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If we accept politicians’ claims that “Britain is broken”, there’s something we need to add: Britain isn’t broken by accident.
For decades, successive governments have sold off the very things that made public life affordable, efficient and fair — council housing, public transport, energy, water, even public land.
These weren’t gifts. They were bad deals: knock-down prices for essential national infrastructure, handed over to private buyers with little regard for the long-term consequences.
And now, with investment and productivity at historic lows, we’re told it’s a mystery that our living standards have stagnated.
It’s not a mystery!
Economist Simon Wren-Lewis just published an article stating that UK productivity has declined further and more persistently than in other advanced economies since 2005.
One reason, he says, is a sharp fall in investment.
Productivity — the value created per hour of work — depends heavily on investment in things like transport, digital infrastructure, housing, research, and energy. When investment slows, so does wage growth, job quality, and economic resilience.
And investment in Britain – more properly, in the UK – has slowed badly.
Wren-Lewis notes that in the 1980s and 1990s, UK productivity kept pace with Germany, France and the US. But from the mid-2000s onward, we began to fall behind.
Austerity in the 2010s delayed economic recovery from the 2008 crash. Brexit in 2016 made investment riskier and less attractive. And through it all, one trend continued: the steady loss of public ownership and long-term planning.
Here’s where economist Gary Stevenson adds the missing piece: while public investment fell, private wealth skyrocketed.
This means that, as public assets were sold off, the rich bought them up — and profited handsomely.
Stevenson argues that the UK has become a country where the richest extract rent from everyone else. It has become the ‘zombie economy’ about which I and others warned in the 2010s.
The rich own the houses, the trains, the utilities, and the debt. And they get richer, even as the economy stagnates, because ownership itself generates wealth. The rest of us work to service our debts to them.
What this means is simple: the UK doesn’t just have a growth problem or a productivity problem — it has a structural ownership problem. And until we deal with that, investment will remain weak, and living standards will remain flat.
To invest properly in Britain’s future, we need more than just spending. We need to take control of what we invest in — and who owns the outcomes. That means:
- Rebuilding public ownership of essential infrastructure — transport, energy, water, broadband
- Ending the fire-sale model of privatisation, where assets are sold without regard for public benefit
- Creating new publicly-owned institutions capable of long-term investment in green energy, industry, housing, and care
- Taxing unearned wealth and land values to fund new investment fairly
Labour says it wants to “invest for growth.”
That’s a start…
But if it leaves the fundamentals untouched — if the railways remain in private hands, if energy remains dominated by profiteers, if housing policy continues to enrich landlords rather than build homes — then the pattern will repeat.
Public money will continue to be poured into private profits. Living standards will stay stuck. And the cycle of low investment will roll on.
The UK has been disinvested.
That is not because we couldn’t afford to invest, but because we were told that selling everything off was clever economics.
It wasn’t. It was national vandalism. And fixing it means not just investing again, but reclaiming control of the wealth of this country.
When the public owns the assets, the public shares the gains.
Until that happens, we’ll just keep paying top dollar, renting everything we used to own.
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All I’ve got is my keyboard, these words, and the truth.
The political elite and mainstream media have wealth, influence, and the power to silence voices like mine. I’ve got none of that—just a keyboard, a passion for the truth, and the courage to say what others won’t.
That’s why I need you. If you believe in what I’m saying, don’t just read—share. Tell your friends. Pass it on to your colleagues. Because without that, the truth doesn’t spread. And if you think it will go viral on its own, you don’t understand how the online world works.
Let’s break through the noise. Together.
They took our assets so OF COURSE living standards fell. What should we do now?
Share this post:
If we accept politicians’ claims that “Britain is broken”, there’s something we need to add: Britain isn’t broken by accident.
For decades, successive governments have sold off the very things that made public life affordable, efficient and fair — council housing, public transport, energy, water, even public land.
These weren’t gifts. They were bad deals: knock-down prices for essential national infrastructure, handed over to private buyers with little regard for the long-term consequences.
And now, with investment and productivity at historic lows, we’re told it’s a mystery that our living standards have stagnated.
It’s not a mystery!
Economist Simon Wren-Lewis just published an article stating that UK productivity has declined further and more persistently than in other advanced economies since 2005.
One reason, he says, is a sharp fall in investment.
Productivity — the value created per hour of work — depends heavily on investment in things like transport, digital infrastructure, housing, research, and energy. When investment slows, so does wage growth, job quality, and economic resilience.
And investment in Britain – more properly, in the UK – has slowed badly.
Wren-Lewis notes that in the 1980s and 1990s, UK productivity kept pace with Germany, France and the US. But from the mid-2000s onward, we began to fall behind.
Austerity in the 2010s delayed economic recovery from the 2008 crash. Brexit in 2016 made investment riskier and less attractive. And through it all, one trend continued: the steady loss of public ownership and long-term planning.
Here’s where economist Gary Stevenson adds the missing piece: while public investment fell, private wealth skyrocketed.
This means that, as public assets were sold off, the rich bought them up — and profited handsomely.
Stevenson argues that the UK has become a country where the richest extract rent from everyone else. It has become the ‘zombie economy’ about which I and others warned in the 2010s.
The rich own the houses, the trains, the utilities, and the debt. And they get richer, even as the economy stagnates, because ownership itself generates wealth. The rest of us work to service our debts to them.
What this means is simple: the UK doesn’t just have a growth problem or a productivity problem — it has a structural ownership problem. And until we deal with that, investment will remain weak, and living standards will remain flat.
To invest properly in Britain’s future, we need more than just spending. We need to take control of what we invest in — and who owns the outcomes. That means:
Labour says it wants to “invest for growth.”
That’s a start…
But if it leaves the fundamentals untouched — if the railways remain in private hands, if energy remains dominated by profiteers, if housing policy continues to enrich landlords rather than build homes — then the pattern will repeat.
Public money will continue to be poured into private profits. Living standards will stay stuck. And the cycle of low investment will roll on.
The UK has been disinvested.
That is not because we couldn’t afford to invest, but because we were told that selling everything off was clever economics.
It wasn’t. It was national vandalism. And fixing it means not just investing again, but reclaiming control of the wealth of this country.
When the public owns the assets, the public shares the gains.
Until that happens, we’ll just keep paying top dollar, renting everything we used to own.
Share this post:
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