Martin Meenagh blog

The Campaign for Public Ownership The complexity of modern life gives rise to a public dependence on services that are complicated to deliver. These services are often only capable of being produced by organisations that must think to the long term, raise a great deal of long-term debt, and plan their provision without regard to day-to-day profitability. There are effectively only two sorts of organisation that can function in that fashion. The first is a business so large and dominant, or at most sharing a great dominance, that it can extend services without placing the full burden on customers. The UK model of high street banking, for instance, offers free cash machines, unauthorised overdrafts that often do not result in severe penalties, and widespread free banking. This is at the expense of appeals, a certain amount of fairness, and a more efficient clearing system. However, at least the UK banks are not dependent(Northern Rock aside) on vast public subsidies. A second model of or...

The diversity of public ownership This past week has been full of portents of the times to come as the oil available at viable prices, regardless of any momentary fluctuations, runs out. For instance, the American Congress, of all people, voted to increase subsidies to the state-run local railways and public transport systems that will be a vital way for people to get around as oil-dependent cars become unaffordable and replacement technologies unavailable. Similarly, in Pakistan, and in Nigeria, there were increased calls for local governments and publicly accountable bodies to control energy supplies. This follows April's riots over power shortages in Pakistan. Nigeria is involved in high-level talks with Venezuela to study models of how to do that, and has been considering the Putin and Asian Petronas examples of state oil control closely. In Britain, a new group was launched to make the railways accountable to their customers by the Co-operative Party, which is affiliated very...

The British Government Wants to Borrow Another £100 Billion Cross posted to the Campaign For Public Ownership and Facebook The Government's strategy of throwing money at things and hoping for the best has failed. It is now trying to borrow, but Britain's economy is bankrupt and the usual lenders are in desperate straits. So, time to stop, and think. Why not cut government spending and cut taxes, whilst expanding public ownership? This country cannot, at the minute, afford the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, especially if it thinks that it can afford the 2012 Olympics. It cannot afford a vast expensive renewal of seaborne nuclear weapons. It cannot afford the European heavy-lift air transport it's ordered and which will now be a decade late. It cannot afford to pay for charities and lobby groups out of spurious public grants, it cannot afford the expenses of Members of Parliament and it cannot afford about a third of local councillors or European Parliament legislato...

The Campaign for Public Ownership What a successful campaign. We set up a blogspot website, then buy a website. We call for equity-for-subsidy swaps, social ownership, and the taxpayers to be considered. We do so in the knowledge of a coming recession. Then we wait. Now, as if by magic, the banks are being nationalised. City financiers are calling for a sovereign fund. The loss of building societies is being mourned. Germany realises that the toxins in its system came from derivative markets no one who hasn't seen cards sharps at play understands. The government is plunging into deficits so big it will soon have to bankrupt train companies by withdrawing subsidies, which will mean they get renationalised. Then the US deficit will create economic nationalism in the US, and they'll move to only back American companies. That will bring BAe Systems near bankruptcy. Once they are under government control and not beholden to the American Department of Defense, Britain can have an ind...

The Campaign For Public Ownership We now have a Facebook Group--have a look. I'll try and add to it in the next few days. The case for social ownership, co-operatives, and equity-for-subsidy deals, as well as the public ownership of natural monopolies providing quasi-public goods and the election of commissioners for subsidised or public industries grows by the day. The long crisis I and others blogged about for years is upon us--but why sit back and do nothing? Ideology doesn't matter when the tides come in, only the sense to see what you have to do. Lend a hand, build a movement....

A windfall tax on utilities? One of the sad things about the past thirty years or so is how liberal ideologies based around the market have taken over public life. One feature of this is an unstrategic, reactive position on the part of those who inhabit 'the left', in which posing is frequently more important than saying what you mean or responding to evidence. One recent example of this is the response to the news that privately owned gas, water and electricity monopolies in the United Kingdom are raising prices. The monopolies claim, with some justice, that world prices and the need to invest as well as to reward shareholders are primary factors in the inflation of their prices. I do not fully trust the catholic communitarianism I am heir to. It assumes that businesses can be social entities, and that they can be run on a community basis. I think that is probably true of cooperatives, and of charities. I have to reflect, however, that charities are some of the most ruthless a...

Sensible Social Ownership. I am no mad fan of nationalisation for its own sake. There are some things government has proved bad at, like education in England, or the provision of medical care rather than the funding for it. However, it is time to ask why we don't have some sort of social control of utilities, transport, and energy. It is also time to ask why we have the private sector providing police services, collecting information about the public, and getting hugely rich off of what appear to be rubbish contracts to manage the affairs of the people electronically. Even Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is now legally lowering its own liabilities by outsourcing to a companies like Mapperley, Cap Gemini and Capita. The standard justification in England is that the way the UK outsources some of the core businesses of government to the 'private finance initiative' meets several requirements. It is meant to lower public borrowing, and therefore interest rates. It is mean...

