New Labour leader Andy Burnham has claimed that nationalisation – taking Britain back to the pre-Thatcher 1970s – will cure the country’s ills. He’s in for a very nasty shock, says Tim Wallace in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
Grieving families, unable to bury their dead as gravediggers downed tools. Factories forced into a three-day week after a strike by miners. Hospitals blockaded by protesting NHS workers, ending all but emergency care.
In the minds of some, these were Britain’s glory days, the pre-Thatcher 1970s for which Andy Burnham pines.
The new leader of the Labour Party and Britain’s next Prime Minister has lamented a “series of wrong turns in the 1980s” – his teenage years – which, he believes, sent the country on the path to ruin.
“Political power was centralised and economic power was privatised,” he said in his coronation speech as Labour leader on Friday.
“The country surrendered control of the essentials, housing, water, energy, transport and left people exposed to higher costs.”
He lumps the Thatcher years and everything that followed, Tory or Labour, as “four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s [which] have not been kind to the places that built our party”.
His solution is “control” – more state ownership, more diktats from politicians.
Yet a survey of the 1970s and the following years suggest that was hardly a paradise for most Britons.
It is no coincidence that the years before Thatcher’s privatisations began, and when close to one worker in every three was employed by the state, strikes were at their peak.
In an average month in the 1970s, more than one million working days were lost to industrial action – hence the extraordinary disruption to ordinary life in the “winter of discontent” and other painful episodes of that fraught decade.
The peak came in September of 1979, four months after Margaret Thatcher’s first great General Election victory, when workers downed tools for a total of more than 11 million days.
The combination of privatisations, limits on union power and a smaller state meant strikers were never again able to wreak such havoc on ordinary people’s lives again.
Even with the long miners’ strikes, the 1980s only saw 600,000 days lost to industrial action in a typical month. In the 1990s and subsequent decades, the figure was crushed to around 50,000.
Union tactics not only cut off businesses and families from the essentials like power and healthcare. The combination of strikes plus turmoil in oil markets resulted in catastrophic inflation.
Inflation peaked at 25% in 1975, more than twice the pace of the recent cost of living crisis that followed the pandemic lockdown.
Rising prices were more pervasive 50 years ago, too, staying in double digits for half the decade, and never falling below 5%.
Worth reading in full.
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Unfortunately all of Andy’s ideas are not his own, but his puppet masters. He does as he is told, similar to his predecessor. It really is that simple folks.
I think it’s a mistake to think that Burnham thinks.
So, Burnham thinks that “four decades of the neoliberalism” was a mistake. Britain took the wrong path.
My question to him would be: what country is the example of what Britain should have done?
I’m not saying Britain has done particularly well but I have to say, looking around, most Western European countries followed the same path and face similar problems.
And the rest of the world? Mostly even worse.
Ideally.
Nationalise utilities, energy and transport into co-operatives with their workers having a vested interest in the success of the enterprise.
Nationalise Big Pharma and have stringent safety controls of vaccines, medicine, drugs etc.
Nationalise all banks operating in the UK.
That’s more optimistic than a half-full glass – I guess you’re too young to have experienced life with nationalised industries?
Then your guess would be wrong.
Workers at the time didn’t have a vested interest in the success of those industries and they were allowed to fail as the “establishment” didn’t want socialism anywhere in the world to be a success.
They still don’t.
Where will the money come from to buy these enterprises and how many £billions? Borrowing of course to add to the current £3 trillion debt.
Where will the money come from to capitalise these State-run enterprises, ensure positive cash-flow, invest to expand operations and update equipment, etc? Borrowing of course.
In the absence of private investors therefore no profit motive, an enterprise which cannot go bankrupt because it will perpetually be bailed out by the taxpayer, what will be the incentives for fiscal prudence, increasing labour productivity, increasing efficiency? None.
Workers have no vested interest in the success of the enterprise, just more and higher pay awards, because the enterprise doesn’t have to be a success, they will get paid anyway no matter his bad it is (see NHS, daily strikes in nationalised industries in the 60s/70s) out of the pockets of taxpayers in the private sector, and since the enterprise cannot go bankrupt they will never lose their jobs.
Nearly the whole economy was nationalised in the late 1940s by Labour, which was a disaster and made UK “The Sick Man of Europe” and requiring aid from the IMF.
Why would anybody not in a lunatic asylum… Read more »
All of them can make a profit that will go to the countries consolidated fund.
Run as co-operatives workers will share in the profits so they do have a vested interest.
The UK can find money for anything it wants so it can find money for nationalisation.
