UK
By Backing Public Ownership, We Can Tackle the Rise of the Far-Right – Ben Chacko
Leading Campaigners and voices for public ownership took part in the Arise Festival event: ‘Public Ownership and Control – Key to Tackling the Crises we Face’ on 3 December. You can read Ben Chacko‘s contribution published below or watch the event in full.
Public Ownership is necessary. On a global scale, the scandals engulfing the last two UN climate summits, Cop28 and 29, with conference presidents and hosts striking oil and gas deals at the summits themselves, show what happens when you task the people who profit from an existing system with overhauling it.
Exactly the same problems arise when we expect a privatised, profit-making National Grid to prioritise a transition to cheap, clean and green energy. Or foreign-owned water companies to prioritise infrastructure maintenance, water safety and the environment over dividends and shareholder returns.
As we’ve seen, privatisation has landed us with the least reliable and most expensive trains in Europe, closed thousands of bus routes or run them down to be so infrequent they are no longer convenient to use (again while ramping up prices), removed our ability to control energy prices, gutted Royal Mail and fuelled a destructive reliance on outsourcing in essential services that worsens quality and workers’ pay and conditions. In the NHS, reliance on outside contractors and a privatised supply chain has been wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.
Despite the Thatcherite mantra, it has not driven innovation or improvements in efficiency. An article in the Financial Times this morning named 1980 as the year British and European labour productivity, having shown strong growth since the 1950s, began to fall behind the rest of the world. Britain has the lowest level of private-sector investment in the G7. CEOs only accountable to shareholders seeking short-term returns have not modernised or improved services, they have attacked wages, siphoned money out in unsustainable quantities and loaded up debt that we either have to take on publicly or risk the collapse of services millions rely on.
Public ownership is also popular. We Own It regularly updates us on the results of surveys and they are remarkably consistent in showing broad backing for public ownership of what were once considered the “commanding heights” of the economy: water, energy, transport including buses as well as trains, health and social care, often by big majorities. Labour’s abandonment of this agenda since 2020 is billed as part of a strategy to make it electable but this doesn’t stand much scrutiny. Labour has been seeking to make itself acceptable to big business, not to voters.
I want to focus today on the political dangers of this approach. We know that the British public want change.
Keir Starmer’s government claims both to have won a mandate for that change with its election win in 2024, and to be on course to deliver it. I think it had better deliver it, precisely because its popular mandate to be in power at all is so weak.
We saw in the last decade that political momentum has been with whoever represents a break with the status quo, which is unsurprising given the long-term decline in living standards with wages flatlining as the cost of living rises.
We saw it in the Brexit vote. We saw it too in the Corbyn movement from 2015, which official British politics wants to put behind us, but which is particularly important for us because it created a genuine mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people, and won the biggest increase in the Labour vote in 70 years, precisely on a programme of extending public ownership and redistributing wealth.
For a few years at least, this people-powered opposition changed the political narrative (forcing the Conservatives to abandon support for austerity, for example) despite the overwhelming hostility of the media and the political class. If we’re to change the narrative on public ownership, which the public wants but the political elite don’t, we need to pull off something similar just to get it on the agenda.
When it was defeated, it was defeated paradoxically by making the existing Conservative government look like the break with the status quo, by framing departure from the EU in those terms. It was Get Brexit Done which delivered the big Conservative majority of 2019.
The period since then has seen a really thorough clear-out of socialist policies, and a good number of socialists, from the Labour stable. Starmer still prides himself on this, regularly boasting of having changed the Labour Party and made it electable.
But removing popular policies from the political menu doesn’t mean people start supporting whatever they’re given. I think politicians underestimate the extent to which their artful suppression of Corbynism has driven alienation and disillusionment from the political system itself.
The 2024 election looks great for Labour in number of seats won, but it’s a castle built on sand. Its vote was half a million lower than at the disastrous election of 2019, more than two million lower than at the Corbyn surge election of 2017. The Conservatives, presiding over collapsing services and falling living standards, could not avoid being the main victim of the anti-status quo feeling in the country, but Labour only gained by default, not in actual support from real people. Its vote fell because people saw it as part of the status quo too and were not willing to vote for more of the same.
In that election itself, we saw a huge rise in the vote for a populist right-wing that looks and talks like a break with the system: Reform UK. Shortly afterwards we saw fascist violence spread across many of our towns. Mass mobilisations saw that off for the time being, but the sorry tally of council by-election results and most polls show a continued shift towards Reform UK among voters, most prominently among people who used to vote Labour.
The combined Reform-UK and Tory vote last summer was higher than Labour’s. Polls show Labour has lost its summer lead over the Tories, while Reform UK’s projected share of the vote keeps rising. Labour cannot, as it did under Blair, get more unpopular in government while maintaining power. It has to get more popular, and that means delivering improvements in public services. We know that these improvements depend on public interest being prioritised over private profits: on public ownership.
So in a way the left and trade unions need to find a way to save this Labour government from itself. Left to its own inclinations it will fail to make any tangible difference to the problems in public services, continue to lose popular support and collapse before an insurgent and increasingly racist hard right in a few years.
We need a mass campaign offering the answer here. One which places the question of public ownership back at the heart of political debate.
Not only can we put pressure on government, but this is terrain the far right can be beaten on. Farage is no break with the status quo, he is a tool of turbo-charged Thatcherism, an acceleration of the same privatising policies that have done so much damage in recent decades. Forcing discussion onto the role of the private sector in the NHS, in education, in water and energy systems, helps expose that.
The huge and resilient Palestine solidarity movement shows that this country is not politically apathetic. But the street and community campaigning for an economic alternative that we saw in the early 2010s, through the Coalition of Resistance and then the People’s Assembly, has become weaker.
Unions need more persuading to get behind such a movement under a Labour government than a Tory one, but only through such a movement can we apply the political pressure we need to win back working-class support and defeat the far right. We need to win the argument that protesting and organising for change is still something that needs to come from below, and can’t be left to discussions with ministers. As has been indicated, the NHS can be a unifying cause in this process.
Take back control was a slogan that resonated because people feel they have lost that control over the political and economic forces that shape our lives. But to control this country we need to own it.
- ‘Public Ownership & Control – Key to Tackling the Crises We Face’ was hosted by Arise Festival on 3 December 2024. You can watch or listen back on the Arise podcast.
- You can follow Arise Festival on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X and see all upcoming events here.
- If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.
No comments:
Post a Comment