Water, water everywhere, but its too expensive to drink

This column by CPO co-founder Neil Clark ,on England's great water privatisation rip-off, appears in the Morning Star.

The Crazy Gang. The Keystone Kops. The Marx Brothers. Just three of the all-time great comedy troupes. To which we need to add another name - the Institution of Civil Engineers. 


Last week this bunch of comedians issued a report which claimed that water in Britain is too cheap and recommended the introduction of compulsory metering. 


It would be a hilarious, side-splitting joke if only the subject under discussion wasn't quite so serious. 


In England water prices have risen by an average of 5.7 per cent since April, nearly double the rate of inflation. 


More and more people are finding it harder to pay their water bills. Research by the Consumer Council for Water has found that one in seven of all customers feel their charges are now unaffordable. 


Far from being too cheap, water in England is actually too expensive - and the reason is a simple one. It's called privatisation. 


You can read the whole of the article here.

Neil Clark: Put Britain's trains back on track

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.

Doing nothing to the NHS IS an option

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.

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

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

Neil Clark: Open Wide for Public Service Destruction

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.

All Aboard the Gravy Train

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.

The unfunny joke of energy policy

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.

The Great Royal Mail Betrayal

This column by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears in today's Morning Star.

A royal disgrace

First they came for the aerospace industry. Then the oil. After that electricity, gas and water. Then the railways. Then air traffic control. Thirty years after the great theft of Britain's national assets was launched and the corporate profiteers still aren't satisfied. Now they want Royal Mail.

The three leading contenders for a 49.9 per cent stake in the Royal Mail are Dutch postal operator TNT, Deutsche Post subsidiary DHL and private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. The Sunday Express informs us that "TNT and CVC are serious in their intentions."

In fact, CVC is very serious in its intentions - it has been lobbying the government to sell off a stake in Royal Mail since 2005.

Founded in 1981, CVC describes itself as a "global private equity and investment advisory firm headquartered in Luxembourg with a network of 19 offices across Europe, Asia and the USA."

To see how a CVC-owned Royal Mail might operate, we need only look at the way the company ran another British institution it acquired, along with another private equity firm Permira - the Automobile Association.

Since its transformation from a mutual organisation to one owned by private equity sharks, the whole ethos of this once much-loved British institution has changed.
Over 3,000 staff have been laid off. The organisation consequently slumped from first to third place for response times.

In 2006, the AA chief executive conceded on an audio tape leaked to a national newspaper that the slimmed-down workforce was struggling to get to stranded motorists.

The prospective sell-off of the Royal Mail is already providing lucrative business for some.

TNT is being advised by the international law firm Allen & Overy, while CVC is working with Clifford Chance, the largest legal firm in the world. TNT has reportedly been sounding out investment bankers to advise it, including new Labour's favourite money men at Goldman Sachs.

And what do the British public think of the planned sell-off? Not a lot. According to a new poll, around 75 per cent of Britons who had heard of the possibility of Royal Mail being sold opposed the idea.

The latest news is that the government, faced with the possible rebellion of 130 Labour MPs, may yet decide to drop its plans for privatisation.

Is Britain a democracy or a country where capital always gets what it wants?

We'll soon find out.


How the pendulum's swung

THIS month marks the 115th anniversary of former Tory PM Harold Macmillan's birth.

He famously lambasted Margaret Thatcher in 1985 for selling off the family silver and was among a group of one nation Tories whose thinking was shaped by the horrors of World War I and depression.

Under Macmillan's premiership, the welfare state expanded and Britain's large publicly owned sector, which included not only the commanding heights of the economy but also a travel agent and pubs in Carlisle, remained intact.

I'm sure that if "Supermac" and his fellow one nation Tories were to come back to life and engage in political debate, they would be denounced in the editorials of The Times and Daily Telegraph as "hard-leftists" for their pro-mixed economy views and opposition to Thatcherite economics.

Doesn't it show you have far the pendulum has swung when the grouse-moor Tories of 50years ago were further to the left than today's Labour Party?


Czechs take leaf from British book

YOU would have thought that, after the disastrous example of airport privatisation in Britain, no-one in their right mind would think of following suit.
But that's exactly what the neoliberal fanatics currently in charge of the Czech Republic are doing.

The Czech government - yes, that's the same one that enthusiastically supports the siting of the US anti-missile defence system in the country and backs the banning of the Young Communist League because it is in favour of public ownership - is keen to flog off Prague Airport, despite the fact it earns around 100 million euros (£99m) for the Czech state coffers every year.

Once again, there'll be rich pickings for Western capital. We are told that Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, NM Rothschild and JP Morgan are all in the frame to advise the Czech government on the 3 billion euros (£2.6bn) sale. Nice work if you can get it, eh?