Welcome to Rip-Off Britain.  

A country remade by privatisation. 

Our latest project — Who Owns Britain? — explores how a radical experiment transformed our society and shapes your life.

🧵 Its scale was unprecedented. 

Post-1980, the only advanced economies that experienced a faster and deeper decline in public wealth were those affected by the “shock therapy” of the post-Soviet transition. 

Britain’s public wealth collapsed.

💰 How much public wealth do you think was given away for free via Right to Buy? 

1bn? 10bn? 100bn? 

Try 200 BILLION pounds. 

🧵 Here's how Britain’s most infamous housing policy became its biggest housing disaster — and near the largest privatisation in British history. Since 1980, 1.9 million council homes in England have been sold off under Right to Buy — Thatcher’s flagship housing policy. 

Councils got just £51bn for them (£104bn in today’s money). 

Today, analysis by @chrismwhayes reveals that those homes are now worth £430bn.

A fire is blazing at a UK Power Network’s West London electricity substation, weeks after Heathrow was closed due to a similar blaze.
 
The UK’s electricity system is breaking down. Why?
 
Because of the behaviour of the private companies that run the grid.
 
🧵

https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/1917113465044451655

Electricity network companies are under spending on basic asset replacement work by £460 million every year.
 
For every £ they are given to replace old equipment, they only spend 75 pence — pocketing the difference to bump up their profits.

🚨NEW: Ofgem price cap raises by 6.4%, meaning customers will pay £111 more on average (per year) on energy bills.

Higher energy costs aren’t just due to rising gas prices. Companies are exploiting our dysfunctional energy system for profit.

Here’s how they do it. 🧵 In the 3 years since Russia invaded Ukraine, we have *still* not decoupled electricity from the price of gas, meaning we still pay far above the price needed.

But the price of gas isn’t the only problem. The problem is how we manage our electricity market.

🚨 What connects Thames Water, Panama Canal and the UK's power networks?

The Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.

🧵 See our thread to find out just how of Britain he owns. 💧 The largest publicly-listed infrastructure company in Hong Kong has just made a £7 bn bid for a majority stake in Thames Water.

CK Infrastructure (CKI) is owned by billionaire Li Ka-shing.

CKI also has a majority stake in Northumbrian Water.

NEW: Starmer has announced a new agreement to “expand the relationship between the NHS and the private healthcare sector”

He claimed that increasing state-funded private healthcare is an effective non-ideological solution — but relying on the private sector won't fix our NHS

🧵 Since the austerity era ushered in under the Conservatives, the NHS has seen budgets slashed, and our health service has been forced to do more with less.

This could be a crucial factor behind the decline and crisis in the health service.

🚨NEW REPORT

The military industry — which produces huge social & ecological damage — contains technological capacity that can be repurposed for green manufacturing.

We spoke to military industry workers that were open to a transition, building on the historic Lucas Plan.

common-wealth.org/publications/a…

Today's King's Speech saw a number of welcome first steps, including on GB Energy, the New Deal at Work, public ownership of rail, and bus reform.

We have called for these and more in recent years.

Here's why they are a start — and how to go further 🧵 Labour committed to establishing GB Energy, a publicly owned energy company “owning, managing & operating clean power projects"

Direct ownership is far superior to a private financing vehicle for Labour’s clean power mission & cutting bills.

This is welcome, but only a start.

We shouldn’t muddle through the Thames Water crisis.

Ending "sticking plaster" politics means grasping the root cause: the failure of water privatisation.

The solution: returning Thames Water to public hands

@ellieshearer & @ewan_mg in our new briefing:
common-wealth.org/publications/d… Running water services for profit has failed. Decades of underinvestment have left £19bn of Thames Water’s assets in critical or failed condition, increasing the risks of flooding and exposure to waterborne diseases.

Labour have committed to doubling the size of the UK’s co-operative and mutuals sector.

This is a welcome step toward a more democratic and co-operative economy.

Here are five more steps that could be taken to make that happen. 🧵 STEP 1: A Co-op Economy Act that establishes a new legal framework for co-ops, including a new duty to foster diverse corporate forms

STEP 2: Give co-ops access to patient forms of capital, including a mandate for the new National Wealth Fund to finance co-operative development

Labour have just announced that their upcoming manifesto will pledge to renationalise UK railways, bringing them back into public ownership after nearly thirty years of privatisation.

Here’s why that’s a good thing — and why such measures should be expanded across energy, water, and mail. (1/8) In 2022, @We_OwnIt found that privatised rail was costing the taxpayer £1 billion more every year than if the railways were in public hands.

In fact, 67% of the public wanted the railways back in public ownership. (2/8)

A 2023🧵

In “In Praise of Learning”, Bertolt Brecht argued that the radical, everyday act was to “Put your finger on each item, ask: how did it get here?”.

What forces, what relationships, what entanglements, sit behind the objects and infrastructures that make our world? Over the course of 2023 our work has sought to follow that invitation, putting our finger on the "items" that constitute our economy and society, asking: how are they owned, how are they governed, and how can they be reimagined to better serve people and planet?

NEW RESEARCH: @chrismwhayes and @carsjung from @IPPR analyse firm-level data for >1,300 companies, charting profit trajectories before and after Covid.

Corporate profits grew faster than inflation among publicly listed firms across a range of countries.

common-wealth.org/publications/i…
Profit margins – that is, profits as a percentage of revenues – are on average higher than they were pre-pandemic. Margins among FTSE firms were still flat after stripping out commodity extraction firms (like oil & gas) and finance firms.

NEW: As the world boiled, BP distributed $3.3 billion to shareholders, 17 times more than they invested in “low-carbon” in Q2 ($190m).

How can we trust Big Oil to deliver a fair energy transition when its priorities are so misaligned with what the public and planet need? Even as the fossil fuel industry drives “global boiling”, BP continues to be a cash machine for investors.

This quarter, it posted a profit of $2.6bn and handed out $3.3bn to shareholders, while the CEO’s pay has doubled to $12mn.

🚨 New: Shell's latest results underscore why Big Oil cannot be trusted to deliver a just energy transition 🚨

Analysis by @sophieFlinders_ reveals they've paid shareholders over 11x and invested in fossil fuels almost 6x what they have invested in low carbon this past quarter. Even as fossil fuels heat the planet, Shell continues to be a cash machine for its investors.

They paid out more to their shareholders than their adjusted earnings in Q2.

Their priority is obvious: maximising the wealth of their shareholders.

NEW: After the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a state-led green transition is no longer a “yes or no” question; it’s more urgently a “how” question.

@BrusselerMel on the necessity of democratic coordination of the transition.

common-wealth.co.uk/perspectives/t… Decarbonisationation at the required pace and scale fundamentally depends upon the extent to which democratic planning displaces market coordination — private control — of investment.

common-wealth.co.uk/perspectives/t…

The water industry has pledged to "invest" £10bn to address the sewage crisis — but the money will all be paid for by higher bills.

Privatisation is costing households, while dividends for shareholders have almost tripled in the last year.

ft.com/content/ca9efe… Since privatisation, the water companies have paid out £72 bn in dividends, despite falling investment,

ft.com/content/ca9efe…

🧵🧵🧵

Critics of the windfall tax on the energy giants’ super-profits argue cutting shareholder payouts hurts the public as our pensions own these firms.

But are pensions dependent on corporate excess? Who owns UK plc? And who owns pension wealth?

common-wealth.co.uk/perspectives/w… Many assume UK pension funds dominate ownership of corporate Britain – and so are the main beneficiaries of shareholder payouts. Cutting payouts directly and substantially hurts ordinary savers. Our new analysis suggests this isn’t the case.

common-wealth.co.uk/perspectives/w…

BP’s bumper results — £4bn of profits in the last quarter and £1.4bn of new share buybacks — confirm what we all know: the energy crisis is transferring income from households and business to the energy giants and their shareholders. Total payouts to shareholders remain higher than investment.

This underscores a critical truth: the priority of the energy giants is maximising returns to shareholders, not delivering a secure, affordable energy future as quickly as possible.

🌹🍞This May Day, we’re excited to launch the Centre for Democratising Work, a hub for exploring the nature of work and how we can secure its reimagination.

In our first interview @AmeliaHorgan asks @gabrielwinant about class in the twenty-first century.

common-wealth.co.uk/centre-for-dem… The Centre is the UK hub of the global Democratise Work movement, @GlobalForumDW. We are excited to connect activists, academics and movements nationally and internationally to explore shared strategic questions and new terrains of struggle.

democratizingwork.org

🚨 Today, we’re launching our Social Value Index, a new tool for modelling the social and economic benefits of community-led developments 🚨

We need alternative models of development & regeneration: which distribute the benefits within local communities.

common-wealth.co.uk/publications/s… Developed by @adammarqalmeida, the Social Value Index takes into account a broad range of metrics, from childcare provision to air pollution and the impact on social harms and violence, to evaluate the value to local communities.

common-wealth.co.uk/publications/s…