A Free Country?

Freezing rail fares is a start, though only a start. Either they will all mock free public transport until we had it and then they will pretend to have been in favour of it all along, or we shall never have it even once every other Western country but one did, because that one will be that one. Then again, there may be a Third Way, in which this would exist even in the United States, yet still not here. Or at least not in England. Like universal free prescriptions, it may come to exist in all three of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But never in England. Again, then, freezing prescription charges is a start, though only a start.

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. The rolling stock will remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Rent 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. Another such is Richard Dannatt, who has secured all past, present and future criminal charges against Palestine Action in return for payment by Teledyne, which is not even a British company. Jurors and magistrates should acquit on principle.

Build an all-of-the-above transport policy 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 buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists; Jeremy Corbyn was mercilessly derided for having so much as mentioned buses. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended, well-watered garden.

For an all-of-the-above transport policy, and for very much else besides, we need an all-of-the-above energy policy. 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. But something like this has worked in the past, sweeping away the Poll Tax and, 35 years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher with it, as she herself made bitterly clear in her autobiography. 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 paid 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. Once again, the small modular reactor on Anglesey will be a start, though only a start.

So much, then, for the Greens. Nor are they reliable on lifting the two-child benefit cap that is in keeping with their Malthusian principles. Meanwhile, the only thing even funnier than the vanguard elite is always the master race, and it is excelling itself this time, by pointing out that the lifting of the cap would favour its least favourite ethnic minorities while complaining about being outbred by them. Take as long as you need. We need to keep saying that two in five Universal Credit claimants were in work, that two thirds of children in poverty were in households where at least one adult was in work, that almost anyone might lose their job, that anyone at all might become too ill to work, and that the cap was a significant driver of abortion.

As for Polanksi and withdrawal from NATO, when the United States is already disengaging from that, then it is largely ceasing to exist in any practical sense. Finland looks silly for having joined at this point, and Sweden looks downright irresponsible for having sacrificed for this its work and reputation in peacemaking and in aid. The canonisation of NATO “because of Attlee” does not extend to the NHS, or to the public ownership of the utilities. That NATO was founded by Ernest Bevin on the principles of British trade unionism is a pious if self-regarding fiction that has a parallel in every original member state, including what was then Salazar’s Portugal. It is comical to assert that NATO was devised by Denis Healey, who was all of 31 when it was created, and who in any case went on to inflict monetarism on Britain, after he had perpetrated against the Chagossian people the evil that was later compounded by David Miliband of extraordinary rendition infamy.

Far from NATO’s having kept the peace, its expansion has directly caused the war in Ukraine, which will end with a commitment to no further such, a commitment that we may only hope will prove more valuable than the last one. Membership of NATO subjects our military personnel to the command of officers who were ultimately answerable to Viktor Orbán, or to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or indeed to Donald Trump. Trump accuses of sedition those who advise American military personnel that they might disregard his unlawful orders. But on 1 July 2024, ruling in favour of Trump, the Supreme Court finally agreed with Richard Nixon that, for example, an order given by the President as such could not be illegal. The country where that is the constitutional order, if it can be so described, is the lynchpin of NATO. On Thursday, the United States and its dependency of Argentina were two of only three states to vote against a United Nations resolution against torture.

And the third? Take a wild guess. But Republican leaders are increasingly furious that Turning Point participants ask them about Israeli espionage against their country, about Israeli influence over its politicians, about the abuse of Christians in Israel and by settlers on the West Bank, and about the USS Liberty. Yet even when everyone else in the West, including the Americans, had stood up to Israel, then Britain will still never have done so, just as even when everywhere else in the West, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, had things like free public transport, cheap water and energy, and the universal free broadband for which Corbyn was mocked to scorn, then the mere suggestion of them will still be unutterable in England.