The Year Britain Finally Buried Thatcher’s Privatization Legacy
The UK’s souring experience of privatized public services may presage a definitive breach with an epoch-defining policy.
Britain is finally acknowledging that the value of some public services outweighs the price they can fetch through privatization.
Photograph: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The walk from Abbey Wood underground station to Britain’s second-largest sewage works leads past Southmere Lake, an artificial body of water bordered by brutalist tower blocks that featured in Stanley Kubrick's dystopian movie A Clockwork Orange. This area of former marshland beside the Thames in southeast London is a fitting place to contemplate the turn in Britain's privatization journey: It’s a landscape that evokes a future gone wrong.
This may go down as the year that the UK finally severed its bond to Margaret Thatcher, the former leader who changed her country and set an economic template for much of the world with a program that emphasized the primacy of free markets and private capital. Thatcher’s 11-year reign ended in 1990, but all subsequent UK governments have been shaped and constrained by her epochal unwinding of state ownership — until now.