Banks are currently “too big to fail” and can’t go bust as tax payers are forced to bail them out. Answer? Nationalise them.
As a child of the 1950’s I lived through nationalisation and it was never given a fair chance by the capitalist system.
A socialist system, properly run and independent of any US or EU interference, can make it work.
More broadly, during the 1979–80 period, nationalised industries required an ongoing state subsidy of roughly \(\pounds 50\text{ million}\) per week. By 1993–94, these privatised counterparts were contributing \(\pounds 50\text{ million}\) per week to the Exchequer through corporation tax, interest, and dividends.
I thought the dinosaurs were dead.
It seems Burnham intends to build Jurrasic park in England’s green and pleasant land. It won’t end well.
I still don’t see how it happens. Forget for a moment my point about the failure of the Keynesian model to support failing industries, how does this pro-European’s socialist dream fit with EU law? Nationalisation is allowed by the EU, but not with state aid and I don’t see how changing the business model from a profit making industry to a mass employing, high cost, low fee charging industry will achieve what he wants without breaching the state subsidy rules. Equally, he will need to create a business model that allows him to take ownership of water companies currently owned by foreigners which doesn’t breach the nationality rules if he doesn’t do something about Dwr Cymru, a not for profit but not government owned either. Interestingly, they are more expensive than the similar not for profit owned by Severn Trent in Wales but have a worse pollution and customer service record, so that model isn’t the panacea of localised ownership either. Dwr Cymru is also more expensive and worse than the equivalent privatised water companies in England. The now nationalised rail operators are not exactly outshining the other private sector operators either. State ownership is rarely a recipe for low… Read more »
As a little aside, I’ve already been choosing a track to accompany Burnham to the stage for his first party conference as Labour Leader. So far, my preferred song is Cher’s “If I could turn back time”.
May I suggest Dinosaur Rock. A children’s song which should therefore go down well with the left…
https://youtu.be/PIw8mmjeNcg?si=6Oh0aJelTCgg9UQP
I think its a mistake to believe that Burnham thinks that nationalisation will cure Britain.
I suspect that Burnham doesn’t “think” in the accepted meaning of the word, he’s good at parroting nonsense and that’s about it.
At this stage, I’m not sure I’m against large scale nationalisation.
As things are roght now, so called private companies are so widely and deeply regulated that the scope for private initiative and management is minimal.
The regulation causes all kinds of problems that people misattribute to the failings of private ownership.
If companies and industries are nationalised, at least when everything fails even worse there will be no ambiguity as to what and who is responsible. They will no longer be able to pin the blame of private ownership.
This is beyond satire, extremely dark humour, right? That you’d risk an end-of-times immiseration event solely to expose what is obvious bs?
On second thoughts, we’re already doing precisely this, all-aboard the SS Net Zero super-tanker.
Thames Water is a basket case. £22bn in assets, £22bn in liabilities. We could walk in & let the taxpayer pick up the mess.
But what about Severn Trent? Is the taxpayer going to buy the shareholder’s £9bn of shares? Those shares are mainly held in pension funds.
How will this work? It’s like the Scots wanting independence without working out what their currency was or how they’d fund a 12% current account deficit.
The devil, as ever, is in the detail.
See Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. The UK is signed up to all UN Agendas.
I will expect to paid in full for my Severn Trent shares.
As a famous Austrian supposedly said “Why bother socialising (=nationalising”?) industry when I can socialise (= control) the people?
I wouldn’t assume that the objective of socialism and socialists is to “cure” anything. The goal is to ensure the socialist project continues, forever. That’s the fundamental difference between the left and the right. The right want to let people try to solve their own problems, the left want to pretend they can solve your problems for you. The object of power is power.
The truth is that the problems are usually caused by the left in the first place.
Intentional
The sociopaths no doubt act with intent or total disregard for the harmful consequences of their actions.
But I think that the problem with socialism isn’t bad intent. It is a flawed ideology that denies fundamental, inescapable realities of nature (human nature in particular).
I reckon many socialists have good intentions but refuse to accept that their solutions do more harm than good. How can good intentions not lead automatically to good outcomes? That cognitive dissonance makes them place blame elsewhere and double down over and over again.
The only way I can see of fighting socialism is exposing their clearly observable flawed premises and not allowing them to shift blame elsewhere.
I would love to know. I think your suggested approach has merit, but I have sort of lost the desire to fight that fight and disappear down that rabbit hole. These days I am resigned to the reality that I have a very different view of what life is all about compared to many, and I don’t see much hope of a reconciliation.