“The fight for our public services is a fight between you and people and interests like this, and for Andy Burnham and every politician it comes down to the question: whose side are you going to be on?”
Johnbosco Nwogbo spoke at an online event organised by Arise – a Festival of Left Ideas titled “A Fork in the Road Moment: for an Irreversible Shift in the Balance of Power and Wealth.” You can read an edited version of his speech below.
I think we all know that we are in an important political moment. For the first time in 40 years, we have a prime minister who is speaking in terms that repudiate the political and economic consensus of the last 40 years. We often call that consensus neoliberalism.
It basically boils down to the idea that if we loosen the reins on the rich, their actions and decisions will benefit everyone else. So we tax them as little as possible, we remove as many regulations as possible from their way, we allow them to buy our politics. We all know what that led to – inequality.
In this worldview, politicians believe that private companies are better at almost everything than the government. The CEOs of private companies are better at almost everything than public servants.
Whatever Andy Burnham’s real intentions are, or, perhaps more importantly, whatever we think of his courage, ambition and honesty, or lack thereof, he has already changed something major by publicly saying what we have known the entire time – neoliberalism is a failure
Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a failure at doing the thing we as society actually want done. You know, running public services like water and energy, delivering doctors’ letters and providing healthcare to everyone.
So the first fight – the narrative fight – is won. Now on to fighting to get him to actually deliver. What that background I just gave makes very clear is that this is a fight between households and hedge funds, between actual human beings and private equity, between people like you who can’t or don’t donate and rich and powerful people who can afford to donate to politicians.
Who will our public services work for?
And We Own It are already in the thick of that fight
We were at Labour Conference to say to Andy Burnham and Labour delegates that his choice in solving the disaster of water privatisation, particularly with Thames Water right now, is households or hedge funds – and this is not even theoretical.
The company’s shareholders have written off their shares, so the company is now, in effect, controlled by its creditors. Guess who they are? A consortium of US hedge funds, including billionaire and Trump donor Paul Singer of Elliott Capital.
This is a man, or at least his company, who forced BP to turn away from renewables for profit. The fight for our public services is a fight between you and people and interests like this, and for Andy Burnham and every politician, it comes down to the question: whose side are you going to be on?
I want to finish by highlighting one opportunity for everyone here listening to me right now, but perhaps even more importantly for Andy Burnham if indeed he was serious about ending neoliberalism.
Thames Water is once again on the brink of collapse. It was bailed out to the tune of £3 billion in Feb last year. It has just asked creditors for a further £2.4 billion so it can avoid going bust by the end of the year.
Thames Water’s creditors are meeting on Thursday 29th October to decide on whether to give them this new money.
This is our chance. We need to generate enough energy before the 29th to demand Andy Burnham step in and block that bailout and take Thames Water into Special Administration.
We’ve launched a petition to ramp up the pressure on Andy Burnham to take this chance. Please sign and share it widely.
We can win this if we all put our hands together.
It’s important to think of this as a dam-breaking moment; a domino effect to create the precedent that can extend across our water and to other public services as well.
- Johnbosco Nwogbo is a lead campaigner for We Own It. You can follow him on Twitter/X here.
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