Great on ideas no detail. I worked for a large UK water company before and after privatisation. Before privatization there was a mad scramble to try to get the water companies into a state where somebody would buy them as a result of many decades of underinvestment. That was all in the wonderful public sector. In fact the water companies in the UK did not exist before 1973. When they were created they inherited a huge mess. The idea that local councils which are often corrupt as well as incompetent could run water and sewage facilities successfully is frankly laughable. The new water companies were constrained by the public sector borrowing requirements as they will be again. Almost from the day they were formed they were underfunded. It's shows a lack of any real understanding to cherry pick Paris as an example one of the largest cities in the world. Of course that's easy to run at a profit. Water companies in the UK are very tightly regulated. In fact Welsh Water is non profit because it went bankrupt as a private company!! Scottish water was never on the agenda for privatization as it runs at a huge loss (funded by the British taxpayer). Anyway the UK hasn't had a balance of payments surplus since 1985 so where will all the money come from to fund these renationalisations. We can print it worked out well in Venezuela.

People have been massively disenfranchised in their local area both by privatisation & by everything going online. Before Thatcher you could walk to your Town Hall & ‘bang your fist on the counter’ regarding local health, education, planning or myriad other local issues. Also you could go to the gas or electricity company showroom, the local police station or the bank in the high street. Not so easy now with distant head offices & not knowing very often who’s ‘in charge’ any more, especially for the doubly disenfranchised who don’t have a computer (and there’s a hell of a lot out there).

Privatisation doesn't work, except for the private companies whose only interest is profit and keeping shareholders happy. They don't care about the consumer or customer, only how much they can make, if this means cutbacks services and reducing staffing levels, so be it as far as they are concerned, they say they are only interested in improving services etc. but they just want to fill their pockets, often at the taxpayers expense, bleeding us dry!!

While nationalization is appropriate for the utilities, the railways, the Post Office, the landline phone system, etc. all of which have national grids or networks best maintained centrally, there are many other forms of public ownership such as the worker and consumer cooperatives in former Yugoslavia. Also individual publicly owned companies and mutuals. Huge State monopolies are not required for many of these things, but a People's Bank operated by the State could help to keep taxes to a minimum.

people are surprised when i mention that every Norwegian citizen = from the dustbinman to the King publishes his tax returns online