 billion last year - is that bus travel in Britain is operated not by the local authorities themselves or by a state-owned national bus company but by profiteering private firms.

These companies will use every trick in the book to extract as much money as possible from the public purse.

A report in the Daily Mail quoted the words of one local authority official, who said of the private bus companies: "They are creaming us."
The Mail's Steve Doughty reported: "Many older people tell stories of using their bus passes for short journeys, but find that drivers log them as tickets to the end of the route."

My own next-door neighbour, who is a pensioner, told me he nearly always gets a ticket to the end of the route, even if he has only asked the driver for a stop less than a mile down the road.

Imagine this scam taking place every day up and down Britain and the huge cost of the scheme is no longer such a surprise.

Overall, Britain's private bus companies received a staggering £2.5 billion from the public purse last year. And the chief executive of one of them, Go Ahead's Keith Ludeman - who received a salary of £910,000 last year - has the nerve to say, in relation to the free bus scheme that "pensioners cannot be given a blank cheque."

It really doesn't have to be like this.

Bringing all bus travel back into public ownership would mean that the free bus scheme for Britain's old folk could be administered much more efficiently and at much less cost to taxpayers.

Having just one provider of bus services in a region would bring huge benefits.
At present, local authorities have to pay different bus companies each time a passenger changes buses. So authorities in towns like Preston, which is the main transport nexus in northern Lancashire, are adversely affected by the scheme.
And, as Morning Star reader Graham Hall pointed out in his letter on Tuesday, if the bus companies were municipally owned, the revenue would come back to the local authorities and not go to the pockets of private shareholders.

We don't have to look too far for an example of how things should be done.

Just across the North Sea in Belgium, public transport remains in public ownership. The advantages of having an integrated, state-owned system are immediately apparent to anyone travelling in the country.

Fares, which are calculated by distance and not by "market pricing" are reasonable, trains and buses run on time and the ticketing system is easy to understand.
And pensioners get a cracking deal too. Seniors over 65 - including visitors - pay only €4 (£3.45) for a return second-class trip anywhere in the country, except on weekends from mid-May to mid-September.

But even outside of this period, fares for the elderly are heavily discounted - costing less than a third of the standard fare.

On buses and trams, all transport is free for over-65s, while those aged from 60 to 65 are able to buy a special yearly pass, costing €182 in Flanders - that's €0.50 a day.

And of top of all this, Belgian pensioners receive a state pension that is around 60 per cent of the country's average earnings - compared to their counterparts in Britain whose pension is only 15 per cent.

If Belgium can run an integrated, publicly owned public transport system - and do the right thing by its old folk - why can't we?

Learning from our European neighbours

It's official. While Britain's "dynamic" and "flexible" privatised economy shrank by 0.8 per cent in the three months to June, the economy of those two European countries Thatcherite ideologues like to regard as "unreformed" dinosaurs - France and Germany - grew by 0.3 per cent.

The reason why France and Germany are officially out of recession while Britain still languishes in it is the sort of economy the countries run.

As The Guardian's Larry Eliot says, France and Germany "are less dependent on financial services, tend to have lower levels of consumer debt and have established long-term relationships between banks and companies which guarantee that credit lines are not pulled at the first sign of trouble."

France and Germany, while flirting with neoliberalism in recent years, have never embraced it as wholeheartedly as Britain's political elite.

The result is that both countries still maintain a manufacturing base and both still have vital services such as transport in public ownership.

Yet incredibly, despite the disastrous consequences "free-market" ideology has had for the British economy, neoliberals in the EU are still trying to impose their dogma on the rest of the continent, by trying to force European countries which haven't adopted Thatcherism to follow the flawed British path.

The fact is that it's Britain which should be learning from the rest of Europe - and not the other way round.

CPO Press Release on the threat to the free bus travel scheme for Britain's Pensioners

2009-08-07T14:37:00.002+01:00

The Campaign For Public Ownership strongly opposes the means-testing of free bus travel for Britain’s old age pensioners, as recommended by the Local Government Association’s consultants’ report.

The reason why the scheme has proved so expensive is that, in the words of one official, privatised bus companies are ’creaming’ local authorities and routinely overcharging them for transporting pensioners. In the Daily Mail, Steve Doughty reports : “Many older people tell stories of using their bus passes for short journeys- but finding that drivers log them as tickets to the end of the route”.

