Forty Years of Privatisation Has Left Most Britons Out of Pocket

© AP Photo / Alastair Grant

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18:51 23.05.2019(updated 18:52 23.05.2019)Get short URL

Neil Clark

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Mrs Thatcher’s great sell-off of publicly owned services and assets, continued by successive governments, started exactly forty years ago to a fanfare of positive publicity.

Small shareholders own only a tiny proportion of the billion of pounds worth of assets that were sold off. Many of these assets are now owned by hedge funds. A large number are in foreign ownership, including quite ironically the state ownership of other countries.

We can have subsidiaries of German and Dutch state railways running our trains, (and buses) and charging British passengers higher fares than passengers in their home countries, but not British Rail.  

The pockets of the public have been picked twice by the privatisers. Not only are prices for services once provided by the British state/ public sector considerably higher post-privatisation- even allowing for inflation, the level of subsidies to private operators of services has in some cases been higher than the old state-providers received. Forget the talk about ‘free market forces’, what has actually happened is privatisation of the profits, with the taxpayer helping to underwrite losses as in the old days, but with no ownership stake. 

Government funding for the railways for instance is around three times more than it was in the late 1980s under British Rail, averaging about £5bn a year from 2012-17. 

In 2017/8 net government support to the rail industry totalled £6.4bn. 

READ MORE: Thatcher Wins, Smith Dies: Two Weeks in May, Two Changes in World History

It’s hard to decide which privatisation has been the most disastrous for the public. Britain’s train fares are around five times higher than in the rest of Europe- and they went up again on average by another 3.4% in January. 

It’s a similar story with our buses, which were privatised in the mid 1980s.  A 2014 report by the Institute for Public Policy research revealed that non-London bus fares in England rose by 35 per cent above inflation between 1995 and 2013 and 34 per cent and 20 per cent in Scotland.