Public ownership as end-of-life care.
This is a quick note in response to the head-spinning fact that, apparently, both ends of the British Parliamentary political spectrum are now positively disposed to the idea of nationalising British Steel.
I mean everyone’s into. Nigel Farage’s into it. Keir Starmer’s into it. But, let’s be clear, it’s a very specific kind of nationalisation these new champions of public ownership are advancing. It’s not the grand, rational, humane – even noble – kind of public ownership that inspired the post-war generations – roughly the boomers and the X-ers – that these guys are after.
Obviously, no one in this story is reasserting ‘the idea of the public’, they want nothing to do with the shared or the collectively-owned or the mutually-beneficial either. And certainly not the emancipatory idea of putting important aspects of our lives under democratic control or involving ordinary people in their governance. None of that, obviously.
Don’t nationalise that
What Labour and Reform are calling for when they contemplate taking British Steel – what’s left of it – back into public ownership, for instance, is, let’s face it, a shitty, rushed, contingent emergency nationalisation. An urgent takekover of a failing business that employs 2,700 people – roughly the same number as fancy cake shop chain Gails. It’s a last-minute resuscitation for an industry that’s on its last legs anyway and probably can’t be saved (this morning I read that it might even be less than that – it might simply be an agreement to supply coal to the business so it can keep the blast furnaces alight for a bit longer – even sadder).
And, to state the obvious, this kind of miserable, thin, last-resort act is the worst kind of solution – a refusal of all the promise of public ownership, of its potential to contribute to a revived public realm, with institutions and organisations that we trust and can expect to act on our behalves.
Also, of course, if what you’re nationalising is just the weakest and most fragile parts of the economy (and the parts that are in deep financial trouble), the odds that it can actually work are low. So what you’re likely to wind up with is, to put it directly, a failed nationalisation. A nationalisation that, when it does fail, can only undermine the idea, set back the whole enterprise, the promise and the potential of public ownership in other parts of the economy.
Nationalise this
This will obviously look like the most ridiculous, starry-eyed naivety in the present moment but what we ought to be nationalising is not the diminished, collapsing parts of the economy but the big, active, socially and economically important parts – the sectors of the economy that employ a lot of ordinary people and especially young people and people who need better contracts, more security and bigger salaries.
So let’s start by nationalising hospitality (Starbucks? Publicbucks more like!) and the night-time economy (the people’s nightclubs!), the delivery economy (Deliveroo run in everyone’s interests!), retail (publicly-owned shopping malls, like People’s Palaces!), entertainment (cinema chains that belong to all of us!)… everything with an app or a big shopfront or an outsize place in the lives of the young, everything that touches their lives. Not the rusting, already failed relics of their parents’ lives – heartbreaking though it is to watch them fall appart – but the vigorous, now elements of the culture and the economy, where public ownership isn’t a desperate final act but an investment in the promise and potential of people and nation.
- (all right, I know, it’s ridiculous – a fantasy… the idea that the dourest, tidiest, most grey and workmanlike and timid government in modern history might embrace public ownership as an expression of joy or an uninihibted investment in a brighter future is my silliest idea yet).
- Obviously. there’s some day-to-day politics here. Farage is not what you’d call one of nature’s nationalisers – quite the reverse – but he has the political freedom, in this moment, as an insurgent political figure with no actual power, to advance a pretty ambitious and explicitly patriotic programme. He frames it as a national emergency: “There are three days left to save primary steel production in Britain.” And Starmer, facing local elections in a few weeks that could honesly be a bloodbath, and not just for the Tories, can’t let Farage have the topic to himself, hence: “all options are on the table, including nationalisation.” One of these men – Farage obvs – sees a political opportunity in advancing nationalisation; the other sees a threat and responds to it with a weak statement that does the absolute minimum, essentially acknowledging nationalisation as a last-resort possibility. But neither of these men – no one on the political scene, in fact – can admit the obvious: that rescuing a dying steel plant, a fraction of a fraction of a strategic national asset, would be pointless. An unstrategic waste of money. An empty political gesture.