Keith Adelman, the chief executive of bus privateer Go Ahead has complained that ‘pensioners cannot be given a blank cheque’. Adelman’s company- in common with other bus companies has received millions of pounds in public subsidies, and Adelman himself drew a salary of over £910,000 last year.

It‘s not been Britain’s hard-pressed pensioners who have been given a ‘blank cheque’ but our profiteering private bus operators, which have made a fortune from the British taxpayer since Margaret Thatcher's destruction of the publicly-owned National Bus Company.

The free bus scheme for old age pensioners would be far cheaper to administer, if instead of coughing up ever larger subsidies to profiteering private companies, all bus travel was brought back into public ownership- as it is in Belgium.

We're outsourcing the future, to be built by Thatcher and Philip K Dick

2009-08-06T15:11:00.001+01:00

Don't be fooled. The drive to privatise goes on. How long till schools, prisons and hospitals all sport flashing corporate logos?

Here, anyway, is what increasingly seems to be the future: slick corporate logos flashing from prisons, hospitals, schools, detention centres, defence facilities, police stations and more, and a cut-price society pitched somewhere between Margaret Thatcher and Philip K Dick. Real-life dystopias, let us not forget, tend to arrive by stealth; whatever the political fashion, we need to start talking about all this again – and fast.

By John Harris, The Guardian, 28th July 2009.

Derail this Great Train Robbery

2009-07-06T19:39:00.003+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark appears in the Sunday Express.

Nationalise the losses, privatise the gains. That’s the Government’s policy when it comes to the banks and now, it seems, it applies to the railways, too.

Transport Minister Lord Adonis last week announced that the Government would take back the East Coast line, the busiest inter-city route in the country, from private operator National Express, which had warned it was likely to default on a franchise payment.

Adonis says public ownership will only be temporary and the Government will tender for a new operator from the end of 2010.

So why should the taxpayer be expected to pick up a £700million bill now and another private operator be allowed to come along and cream off the profits later? Why should National Express, which made more than £80million profit last year, be allowed to keep its other two rail franchises?

Franchising has meant that the private firms have effectively struck a no-lose bet. If business goes well, they make huge profits. If it doesn’t, they walk away and the taxpayer picks up the tab.

Rather than being a temporary, emergency measure, the Government’s decision to take this line into public ownership should be the first step in the re-establishment of a publicly owned railway. Such a policy would not only be popular, it would save a fortune.

Britain’s privatised train companies have been milking the public purse for years. The totals involved make the amount that Ronnie Biggs and his Great Train Robbers stole pale into insignificance but while Biggs remains behind bars, Britain’s 21st- century train robbers continue to fleece the public. Fares have consistently risen above the rate of inflation and, earlier this year, some went up by as much as 11 per cent. In May, fares for railcard users rose by up to 50 per cent. It really doesn’t have to be like this.

For an example of how a unitary publicly-owned railway can deliver enormous benefits to users, we don’t need to look far. In Belgium, fares are up to 20 times cheaper than in Britain, while the ticketing system is simpler.

In Britain, there can be up to 200 different fares for the same journey. In Belgium, the price of a ticket is determined by distance: a system that used to operate in Britain, too, before “market-pricing”. Prices don’t go up in the rush hour: Belgian Railways simply puts on more trains, which it can do because, unlike Britain’s privatised rail operators, it owns its own rolling stock. Moreover, Belgian fares actually drop by 50 per cent at weekends to make it easier for people to get out and about. The fundamental difference between the railways in Belgium and the rest of mainland Europe, and those in Britain, is that there, railways are publicly owned and run as a public service.

In Britain, since privatisation, the need to maximise profits has come before all other considerations, often with disastrous consequences for passengers. Because hiring extra carriages from the leasing companies is deemed too expensive, Britain’s rail firms try to ration existing capacity by pricing people off trains. The result is frequent overcrowding.

Restoring the railways to public ownership could bring relief to Britain’s long-suffering passengers and usher in a new golden age. The reopening of stations closed by the misguided Dr Beeching in the Sixties, the introduction of extra services and the reduction in fares to the European average would help persuade millions of Britons to leave their cars and take the train.

