James O'Brien's Brilliantly Simple Point On Why Nationalisation Will Work
26 September 2017, 12:26
James O'Brien has one simple reason why nationalisation of our services will work: foreign governments already run many of them.
Labour have proposed bringing a number of services back into public ownership, including the railways, water, energy and Royal Mail.
Critics have claimed that it wouldn't work for the government to run utility companies.
But James had one pithy line that shreds that notion: They already are being run by governments - just foreign ones.
Speaking on his LBC show, he said: "There's a philosophical school out there that says nationalised utilities do not work.
"But the pithy, brilliant line we have from the first six or seven years of this decade is that actually governments can own and run utilities in this country. It's just that they usually foreign governments.
"The British philosophical tradition does accommodate the idea of governments running utilities, or at least government owning companies that run utilities, it's just not the British government."
