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Labour’s Spending Review revealed a party aiming to appear bold – while avoiding actual confrontation with the market forces that have devastated our essential services.

Despite pledges of billions for transport, housing, and energy, the structure of these announcements shows a continuing commitment to private sector dominance and a clear reluctance to reverse decades of neoliberal orthodoxy.

But what if we didn’t accept that premise?

A broken system, ignored

Water companies have polluted rivers and coasts while extracting billions in dividends.

Energy bills remain sky-high, even as wholesale prices fall.

Rail delays and cancellations have become the norm.

All this while the companies responsible rake in profit and pass on the cost of failure to the public.

Public ownership isn’t about ideology. It’s about fixing things that are visibly broken.

The argument isn’t difficult: we pay more and get less from privatised utilities.

Bringing them into public hands, run transparently and for service rather than profit, is common sense.

But Labour won’t say this.

What Wren-Lewis missed

Simon Wren-Lewis’s recent article made an important point: that a responsible government would increase public investment, even if it means more borrowing, because the economic returns are greater.

But even he doesn’t take the next step: if public money is funding public essentials, why should private firms be extracting profit from them?

Wren-Lewis supports spending but not structure.

My argument goes further: the structure of delivery matters as much as the spending itself.

A Keynesian case for control

Keynesian economics – which was how the UK was run until Margaret Thatcher turned up in the 1970s – supports state intervention in times of economic stagnation, but it also requires that spending be effective.

If you invest billions in housing, but let hedge funds capture the profits through inflated land prices and buy-to-let schemes, you’re not solving the problem. You’re subsidising the next crash.

Rebuilding the economy requires public direction.

Green energy? Fine.

But why hand profits to private nuclear contractors instead of building public renewables that lower household bills and create secure jobs?

A true Keynesian approach invests to grow capacity and reduce long-term costs.

Public ownership does exactly that.

Neoliberalism in new clothes

Labour’s plan dresses neoliberalism in high-visibility jackets – favouring free markets, privatisation, deregulation, and reduced government spending on public services.

Investment without ownership just repeats the mistakes of the last 40 years: nationalise the risk, privatise the reward.

From Sizewell C to the British Business Bank, the spending sounds ambitious until you ask: who benefits?

You cannot overcome neoliberalism by pouring more public money into the same privately owned structures.

You simply deepen the problem.

Framing the future

What I’m offering isn’t radical.

It’s repair.

We can say to voters: your bills will go down. Your rivers will be clean. Your trains will run.

That’s what matters.

Will investors lose? Possibly.

But most of them won’t notice the difference when the system they rely on — the roads, rails, power and water — starts working again.

That’s good for everyone.

It’s time to stop pretending we can fix broken systems by throwing money at them while leaving them in private hands.

Labour won’t say this. So we must.

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