Too much success

Former British Rail chairman Peter Parker used to complain that being in charge of the state-run railway during the Thatcher years meant being on a hiding to nothing.

If British Rail made a loss, it was called an inefficient nationalised company. If it was making a profit, then surely it was time for it to be flogged off.

I was reminded of Sir Peter's observations while travelling on a cross-channel ferry over the summer. In the 1970s and '80s, the most popular cross-channel ferry operator in Britain was British Rail subsidiary Sealink.

As part of British Rail, Sealink departure times could be co-ordinated with train arrivals and through tickets could be bought from any British station.

The problem with Sealink from the Thatcherites' perspective was that it was too successful.

Sealink earned £12.8 million in profit before interest and tax in 1983, up from £2.9 million a year earlier. It was privatised a year later.

In 1983, its return on assets was almost 10 per cent and return on turnover was 5 per cent. Both are highly creditable figures.

Ludicrously, given how well Sealink was doing, the government claimed that it was privatising Sealink in order for the company to "benefit from the stimulus of private-sector status and access to private capital."

But the "stimulus of private-sector status" proved to be none too stimulating for Sealink.

The company was bought by Sea Containers, a Bermuda-based, US-owned company which was then subject to a hostile takeover by Swedish-owned rival Stena Line. The Sealink name passed out of existence.

The Sealink sell-off, together with the privatisation of the profitable British Rail Hotels in 1982 and British Rail Engineering, all paved the way for the eventual flogging off of British Rail itself in 1996.

Funnily enough, you won't hear supporters of that privatisation talk about the fact that Britain's "efficient" privatised railway system receives over four times more in taxpayers' subsidy than the much-maligned British Rail ever did.

Public energy: you know it makes sense

IT WAS inevitable that calls for a windfall tax would grow when news broke that the big six energy companies had boosted shareholder payouts.

Dividends rose by 19 per cent in 2007, according to new research by the Local Government Association.

The firms paid out £1.64bn, £257m more than the previous year. So much for the energy suppliers' bleating that massive price rises are necessary in order to finance "much-needed investment."

If investment in infrastructure is such a high priority, why on earth pay huge dividends to shareholders instead?

While calls for a windfall tax are understandable, the only long-term answer to energy companies' profiteering is to restore them to public ownership.

The problem lies in the ownership structure of the energy companies.

All of them are public limited companies, whose overriding aim is to maximise profits for shareholders.

That's what plcs do. They always have done. They always will do.

Instead of reacting with horror to the entirely predictable news that plcs are putting the interests of shareholders before Britain's long-suffering energy consumers, we should instead be calling for the government to take the one step that will lead to lower energy prices in the long term.

Restoring the energy companies to public ownership will mean that prices can be lowered, as there will be no shareholder dividends to pay. It really is as simple as that.

Pressing home our message

I AM a fairly optimistic person by nature.

Nevertheless, if you had told me when I co-founded the Campaign for Public Ownership earlier this year that George Bush's neoconservative administration would be following the campaign's pro-nationalisation agenda, I really wouldn't have believed it.

As Simon English put it in the Evening Standard, "large chunks of Wall Street, supposedly the home of capitalism, are now under government control."

The actions of Bush and the British government's measures to nationalise Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are more about keeping the banking system afloat than a sudden conversion to the cause of public ownership. But they still provide us with a great opportunity to promote the case for further nationalisation.

If the government can nationalise Northern Rock, why can't it renationalise the railways and our profiteering energy companies?

This is the year when public ownership returned to the agenda. It's our job to make sure that it stays there.

"GOVERNMENTS and civil servants can't run businesses - that's been proved a depressing number of times all over the world," claims privatisation zealot Richard Branson in his new book Business Stripped Bare. I wonder if this is the same Richard Branson whose privately run but publicly subsidised Virgin Trains is such a model of reliability and efficiency?

Neil Clark is co-founder of the Campaign for Public Ownership.

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