Public services: How do we stop the profiteers? by Declan O'Neill

When Labour dumped its formal commitment to “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” it was the final straw for many in the Labour party who still regarded themselves as socialists. In practice, of course, Labour had never challenged the dominance of the market or the supremacy of private property but few, would have predicted how quickly new Labour would rush to privatise those bits of the economy still in public hands.

In opposition it was “our air is not for sale” and a commitment to renationalise the railways; in government it was selling off air traffic control and cuddling up to Virgin Rail. Private good, public bad became the new mantra.

As Mark Steel has written, in their worship of the market today's politicians “sound like ancient pagans expressing fear of a bad crop brought by angry gods. And once it descends, all we can do is offer a sacrifice, of a few million jobs and lives ruined and thousands made homeless until the gods are satisfied with our gifts and we can start all over again.”

New Labour is so desperate to avoid anything that smacks of “old- style nationalisation” that Gordon Brown would rather give Northern Rock to his mate Richard Branson than contemplate taking it into public ownership. The latest obscenity is the Virgin group's attempt, responding to the government's “reform strategy” for the NHS, to move into Primary Healthcare.

So what is the alternative? What is wrong with running public services on the basis of peoples' needs not private profit? , Decisions about how and where we use those resources should be made by the people themselves through democratic means. This does not mean a return to old style nationalisation. In practice the old nationalised industries aped the private sector: their management boards were composed of the great and good neither workers or users had any real say in the day to day running of public services, never mind strategic direction.

Yet even at their worst the old nationalised industries were a thousand times better than the privatised chaos we now face.

The society we aim to build is not one built on ever increasing production and consumption but one democratically run to meet the needs of all humanity. Reclaiming our public services is an essential first step in this process. We have the resources to do this: our task is to build a movement to transform the system from one built on private greed to one that meets the needs of all humanity.