On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, my co-panellists and I discussed whether public services should be run by the state or by private companies.
Thames Water, which serves a quarter of the UK population, is billions of pounds in debt and on the brink of insolvency. The company has received heavy criticism and calls for it to be nationalised following a series of sewage discharges and leaks. The energy sector, railway companies and the Royal Mail have faced a similar outcry in recent months.
The privatisation versus nationalisation debate highlights competing visions of the good society. For some, the private sector provides individuals with essential freedom of choice. For others, a “market mentality” has crept into more and more aspects of social and communal life, resulting in the erosion of moral obligations towards each other.
Can the motivation for profit co-exist alongside a vision of the common good? What moral responsibilities should private companies have to society? And what are the moral limits of markets?
My co-panellists were Giles Fraser, Mona Siddiqi and Carmody Grey. Our witnesses were Cat Hobbs, founder and director of “We Own It”; Maxwell Marlow, director of research at the Adam Smith Institute; Grace Blakeley, economist and author of Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation (2019); and Philip Blond, political philosopher, Anglican theologian and director of the ResPublica think tank.
If you can access BBC sounds, you can listen to the programme here.
Recent posts
My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers argue that conservatives must reclaim the hijacked language that is driving the culture off the cliff. This is how the piece begins:
The hijack of language
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30 JUN
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