Tag Archives: public utilities

A democratic case for public ownership of utilities

By Oscar Renton | Tue 3rd March 2026 - 5:50 pm

Britain has spent the last few decades running a national experiment. We have taken essential infrastructure that behaves like a monopoly, we put it in private hands, and we hope competition somehow emerges. I can’t blame the utilities executives. They got lucky and landed the utilities in the 80s, like some awful game of Monopoly we still pay for. No risk and all reward, what a deal!

The results are familiar to anyone who has navigated unreliable rail services or warned their children of the dangers of swimming in the sea that was safe in their childhood. When a market is a natural monopoly, public ownership is not a nostalgic slogan, it is the prudent way to align economic incentives with the public interest.