One Nation Nationalisation

John McDonnell has called time on the most obvious racket that there is. The same product, via the same wires or pipes: how can it possibly cost different amounts from different companies? It can't. Of course it can't. Never mind from the same company. The same company! What do you get if you are on the higher tariff? Seriously, what?

If people realised all of this, though, then they might ask why the utilities were delivered by cartels of pretend-competitors, instead of being where they belonged, in public ownership. And that would never do. Oh, no. That would never do at all.

Well, that day has come at last. Moreover, McDonnell has accepted the critiques of the Morrisonian model that have been advanced lately by Blue Labour, and from the start under more or less Trotskyist influence.

That said, we must be wary of too much localism. Huge numbers of people who need the freedom and equality that come from the democratic political control of the commanding heights of the economy will always live under Conservative councils in the arc that stretches from the Fens, down through Essex and Kent, along the South Coast, and up across the West Country.

There is a National Grid in electricity for a reason. There ought to be a National Grid in water for a reason, as there would have been in Labour had won the 1979 Election. Public ownership is British ownership, and that is one of the strongest arguments for it where the railways, the wider transport system and the utilities are concerned. But British ownership must mean ownership by and for the British people as a whole.