Privatisation

[Bilan]

Comrades,
I'm looking for information which relates specifically to privatisation, namely, of electricity.
I'm trying to find stuff on:

- Why privatising electricity is bad for working people, how it will effect them, etc
- Examples of privatisation being confronted and beaten through direct action and strikes (e.g. the Water Wars)

If anyone could help ASAP that would be great.

Cheers.

[KrazyRabidSheep]

I cannot think of any examples of electrical privatization.

I can think of the opposite, however. When Nasser socialized Egypt, industry flourished, and with the building of the Aswan Dam made electricity available to villages throughout Egypt and north Africa for the first time ever.

If Egypt had to still rely on private enterprise, the Aswan Dam would never have been built, which produces 2.1 gigawatts, or 15% of Egypt's power (over 50% when the dam was first built.)

So, sans privatization, Egypt has electricity available at a reasonable price throughout the nation.

[Bilan]

Thanks.

[Sugar Hill Kevis]

You might find this interesting. After a spate of privatisation, New Zealand is beginning to renationalise many public utilities.

It's an article from the comment page in yesterday's Guardian. Ignore the liberal/reformist rhetoric

New Zealand has long had a record of being ahead of the political game. It was the first country in the world to accept women's right to vote, in 1893. In the 1930s, it emerged as a pioneer of the modern welfare state. Fifty years later, in the 1980s, it was the first state to declare itself nuclear-free. Less creditably, during the same decade, New Zealand became host to the first social democratic government to embrace a free-market programme of wholesale privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation.

Named after New Zealand Labour's then finance minister, "Rogernomics" was all the rage on the global new right for a time - and laid the ground for neoliberal social democratic governments like Tony Blair's - until it finally imploded amidst a litany of social and economic failures: stagnation, unemployment, bankruptcies, crime and rampant inequality. Two decades on, another New Zealand government, this time a more progressive Labour coalition headed by Helen Clark, is again at the forefront of political change - leading the revival of public ownership.

Article continued here

[Bilan]

Awesome, you're from the UK though.
you dont happen to have any information about whats happened since privatisation there, though, do you?

[Sugar Hill Kevis]

This article goes in to succinctly more detail on the privatisation of water in the UK than I can bare to compress in this comment...
http://libcom.org/library/uk-water-privatisation

You could look at the massive redundancies seen since the emergence of privatisation in to the political climate in 1984, with peaking unemployment during the Thatcher years... Sorry, I don't have any more specific stats at hand.

A couple of figures I just pulled up:
1979: nationalised industries 9% UK GDP and 7.3% employment
2003: nationalised industries 2% UK GDP and 1.5% employment

[Bilan]

Cheers.