Market failure and the delusions of privatisation
Warrick Funnell, Robert Jupe and Jane Andrew
London: Pluto Press, 2009, p/b. £19.95
Very carefully the authors – a professor of accounting at the University of Kent (Funnell) and two of his colleagues – work their way through the experience of privatisation in the UK, Australia, the USA, China and New Zealand. Very carefully the authors show us what we knew already: privatisation failed in its stated aims of cheaper, better services; but succeeded triumphantly in its unstated aims of redistributing wealth upwards by transferring public assets to private ownership. There can’t be many people reading this magazine who need to be convinced of this; but if you know someone who remains a fan of privatisation, who really believes all the guff about competition producing efficiency, this would be the book to offer them. It always looked like fraud and theft and this is demonstrated by the authors.
This is a deeply depressing book. Not because there are horrible revelations in it, but because of what it says about our politicians’ inability to process data about their environment. For the evidence of the failure of privatisation was available by the late 1980s and here we are, twenty years later; and political parties, nominally of the left, are still engaged in privatising the public sector.