No matter where you live in Britain, you’re not far from a canal. Many millions enjoy canals, for boating holidays, or waterside pubs. In the cities, canal sides have been resurrected for pubs, clubs, restaurants, and trendy flats, for example Canal Street at the heart of Manchester’s gay village.
With the coming of the railways, canals’ use for transport faded away. Some councils started to fill them in, and to eradicate the signs of our industrial past. The canal network was nationalised by Labour in 1948, along with the railways. An official at the time remarked when they realised the canals would be joining the railways in state ownership ‘oh, we get those as well, do we?’
When Labour’s transport minister Barbara Castle toured the waterways in 1967, she was the first minister to do so for 30 years. Thanks to a Labour government, and the vision in Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act, the canals were re-invented as places for leisure and environmental conservation.
This week, the Labour government took another important step in the safeguarding of our waterways, although you may have missed it in all the excitement of the budget. Tucked away amidst the announcements on Wednesday was a pledge to turn British Waterways into a mutually owned and run organisation. There will be safeguards to protect the land and buildings in perpetuity, and avoid a future government privatising the assets.
There is now a consultation about the form the mutualisation should take. One suggestion is a charitable trust. For my money, this is an opportunity to be much more radical. We don’t want a ‘National Trust of the waterways’, with the same old great and good in charge (especially if that means Simon Jenkins). I was briefed by British Waterways when I was a special adviser, and what struck me was their commitment to engagement and involvement with the people who live on, work on and enjoy the canals. Their methods of involving people in decision-making and how they handled complaints seemed to me to be a model for other public services. Heaven knows we’ve still got a long way to go with institutions such as the NHS or BBC.
That commitment to engagement should be translated into a commitment for genuine common ownership, through a full-blown co-operative model. I am sure our friends at Mutuo and the Co-op Party can come up with some robust business models for British Waterways. We could then form an orderly queue to buy our shares, and take a stake in this important part of the economy and British cultural life.
The question this raises is: if we can mutualise the waterways, why not other enterprises? What about the rail companies? Or the post offices? Or derelict land belonging to the MoD or NHS? Could it be that this blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment of Wednesday’s budget was a glimpse into a future where a Labour government creates real common ownership of state-owned assets?
After all, the Thatcher privatisation programme started small.
As Larry Elliot has written:
‘…there was little evidence that Mrs Thatcher quickly saw the possibilities of privatisation. The idea was not a feature of the 1979 Conservative manifesto, and the sell-offs between 1979 and 1983 were small-scale and tentative. The Thatcher government decided to offload companies such as Amersham International, which it saw no reason for the state to own, but in 1983 the structure of British industry was much the same as it had been in 1979.’
If the mutualisation of British Waterways is the start of a wider and deeper programme of mutualisation, it will give us a meaty programme for the fourth term, and a genuine shift in wealth and power in the British economy. It must start with the Labour manifesto in a few weeks’ time, which must be more than a series of trade union demands and pat-on-the-back lists of achievements.
Your next stroll down a tow-path, or pint in a trendy waterside bar, might be a visit to the epicentre of a revolution in ownership, if Labour has the guts and vision.
It is good to see the long term perspective being considered even in times of short-term preoccupation with reducing the deficit.
The waterways has i think been touted as having its assets sold in recent years with their land bank having various large scale figures attached to it.
It is my understanding that if they were denied this land bank then it they would lose the ability to generate millions of pounds from development work – millions that are put straight back into the waterway infrastructure. If this land had been taken away by HMT we can safely assume that the income lost to the waterwayas would not be replaced by Government grant.
This is commendable, long-term, policy-making that the Government should be proud of.
For all the commitments we have seen from the two main parties about mutual moments and public sector co-ops this is the first time someone has acted on it.
Good stuff.
Great stuff. Go for it !!! Owned by the people for the people !