This summer, many of us will experience the delights of rail travel in Belgium and other European countries.

The question we need to be asking Lord Adonis is: why, if other countries can have affordable, reliable, publicly-owned railways with easy to understand ticket pricing, do we in Britain have to put up with such a ludicrously expensive, fragmented and user-unfriendly system?

Press Release on the Nationalisation of the East Coast Line

2009-07-01T09:00:00.002+01:00

The Campaign for Public Ownership welcomes the news that the government has refused to re-negotiate its contract with failed privateer National Express and is to take the East Coast railway line into public ownership. But the CPO believes that rather than being a one-off emergency measure, the decision to nationalise the East Coast Line should be the first step in the complete renationalisation of the entire network.

Is there anyone- outside the extreme neoliberal ideologues of the Adam Smith Institute- and the directors and shareholders of the profiteering rail companies- who still thinks railway privatisation has been a good idea? The government has been paying over four times more in subsidies to the private train operators than the much-maligned British Rail received in its final years. And for that the travelling public has received a far worse service.

Renationalising the railways would save the government and the British taxpayer
a small fortune. It would also be a very popular move by the government, opinion polls show that over 70% of the public support renationalisation.

The Campaign for Public Ownership calls for the immediate renationalisation of Britain’s railways and the reintroduction of a simple, easy to understand distance-based pricing system.

Thirteen years on from the disastrous privatisation of British Rail, it’s time to call an end to Britain’s Great Train Robbery.

CPO Press Release on the Profiteering of Britain's Privatised Energy Companies

2009-06-25T10:10:00.003+01:00

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE CAMPAIGN FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP ON THE OBSCENE PROFITEERING OF BRITAIN’S PRIVATISED ENERGY COMPANIES

Here we go again.

A newly published report by the watchdog Consumer Focus says that Britain’s privatised energy companies have over-charged customers by £1.6bn having failed to pass on billions of pounds of savings made from the falling price of gas and electricity.

Consumer Focus states the fall in wholesale prices has saved energy companies around £1.6 billion, but this has not been reflected in average domestic bills.
Energy bills rose by 42% last year, with the average household paying £1,293 for the year.

The Campaign for Public Ownership believes that the only long-term solution to the problem of energy company profiteering is to restore the energy companies to public ownership.

The problem lies in the ownership structure of the energy companies. All of them are Public Limited Companies, whose overriding aim is to maximise profits for shareholders. That's what PLCs do. Instead of reacting with horror to the entirely predictable news that PLCs are putting the interests of shareholders before Britain's long-suffering energy consumers, we should instead be calling for the government to take the one step that will lead to lower energy prices in the long term. Restoring the energy companies to public ownership will mean that prices can be lowered, as there will be no shareholder dividends to pay.

Water bills to rise by 17%

2009-06-22T16:12:00.002+01:00

From the Daily Mail:

Households face rises in their water bills of 17 per cent over the next five years.

The increase comes as Thames Water today reveals profits surging to £605million - the highest for a British water supplier.

The company, which has already put up bills by a third in the past five years, said average annual household water bills are to rise from £283 to £331 between next year and 2015.

Londoners will be hit hardest next year by water bill increases of 10.5 per cent, according to the company's five-year business plan.

Private Health Companies milking the NHS for £1bn for work they did not carry out

2009-06-11T10:30:00.001+01:00

From the Sunday Express

PRIVATE health companies have milked the NHS for £1billion for operations and treatments that were never carried out.

The findings, gathered through Freedom of Information requests, have led to calls for an inquiry into flagship Independent Sector Treatment Centres.

Last night new Health Secretary Andy Burnham faced demands to disclose the Government’s deals.

The ISTCs were launched five years ago to allow private companies to help reduce NHS waiting lists.

Allyson Pollock, a finance expert who undertook the research, found some were under-used due to problems and other were unpopular because of their location.
She said: “There is nothing efficient about the NHS paying for thousands of operations that have not been carried out and the private sector pocketing the money.”

Which for real democracy?

2009-06-03T20:25:00.003+01:00

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in the Morning Star.

