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Academies and Free Schools. Still a good idea?

Can you say a bit more about what stake means for you here? Do I now have a stake in grant maintained schools? If so, I’d like to cash it in please.
An indirect stake. The state owns and runs the utility on our behalf. It's like the local park - something held in common for the benefit of the community.

If you'd like to cash it in, just vote for a privatisation programme. But I'd warn you, this privatisation stuff has happened before, and the promised benefits are hard to identify if they come at all. If privatisation actually empowered the demos, we'd privatise the army.
 
The way Redwood tells it in the programme I linked above, when he arrived in Conservative Policy in 1983, he proposed a much wider set of privatisations than they had in mind. He says that Thatcher was sold on the idea of a wider ownership culture. She liked the idea of the little man having a stake. Of course, the irony is that nationalisation meant that - indirectly - everyone already had a stake; so any privatisation by definition would concentrate wealth and dispossess the little man who couldn't afford to subscribe for shares. A share-owning democracy, where the demos is restricted to the 1.5 million individuals (2.7% of the population) who bought shares.

At the time I was struggling like many to keep up with a mortgage etc and, although I was ideologically opposed to flogging off all OUR assets on the cheap, hypocritically would have bought shares in gas, BT etc as they were so clearly a slam dunk. Except I couldn't afford to. As you say a tiny percentage was able to profit from what belonged to all.
 
At the time I was struggling like many to keep up with a mortgage etc and, although I was ideologically opposed to flogging off all OUR assets on the cheap, hypocritically would have bought shares in gas, BT etc as they were so clearly a slam dunk. Except I couldn't afford to. As you say a tiny percentage was able to profit from what belonged to all.
Our own privatisations are seen as democratic and enabling, but when the same thing happened in Russia in the 1990’s it was a ‘rape’ of national assets.

Same thing, different sales pitch.
 
Our own privatisations are seen as democratic and enabling, but when the same thing happened in Russia in the 1990’s it was a ‘rape’ of national assets.

Same thing, different sales pitch.

Maybe, maybe not. In the 1990s I was a specialist in marketing strategy for financial services companies. Out of the blue I was contacted by Voluntary Services Overseas - that’s an NGO with a good rep I think, a reputation for doing good works - to see if I would be interested in spending six months in a former soviet country to advise them about setting up a privatised insurance sector. I briefly pursued the idea, I met with VSO in their offices in Putney, and that gave me a glimpse of what was happening. Their work was very focussed on these counties, they were vigorously headhunting volunteers from many sectors - finance, agriculture, energy, accounting, even English language teaching (because, they said, English is the language of business.)

I didn’t do it, by the way.
 


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