“Yes, but with caveats” was the most respected sentence in the room, and it neatly captured a vote in which six in ten backed nationalising all UK utilities. The result was a mandate for public ownership, but not a blank cheque for ministers or unions.
The winning side’s strongest case was structural: these are “essential public services which function as a natural monopoly”, said one voter, and should serve the public rather than shareholders. Another insisted they must be provided “as a service not as a source of profit”, while the most-respected Yes argument warned against both union politicisation and unnecessary government interference.
The No side did not oppose every part of the proposition equally. Its best-rated voice could “agree with water” but said other utilities were better than when run by government, while another offered the blunt objection that “Government can't run a proverbial p*ss up in a brewery.” That was the central mismatch: Yes voters treated monopoly itself as the case for public ownership; No voters treated poor management and weak regulation as the real problem.
The wider argument was less about socialism than control, ownership and the cost of failure. Some voters saw foreign shareholders extracting value from infrastructure with no consumer choice; others argued that electricity and gas “privatisation has worked” and that bills reflected government policy, not ownership. Water’s financial distress gave the Yes case its sharpest example, but the vote extended that diagnosis across the whole sector.
The chamber voted to take the utilities back — cautiously, conditionally, and with far more anxiety about who would run them than enthusiasm for the state in the abstract.
49 Opinions
Yes, but with caveats. They must be protected from being politicised by unions who might seek to affect one political party in favour of another, orchestrating strikes to damage a sitting government. They also need to be protected from unnecessary political interference.
Yes but subject to strict rules about cost to ensure that these basic utilities are provided to people as a service not as a source or profit for the government.
I could agree with water. Others are better now than when run by government. I know it doesn't seem so , majority are though. Railway is tethered by those that run tracks.
Yes there should be full renationalisation of all utilities, in the short term problematic but in the long-term help relieve everyone in the cost of living crisis with lower energy bills.
The privitisation of water has been an unmitigated disaster but I don't think the others have fared quite so badly, nor could the taxpayer afford all of them.
I'm old enough to remember the dire state these nationalised industries were in before they were privatised. You only have to look at the appalingvway that the NHS is run to see that public sector management is a bad thing. What should happen is that all utilities should be zero rated for VAT.
Yesz but none of the utilities are run by English ppl everything got sold !!! Nothing belongs to us anymore !
The utilities are in foreign hands some of which include both the French and German Governments. We are paying high costs to line the pockets of foreigners. The Government should take the Utilities back and make them not for profit and in British hands.
Privatising natural monopolies where customers have zero choice was a massive policy error to begin with. Public ownership ends corporate extraction, enforces democratic accountability, and ensures every penny paid is reinvested directly into national infrastructure and not into the pockets of shareholders
Government can't run a proverbial p*ss up in a brewery.