I am all for nationalisation and collective ownership – but Labour must win back power first

For those of us, like me, who believe that the market cannot solve all of our problems, the case for public ownership must be made urgently

Labour came out of the last general election with a dilemma. Our 2019 manifesto was filled with policies that were individually popular with voters but, taken together, delivered one of our most devastating defeats.

Voters told us that, yes, they thought returning the railways to public ownership was a good idea. Yes, they believed in reclaiming our shared ownership of vital utilities such as our water. Yes, they wanted their kids to be able to go to uni without saddling themselves with a lifetime of debt.

But did people trust a Labour government to deliver those things? No. Not enough, anyway.

For people to hear us, we cannot just shout the same things louder. We need to show that we have listened to the message sent to us two months ago. And we can't blame voters for looking at our 2019 manifesto and saying, “That’s nice, but how will you deliver that?”

Nye Bevan said that the “language of priorities is the religion of socialism” and he was right. Nowhere is this truer than with public ownership. As Labour leader, I would focus the party on three priorities when it comes to public ownership.

My top priority would be to halt and reverse the creeping privatisation of the NHS, and challenge the Tories on their record. The 2012 Health and Social Care Act introduced outsourcing on a large scale by encouraging NHS services to be contracted out to “any qualified provider”. Experts estimate that up to 22 per cent of the NHS budget goes to private companies. The result? Companies like Virgin Care are able to sue the NHS for not winning a contract to provide services. Protecting the NHS from future trade deals and reducing private-sector involvement in healthcare should be top of the agenda for a Labour government.

Our second priority should be to address areas of our infrastructure where privatisation makes no sense. Transport is a great example of this. Private-sector monopolies have run our bus services into the ground, with a devastating impact on towns like mine. Fares have risen and routes have been cut, isolating people and stifling local economies. The private-sector experiment on the railways has been a total failure, with even a Conservative government forced to nationalise lines.

The strong public opposition to private-sector franchises is based on an instinctive understanding among the public that they have failed. We need to make and win the same argument with our buses. Labour councils such as Nottingham have produced very successful long-term plans for their bus networks. All councils should have the power to take control of bus services so they can set the fares and the routes.

Our third priority should be to think beyond top-down renationalisations and think more radically about democratisation. Collective ownership is in our DNA as a party. But collective ownership does not have to mean national ownership. Some of the most brilliant innovators in the Labour Party today are in local government. Our council leaders have had to be imaginative because they are in power and because they are at the sharp end of this government’s disastrous austerity programme. And they show us how we can make collective ownership meaningful and practical in people’s lives.

Look at Preston, or Salford: places where new institutions, mutuals and co-operatives are being created so that local people and local workers can have a stake in their housing, their services and the infrastructure around them. As shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change, I worked with 60 Labour councils to defend the Paris agreement and, in doing so, cut the UK’s carbon footprint by 10 per cent by switching to clean energy. These are not mere staging posts on the path to full nationalisation; they are exciting models of shared ownership that are important in themselves.

Labour has had a problem when it looks like we are backing nationalisation first, and making the case for it later. Often we would present our solutions as radical changes, which risked obscuring the truth about public ownership – that they are a common-sense alternative to the chaos and chronic failure of private monopolies in services we depend on. We have to make the argument for public ownership in a careful and considered way. Announcing during the election campaign that Labour would nationalise BT Openreach came as a shock to candidates, the public and the workforce. If it was so important, the case should have been made so much earlier.

For those of us, like me, who believe that the market cannot solve all of our problems, the case for public ownership must be made urgently. Our public services and utilities should be run in the public interest and be accountable to those who use them – that means common ownership rather than privatisation. But to get a hearing with voters we must have the self-discipline to prioritise, to show that we are practical as well as principled.

Lisa Nandy is the MP for Wigan and a Labour leadership candidate