If you are a UK voter and supporter of public ownership, please read it before casting your vote in tomorrow's European Elections!

On democracy...

"The people of Britain are what is called a democracy," said Moung Ka.
"A democracy?" questioned Moung Thwa. "What is that?"
"A democracy," broke in Moung Shoogalay eagerly, "is a community that governs itself according to its own wishes and interests by electing accredited representatives who enact its laws and supervise and control their administration.
"Its aim and object is government of the community in the interests of the community."
"Then," said Moung Thwa, turning to his neighbour, "if the people of Britain are a democracy-"
"I never said they were a democracy," interrupted Moung Ka placidly.
"Surely we both heard you!" exclaimed Moung Thwa.
"Not correctly," said Moung Ka, "I said they are what is called a democracy."

From The Comments Of Moung Ka in The Square Egg by Saki.

After the revelations of the last few weeks there can be few people in Britain who would take issue with the cynical view of British "democracy" expressed by the great Edwardian comic writer Saki.

But it's not just the MPs' expenses scandal which damns our present system of government. It's the way the leading parties ignore public opinion on the most important issues of the day.

Take public ownership. Despite opinion polls showing a clear majority in favour of renationalising the railways, not one of our leading parties even considers the measure.
The neoliberal, pro-privatisation model has never been so unpopular, yet here we have an election where the four leading parties, according to opinion polls, can only offer more of the same.

Labour offers little for supporters of public ownership - the Labour government, despite Britain's disastrous experience of privatised railways, has been pushing for other European countries to "liberalise" their excellent domestic rail services.
The prospect of Virgin Trains, First Great Western and Arriva being allowed to run services in countries like Belgium is too depressing for words, but if Labour has its way, it could be happening a few years down the line.

In their Euro manifesto, the staunchly neoliberal Conservatives boast of being "strong defenders of the single market" and say that their aim is "working to open up new markets."

At the top of the party's list in the South East region in the poll, is MEP Daniel Hannan, an enthusiastic privateer.

In a recent appearance on Fox News in the US, Hannan claimed the NHS was a 60-year "mistake," which made people "iller" and he urged US viewers not to support plans for socialised health care.

The Liberal Democrats are singing from the same pro-competition hymn sheet. While the party did call for the renationalisation of Britain's railways in its 2005 manifesto, it has embraced a more "free-market" approach since the elevation to leadership of the Blairite banker's son Nick Clegg.

The policy to renationalise the railways has been dropped. Instead, all the talk is about opening markets and increasing "competition."

In its European elections manifesto, the party promises that "Liberal Democrat MEPs will continue our campaign to extend the single market in the areas of energy, financial services and transport to so that British firms can provide services across the EU."

So if you do want to see Stagecoach buses on the streets of Belgium, the "progressive" Lib Dems will be trying to make it happen.

Then there's UKIP, which if opinion polls are correct, could do very well in the poll. UKIP claims to be a "moderate democratic party." But there's nothing moderate about its economic policies. UKIP says that although it will maintain the "free at point of care" principle, it will "radically reform the working of the NHS."

On rail, it says that it will "make customer satisfaction number one for rail firms," but there's no talk of returning the railway to public ownership.

Tim Worstall, fourth on the party's list in the London region, is a fellow of the extreme neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, whose model of railway privatisation was adopted by the Major government in the mid 1990s. Worstall considers rail privatisation to have been "rather a success actually."

It's clear that the four parties currently leading the opinion polls offer nothing for supporters of public ownership.

So what about the other parties?

The Greens, to their credit, promise to spend £2 billion on a railway system "brought back into public ownership" and to reduce Britain's sky-high rail fares to the "European average."

Leading Green candidates, such as my fellow Morning Star columnist Derek Wall who is third on the party's list in the South East region, are strong supporters of public ownership.

It's disappointing though that the party's European manifesto does not pledge to renationalise bus transport as well - or bring back energy and utility companies into public ownership.

On the threats to Europe's state-owned health-care systems, the Green manifesto says that the party will "support moves for a framework to limiting market penetration into public services."

Limiting "market penetration" is clearly better than allowing it to run wild, but why not work to stop all market penetration into public services?