From C4PO Cross-posted to The Campaign for Public Ownership It seems that the plans to privatise the Royal Mail are 'dead in the water'. The government has realised that raiding the pension fund of the Royal Mail after carving off bits for desperate public-private corporations just won't wash. The tide of privatisation is on the way out, and we should make our plans to bring those things which the public are paying for and which the public should in some sense control back into public ownership. The disgraceful thing is that Peter Mandelson thought that he could get away with this at all. Why is it that cultists who want to move money to a few favoured and expensive companies just don't get it? Every weekend now brings some new, desperate nationalisation without anyone reading the writing on the wall and thinking really hard about how the public's property is going to be administered in the future. If you want to join in the debate--no personal or libellous comments...

Nationalisation The idea of social ownership, according to today's (Conservative-leaning) Sunday Telegraph , is no longer a 'dirty word'. I'm glad. When I co-founded the Campaign for Public Ownership , we thought that we could maybe shift debate some small way. I certainly did so in the knowledge that nationalisation wasn't necessarily either something associated with the twentieth century or with socialism. However, the silver lining of the present crisis seems to grow by the day. Panics and crashes happen all the time. The media should put down the 1929 example and perhaps have a look at the panic of 1819 ; a financial panic which ended up formally excluding slavery from half the territory of the United States, breaking up an old consensus, and unfreezing a conservative order in politics that had subsisted since the end of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. We face the very real prospect of politicians being forced to confront the fact that deficits a...

The power of finance in the anglosphere I wrote the other day of the importance of insurance to the American 'tort model' of rights which now characterises the political behaviour and outlook of many American citizens. So I understand the importance of AIG to the American economy, and society. As one of the co-founders of the campaign for public ownership here, I understand that sometimes governments have to act, and would argue that sometimes society is protected by collective economic action. I am stunned by what has happened this week, however, and by the blase contempt of those who have done it. The only possible justification for it all is that it has held off another Depression. But we all know that the goal is to remove the risk that the super-rich and financial institutions always said justified their wealth, even if that required straining the chains of the media-political class they own and exposing who runs things to the citizens. Many of those involved couldn'...

Atheist Buses 2 I should perhaps confess here and now that I have a bad catholic's liking for Blaise Pascal , so the 'Atheist' bus campaign that harmless confused Guardian readers and the nastier trendies are throwing their money away on makes me smile. It all kicked off because some Protestant evangelicals and Muslim organisations bought advertising space on the sides of buses last year. I quite like the bus adverts, though the donors could have done something more uplifting and practical with their cash like, oh I don't know, giving it to The Campaign for Public Ownership. Anyway, the great Catholic site In Hoc Signo Vinces has produced two pictures, which I hope that they don't mind me reproducing, as a risposte to the plans of the godless. This is what politics needs--gentle fun between people who disagree. First up, what Jews should put on buses; Secondly, this. By the way, for the purposes of m'learned friends Professor Clinton R. Dawkins --'Clint...

Referism: A Dream of New England Discontent with the virtual representation present in Her Britannic Majesty's Parliament is not new. Here's Anthony Henry MP to his constituents in 1734, responding to comments about his vote on taxes (I found it in Denis Healey's great old book, My Secret Planet , and have referred to it many times before); Gentlemen, I have received your letter about the excise and I am surprised at your insolence and writing to me at all. You know, as I know that I bought this constituency. You know, and I know, that I am now determined to sell it, and you know, what you think I don't know, that you are looking out for another buyer, and I know what you certainly don't know, that I have found another constituency to buy. About what you said about the excise: may God's curse light upon you all, and may it make your homes as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your r...

Public and Social Ownership I believe in Public and Social ownership, which is why I helped found the Campaign for Public Ownership. That doesn't mean centralised, bureaucratic or state control, and doesn't necessarily inflate useless local councillors and bureaucrats. I think people should have a stake in their services and surroundings and not be at the mercy of capital and monopolies. That's why I was fascinated by this excellent piece by Freeborn John , courtesy of Bob from Brockley . Check it out!

This is what you get for hope these days.... 1) up to one hundred thousand people possibly dead in Burma , with the food resources of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma contained in the Irrawaddy Delta rice fields flooded and Burma's disgusting military leadership keeping help out 2)rubbish about how the solution to peak oil is to ignore it and the solution to global food problems is hare-brained globalism 3)Syria stepping back from Lebanon so Iranian militants can hand Hezbollah another $100 million to screw that country with riots and jew-hatred. 4)Mysterious Chinese diseases flaring in Asia 5)Pagan environmentalist idiocy whilst the world catches fire from ' a pillock on a gap year' . Actually, I'm being unfair on David Miliband as usual. Someone has written something sensible into his speech about the 'resource crunch' but it gets lost in the windborne mental fog. To despair is a sin. I have a great deal of confidence in the people whom the media-political cla...

  Presidential election flaws before 2000. The Constitution of the United States prescribes that the president will be elected by a combination of popular vote and elite ‘filtering,’ normally though the electoral college, but in exceptional cases through the Congress. In 1788, The Federalist Papers (No 68) which was written to try to persuade and reassure New Yorkers of the sense of the Constitution, said that this process would ‘afford little opportunity to tumult and disorder’ and that it was a practical obstacle to ‘cabal, intrigue, and corruption.’ This model did not even hold for the first presidential election, as Alexander Hamilton intrigued behind the scenes to humiliate John Adams, who was nevertheless elected vice-president. Processes on paper run alongside regimes, the acceptable and perceived ways of doing things, in the minds and activities of the individuals and communities involved. This is especially true when processes are set out in a document as simple and ...