Abstract
Nowhere are the failings of the neoliberal political and economic order more evident than in its signature project of privatisation. As privatisation and marketised solutions continue to fail, state intervention and public ownership are coming back, in diverse ways, to the management and governance of the economy. This chapter critically appraises the return of public ownership and its wider significance for a more progressive political economy. It is particularly concerned with the potential to create democratic forms of economy out of the crisis of neoliberal governance, whilst avoiding the failings of older hierarchical forms of state management in the twentieth century. The wider arguments are illustrated through the lens of the energy sector and the failures there of faux market solutions compared with the potential for public ownership and planned responses to deal with the climate emergency. Alternative examples of more democratic, less hierarchical forms of public ownership are illustrated.
This chapter has benefited from funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, specifically the project ‘MPOWER: Municipal Action, Public Engagement and Routes Towards Energy Transition’.
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Notes
- 1.
Writing over a hundred years ago, Veblen’s term vested interests as those within a society who have “a legitimate right to get something for nothing” (1919, p. 169) seems prescient to our times. The vested interest is a way of seeing a ruling class as a combination of wealth holders who benefit from intangible assets without involving productive work. A range of contemporary commentators has of course made similar arguments about twenty-first-century capitalism (e.g. Hudson, 2012; Piketty, 2014). Effectively ‘free income’, and crucially, applies more broadly than Marx’s category of a Bourgeois class to corporations benefiting from monopoly positions, landowners able to appropriate rent, or clergy or nobility who have a recognised ‘customary’ social claim to wealth and privilege.
- 2.
The 1970–74 Conservative Heath Government made some relatively minor privatisations of pubs in the city of Carlisle and the travel operator Thomas Cook (personal communication with Malcolm Sawyer).
- 3.
The government quietly carried out an effective renationalisation of the passenger rail network in March 2020 as a response to the coronavirus pandemic (Gill, 2020).
- 4.
See Fine and Saad-Filho (2014) for a useful recent summary and discussion.
- 5.
The UK has a statutory duty (set up by the Labour Government in 2008) to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.
- 6.
“There are two areas today’s results highlight, however, chiefly how ridiculous Hinkley Point C’s £97.50/MWh agreement looks in comparison. EDF is not due to energise that plant until 2025, a year after swathes of Dogger Bank come onstream, and that energy is going to cost consumers more than twice that” (Liam Stoker, editor in chief, https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/offshore-wind-smashes-price-records-in-third-cfd-auction-round)
- 7.
A House of Commons Treasury Committee report found that private finance has always been more expensive than direct government borrowing to fund infrastructure projects but following the 2007–9 financial crisis, the borrowing costs were double than that of the public sector (HOC Treasury Committee, 2012). See, also the work of Parker (2012), who calculates that the 860 PFI projects that have been constructed in the UK since 1991 have resulted in £239 billion of liabilities for future generations of taxpayers.
- 8.
The failure of the European Union’s market-driven approach to energy transition is most evident in the widely critiqued and derided ETS (Emissions Trading System). A disastrous attempt to add a cost for CO2 into the market price, adroitly summarised by one set of experienced policy commentators as “a failed system where emission costs neither reflect environmental costs nor provides any incentive for carbon-neutral electricity production” (Hvelplund, Østergaard, & Meyer, 2017).
- 9.
2017 figures available at: https://ens.dk/en/our-services/statistics-data-key-figures-and-energy-maps/key-figures
- 10.
A case in point is the water sector where in the UK a positive comparison can be made between the financial stability of Scottish Water and its debt-laden private counterparts (Hall, 2018).
- 11.
These arguments are dealt with in greater length than is possible here in Cumbers (2015).
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Cumbers, A., Traill, H. (2021). Public Ownership in the Pursuit of Economic Democracy in a Post-Neoliberal Order. In: Arestis, P., Sawyer, M. (eds) Economic Policies for a Post-Neoliberal World. International Papers in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56735-4_6
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