“It’s time to put an end to the rip-off privatization policies which have done serious damage to our public services and fleeced the public of billions of pounds” says Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour leader in a video following the collapse of Carillion.
“Privatization is the same story again and again: costly, inefficient, unaccountable corporate feather bedding. Labour will take back control of our public services and build a country that works for the many, not the few”, he said on closing the recent Labour conference “Alternative Models of Ownership Conference”.
It is a pleasure to close today’s conference, which has shown once again that it is our Party that is coming up with big ideas.
And we’re not talking about ideas and policies dreamed up by corporate lobbyists and think tanks or the wonks of Westminster, but plans and policies rooted in the experience and understanding of our members and our movement; drawing on the ingenuity of each individual working together as part of a collective endeavour with a common goal.
Each of you here today is helping to develop the ideas and the policies that will define not just the next Labour Government but a whole new political era of real change. An era that will be as John said earlier radically fairer, more equal and more democratic.
The questions of ownership and control that we’ve been discussing today go right to the heart of what is needed to create that different kind of society.
Because it cannot be right, economically effective, or socially just that profits extracted from vital public services are used to line the pockets of shareholders when they could and should be reinvested in those services or used to reduce consumer bills.
We know that those services will be better run when they are directly accountable to the public in the hands of the workforce responsible for their front line delivery and of the people who use and rely on them. It is those people not share price speculators who are the real experts.
That’s why, at last year’s general election, under the stewardship of Shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey, Transport Secretary Andy McDonald and Environment Secretary Sue Hayman, Labour pledged to bring energy, rail, water, and mail into public ownership and to put democratic management at the heart of how those industries are run.
