Tendency Tacticians, Indeed

40 years ago today, the key fact about that speech by Neil Kinnock was that its central claim was a lie. Liverpool City Council did not sack anyone when it hired taxis to hand out redundancy notices “to its own workers”, as if it might have handed them out to anyone else. Those notices were an accounting device. No job was lost. By contrast, the privatised rail operators really have been known to hire taxis to take their engine drivers to the work, because the booking system had failed. Having reverted to chatterbox type in old age, what has Kinnock had to say about that? What has anyone? After all, Kinnock is directly to blame for the situation. After his “finest hour”, “the speech of his life” on the “insurmountable” need to win a General Election, he lost two of them, the first to a Prime Minister who had to be removed by her own party during the course of that Parliament or that party would no longer exist, and the second to John Major.

And whence came the great threat to Conservative Party’s very existence in 1990, such that even the mighty Maggie had to be sacrificed to save it? Many others tried, but the only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Margaret Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons. 

Thatcher made absolutely no bones about the fact that the campaign against the Poll Tax had been organised by the Militant Tendency, and that is perfectly true. When she said that her defenestration and the Poll Tax’s consequent abolition had been a capitulation to Militant, then she was wholly correct. The question is what level of cooperation there was, entirely bypassing the Labour front bench and the Opposition Whips’ Office, between Militant on one side and Conservative MPs on the other. Dave Nellist was always hugely popular across the House. Think on. And while thinking on, consider that had it been left to the Labour Party, then the Poll Tax would still be there. Faced with yet another increase in energy prices, the campaign of non-payment is an extremely high risk strategy, and I am neither encouraging anyone to join it, nor seeking to dissuade anyone from doing so. I am saying only that something like this has worked in the past. This may be the only possible route to bringing our utilities and other essential amenities back into our own public ownership rather than that of other people’s states, which overcharge here in order to keep prices low at home. No one can claim to be patriotic or conservative while supporting the ownership of key parts of our national infrastructure by foreign states as such.

Privatised utilities are a racket. The same product, via the same wires or pipes, cannot possibly cost different amounts from different companies. Never mind from the same company, but on different tariffs. The utilities are currently delivered by cartels of pretend-competitors, instead of being where they belong, in public ownership. Among the numerous benefits of a return to public ownership, there should be a National Grid for water, and the approval of the House of Commons should be required before energy or water prices, as well as many other things such as public transport fares, could be increased.

Last year, Thames Water had to secure the approval of its Class A bondholders, the likes of Silver Point and Elliott Partners, for an emergency loan of three billion pounds, despite having paid a dividend of £158 million only in July. Those bondholders then failed to secure a veto over whether that loan would be used to settle the hundreds of millions of pounds in regulatory fines that were due in the following year, which is very nearly up. If, as indubitably applies to the water companies, something would have to be nationalised rather than ever be allowed to go bust, then it does not belong in the private sector. Most of the world accepts that axiomatically. England is one of only two countries with privatised water. At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free. The money that those companies pay out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. 

Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas. In 2022, Thames Water, typically of the sector, declared a billion pound profit in order to pay dividends, despite being £12 billion in debt. So we are all expected to bail it out, at whatever rate happened to be demanded by the shareholders, themselves largely foreign states as such. They should be told to forget it. Those shares are worth what anyone else would now pay for them. How much is that? More broadly, since dividends are supposed to reward investment, then they should be limited by the Statute Law to the Bank Rate plus risk on the capital provided by the original share issue, with customers awarded shares for all capital converted from their payments. In April, in a move perilously close to making itself useful, Ofwat began investigating the water companies for spending many times more on refurbishment projects than operators in comparable countries, leading to much higher bills.

Likewise, the standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Just abolish them. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. Let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act has left Abellio East Midlands Limited with a contract that will not end until October 2030,  XC Trains Limited with a contract that will not end until 12 October 2031, and First Trenitalia West Coast Limited with a contract that will not end until 17 October 2032. Who knows who will be in government by then? Moreover, the rolling stock will remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Where is that money going? To whom? See also HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Bibby Stockholm, the Rwanda Scheme, the arms companies, and everything else that is very good at kicking back to politicians while employing retired top brass. Why have Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman not been arrested? I do not agree with Unexplained Wealth Orders without a conviction, but they are the law, so where are the Orders against that pair? As with Peter Mandelson, all other members of the House of Lords should go on strike if Mone ever again set foot in the place. Mone, Barrowman and Mandelson are the characters that our present economic arrangements form as a feature and not as a bug.

Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be instead an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended, well-watered garden.