Labour’s promise to nationalise broadband threatens to reverse Mrs Thatcher’s legacy
Maureen Lipman as ‘Beattie’.
Privatisation was Margaret Thatcher’s signature policy — and it really began with BT. There was and is no more distinctively Thatcherite concept than the promise to reverse decades of nationalisation. Not all Tories felt comfortable with “selling off the family silver”, as the aged Harold Macmillan maliciously dubbed it. But for the many millions of families who had never owned any silver, this was the first opportunity they had to acquire an investment.
For many on the Left, privatisation seemed to be the death-knell of socialism. The first sale of BT happened in the Orwellian year of 1984. Many socialists defined themselves as those who refused to own ordinary shares. Those who did own them were capitalists. Now that millions of people owned shares, they really had become ordinary. The public had rejected public ownership in favour of private profit. The workers didn’t just want a share of the action — they wanted shares.
And here was Mrs Thatcher, a Conservative Prime Minister, selling off just over half the government’s stake in British Telecom (rebranded as BT), making shares cheap and easy to buy. This was the first big privatisation.
The BT flotation was a colossal success. Three million shares were sold to employees and the public; as they were three-times oversubscribed, those who chose to make an instant profit could do so. But most people hung onto their stake in a business that would later benefit from new markets in mobile phones and the internet. The newly privatised BT popularised itself with a clever advertising campaign fronted by “Beattie Bellman”, a fictional Jewish grandmother whose catchphrase was “You got an Ology”. Beattie was hilariously played by Maureen Lipman — a lifelong Labour voter, by the way, until Ed Miliband paved the way for Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-Semites to take over the party.
The state’s remaining 49.8 per cent of the company was privatised in the 1990s and its mobile subsidiary O2 was later sold off separately. By then many other industries had been privatised, among them gas, electricity, water, railways and the Royal Mail. Not all of these privatisations were as popular as that of BT, but so far none has been reversed.
All this is about to change if Labour wins on December 13. Unlike Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have never reconciled themselves to privatisation. They see their opponents, not as Conservatives, but as Thatcherites. They intend to reverse the Tories’ flotations one by one, beginning with that of BT.
As a sweetener, McDonnell is promising free full-fibre broadband for every household, as part of the nationalisation of BT’s Openreach, which owns most of the network. Labour is committed to investing more than £20 billion in this project, but it is unclear whether any of this would be spent on compensating BT shareholders, which include most of the pension funds and other institutions. The cost of such compensation could amount to anything between £12 billion and £25 billion, depending on the market value of Openreach. The market capitalisation of BT group as a whole is around £19 billion, with revenues in 2018 of well over £23 billion, but its total value would be much higher.
The offer of free and instant internet access, delivered by a state-owned British broadband, could be tempting for voters under 50 who have little or no memory of the pre-privatisation era, when it could take months to have a telephone installed. The fact that McDonnell and his comrades have not properly costed their promise does, however, render them vulnerable to the charge of profligacy. Labour is also open to the accusation that it is expropriating millions of ordinary people. McDonnell is promising to compensate BT shareholders with vaguely-defined “bonds”, but without Openreach, its most valuable asset, the company’s shares would be worth far less.
Boris Johnson faces a dilemma. If he takes on Labour’s threat to reverse four decades of the flagship Conservative policy of privatisation, he risks diverting attention from Brexit, on which the Tory policy is clear and Labour’s is confusing. He does not wish to highlight a Labour policy that might prove popular with younger voters. But if he tries to ignore the Labour promise of free and universal broadband — a direct challenge to one of his own signature policies during the Tory leadership campaign— then the Prime Minister risks being caught on the back foot.
Margaret Thatcher herself would have relished the opportunity to bang the drum for wider share ownership and popular capitalism. She never ran away from a fight. Boris Johnson is at last coming out of his tent, with a media blitz. He needs to explain to a new generation why nationalisation lost any appeal it might have had when the Berlin Wall fell. He cannot afford to show any sign of evading the issue. Boris must make the case for private ownership or risk the charge of cowardice. Mrs Thatcher had a good old Anglo-Saxon word for that: “He’s frit!”