The Christian Party/Christian Peoples Alliance pledges that "multinational companies will be compelled to act in a transparent and accountable manner," but there is no mention of nationalisation in its programme.

The BNP opposes the privatisation of the Post Office and other "public services" including the NHS. It also supports renationalisation of the railways and the public utilities. But the party's racialist stance in other areas precludes it from being a party that progressives could consider supporting.

There are though two non-racialist parties standing in the Euro elections which are strong supporters of public ownership and unequivocal opponents of privatisation.

In its election campaign, No2EU - Yes to Democracy has drawn attention to the recent extension of European internal market rules to cover health care, which are designed to pave the way for private companies to take over state health-care systems, such as the NHS. No2EU leader Bob Crow, whose RMT union has consistently campaigned for the renationalisation of Britain's transport network and which has fought alongside fellow unions in Europe to fight privatisation, says that anyone who believes in "the NHS and public services should be voting No2EU."

The Socialist Labour Party, which, like No2EU, is fighting every seat in the elections, is also fervently committed to public ownership. The party invited me, in my capacity as co-founder of the Campaign for Public Ownership, to speak at the launch of its Euro elections campaign at the Hay Festival.

The SLP, which favours Britain's complete withdrawal from the EU, calls for the renationalisation of all industries and services privatised in the last 30 years.
Supporters of public ownership should use their vote in the election wisely to make sure it goes to parties opposed to the neoliberal privatisation agenda in Britain and the rest of Europe.

The prospect of Britain sending more enthusiastic privateers to Brussels at a time when the neoliberal model has never been more discredited would make a mockery of the idea that Britain is a democracy. Saki would regard such an outcome with a wry smile - as proof that he was right all along.

2009-06-02T08:44:00.002+01:00

Save The Royal Mail!

Opposing privatisation cuts across the political spectrum. As we realise just how much this country has been hollowed out, across parties and outlooks, more and more people are realising how privatisation functions as a way to socialise debt and privatise profit.

This morning sees an Excellent article from Martin Kelly on his site about how the euro-election results might be the perfect day to bury news about the Royal Mail--go read.

Nationalise Vauxhall!

2009-05-30T08:40:00.002+01:00

This post appears on the website of CPO supporter Charlie Marks, and is reproduced with kind permission of the author.

Car production in the UK is efficient, let no one fool you about this. Plants which produce cars are linked to plants which produce parts – there’s a supply chain to consider. Also, many work in other services which are dependent upon skilled workers spending their wages.

We need to have cars which are energy efficient – though effective demand has slumped globally, we all know this is due to our chaotic economic system, not to the car being made obsolete.

It’s not Rover!

Four years ago Rover went under – the government could have nationalised the company and set up a joint-venture with the Chinese, the company ended up in China selling to their domestic market.

Instead the government let Rover go, and now many of the skilled workers formerly employed by the company are in lower skilled and lower paid jobs.

The same mistake cannot be made again – the government has bailed out the banks which have failed to get lending again.

There’s no doubt that if Vauxhall is bailed out, we’ll see a return – with new energy efficient cars being made at UK plants for sale across the world as demand recovers.

Protected?

Whilst other EU govts get their checquebooks out, the UK govt is nowhere to be seen. At the negotiations, there’s no one to represent car workers in Luton and Ellesmere Port – remember, UK workers are easiest for big businesses to sack in the EU.
It’s a sickening sight – “Lord” Peter Mandelson pretending he’s got a guarantee against mass lay-offs and blaming unions for scaring workers when he knows that’s what will happen.

At least he’s the sense to stop wittering on about protectionism – we all know that when the rich cry poverty the money flows from the government to protect their corrupt system.

But when thousands of skilled workers face uncertainty, New Labour are too spineless to step up to defend them, fearful of a backlash from the super-rich. Mandelson and co. are so eager to please them that they will allow no concessions to working people – look at his actions over Royal Mail where most people oppose privatisation, even within New Labour.

The threat of a good example!

Car workers at Luton and Ellesmere Port can follow the example of the Visteon workers who occupied their plants to demand justice.

There would be no shortage of support, no limit to the solidarity that others would demonstrate.

We own the banks now – we can get them to invest in the car industry.

Don’t despair – organise, occupy, nationalise!