Reversing Thatcher’s failed legacy of privatisation can be a Labour vote-winner. If you see Keir, tell him | Julian Coman

In the summer of 1987, as life in Britain was being steadily reshaped by Margaret Thatcher, I landed a temporary job as an electrician’s mate in a steel-drum factory. I was a truly useless assistant, and justified my existence by singing songs to entertain my boss as he worked. As I recall, by the time I left Stuart had come round to quite liking Bob Dylan, but still had no time for the gothic gloominess of the early Cure.

While I handed him tools he didn’t need, and failed to locate the ones he did, we occasionally talked about politics. Stuart was a gentle man in his mid-20s, already married and hoping to buy a house. He was also, it turned out, a cautious believer in Thatcher’s promise of a “people’s capitalism” in which working people would get a piece of the action. Prior to my coming to “help” him, he was one of the millions who had responded to the previous year’s Tell Sid ad campaign and bought shares in newly privatised British Gas.

You can still see some of the ads on YouTube. In one, an upper-middle-class type sporting a bow-tie and tweed jacket enters a crowded village pub full of honest-to-goodness folk. Asking that “Sid” be alerted, he whispers details of the government’s share offer to a punter, adding, “It couldn’t be easier to apply!” As word of mouth spreads, even the local postman is seen rushing to get his forms filled out.

I don’t know whether Stuart held on to his shares. Most small investors like him quickly cashed in, as the “loadsamoney” era arrived in a booming post-big bang City. But for Tory ministers who originally conceived of the privatisation programme as a means of balancing the books and shrinking the state, the ideological dividend lasted a generation.

The success of the ad campaign helped frame a new social settlement in which a sense of class identity diminished, and the good life was understood more in terms of individual aspiration and consumption. Even the choice of name perhaps served a clever purpose, subliminally evoking the cheeky cockney chancers played by Sid James in the Carry On films beloved of blue-collar Britain. A year after the miners’ strike had been defeated, and in a way the Thatcher government had not really anticipated, commencing the sell-off of state assets helped bury the collectivist ethos that had defined the sensibility of the postwar working class.

The subsequent failures and scandals of privatisation have been chronicled at length. Far from inaugurating an age of popular capitalism, the sale of utilities delivered Britain into the hands of a rentier class that underinvested and overcharged, while awarding itself handsome returns. In 2026, the sewage scandal presided over by our water companies has come to symbolise an economic model prioritising private enrichment over the common good. Poll after poll confirms large and growing support – cross-class and cross-party – for a far-reaching renationalisation programme.

Nigel Farage was quickly on to this. Until very recently, Reform UK used to talk confidently about “a new ownership model” for public utilities, which amounted to part-nationalisation. But such thinking is now being abandoned in the name of a fiscally conservative, small-state approach more in keeping with the views of its recently appointed Treasury spokesperson, Robert Jenrick.

Which should give the Labour party, as it seeks renewal after the electoral humiliation looming on 7 May, an enormous opportunity. In the 40 years since British Gas was sold off, the party’s response to privatisation, and to Thatcherite political economy in general, has been intellectually supine to a soul-destroying degree. New Labour accepted the false premise that the profit motive and competition gave the private sector a special edge, even in industries where the existence of natural monopolies made nonsense of such a notion. Foreign counter-examples – state-owned energy in France, a state-run post office in Norway – were left unexamined. The irony of foreign state-owned businesses filling their boots – Arriva trains run by Deutsche Bahn and then sold to an American private equity firm in 2024, UK homes running on power delivered by EDF, courtesy of the French state – might not have been missed but it was certainly ignored.

Only in the chronically underanalysed and misunderstood election of 2017, did Labour risk acting with the courage of its inner convictions. The public ownership programme presented to the country then, by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, was part of a campaign that, by removing Theresa May’s majority, overturned every expectation. A commitment to renationalisation wasn’t the only reason that Labour did far better than anticipated, despite being immersed in an internal civil war. But it was surely one of them. The notion of restoring public control over the unsatisfactory everyday infrastructure of British life gave Labour clear political definition, and crucially it appealed to leave voters in Hull as much as remainers in Hackney.

What was true nine years ago is even truer today. Two hundred miles north of Westminster, the bringing of Greater Manchester’s buses back under public control – against fierce industry opposition – has been both popular and exemplary. For Andy Burnham, the revolution has been a formative experience, acting as a catalyst for a wider reimagining of relations between the national and local state, business and citizens.

“Manchesterism”, Burnham’s word for a civic-minded politics that undoes the destructive legacy of Thatcherism (“rolling back the 80s” in his words), is a work in progress. At its core is the insight that the “Tell Sid” settlement excessively empowered the market in areas that should be subject to collective provision and oversight, and enriched beyond all reason those in a position to take advantage. The endangered future of centre-left politics in Britain may depend on Burnham’s ability to gain permission to make this argument on the national stage.

I wonder what Stuart might be making of it all. As he did his summer maintenance work, and I stood to the side looking like a spare part, he would smirk when I sounded particularly ideological. Labour was put to the sword in a general election that summer, its third defeat in a row. Stuart bought his shares and voted Conservative, and for the next four decades the principles of the marketised society being mapped out then went essentially unchallenged. But a majority now support taking Britain’s energy networks back into public ownership. A terminally disillusioned public will surely reward the political party that calls time on a failed experiment. If not now, for Labour, when?

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Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor