Michael Howard today (on BBC radio 4):
The point about public ownership is this: if you have the industry in public ownership, it has to compete for resources with health, with education, with the police, with all the other legitimate demands on the public purse, and water when it was in public ownership was way down the queue.
People pay water rates Michael. This is an income bearing asset that could have supported other public programs. Instead it’s been used to enrich the already wealthy at the expense of underinvestment in infrastructure, callous polluting, and the risk of damaging bancruptcy.
When you release it into the private sector, you have recourse to private capital. You can make the investment that’s needed.
Errr. Except a PLC’s cost of capital is higher than the cost of govornment debt, so any investment is going to be harder to make and ultimately will cost the public more. As evidenced by the fact that they have done exactly the opposite of “make the investment that’s needed” over the past 30 years.
Dear god, he can’t possibly be actually that dense. I have to assume he, and by extension his party that continues to support this stupid idea, is acting in bad faith.
Yeah, I woke up to that yesterday. My mood was not improved by it.
Or in other words, “when we had responsibility for it we didn’t want it because we couldn’t profit from it, so we shirked our responsibility so we could shrug it off in '89. Naturally, no other attitude to the matter is conceivable”.