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It was brought to my attention last week – it’s brought to our attention every week – that state ownership of essential services is a bad thing because we tried it once and it didn’t work.

Hmmm.

Lots of things overseen by the state didn’t work once, but do now. Computers in schools. Brain surgery. Transplants. New roads. Electronic payment of pensions. The Channel Tunnel. The East Coast rail line. The banks.

Lots of things that aren’t overseen by the state did work once, but don’t now. Thames Water. Talking to phone line providers. Affordable railway tickets, bookable through an easy-to-understand national timetable. Affordable energy provision.

Lots of things that didn’t work at once but were allowed to mature became very useful. People, for example.

It’s interesting that those who are in favour of the theft of Royal Mail (and the £400million a year-plus it gives to us, the taxpayer) refer us back to their favourite period in history: the 1970s. The 70s provide, they believe, a lesson in how and why state ownership does not work.

We are never asked to look at other periods in which state ownership has had a different economic effect. Now, for example, with our banks, some of our railways, the Royal Mail. Or the 1960s, that golden era that created the economic successes off which so many of the right live today. Or the 1930s, when the state bailed the world out of recession. Or the late 40s, when state ownership improved everybody’s lives at a stroke. These and more are airbrushed out of the right’s “thinking” in favour of cliché and dogma.

It’s so apt that the right justifies its theft of the country’s assets now just as it did in the past: selectively. It likes us to believe that things were awful in the 1970s only because of the left, and this tiny chink of world history is the only one relevant to the thinking. But everything was awful in the 1970s: clothes, cars (not just the state-built ones, either!), the Bay City Rollers, food, drink (Watney’s Red Barrel, anybody?), TV (Terry and June), radio (Jimmy Saville!) – everything. Nobody’s suggesting we go back to any of it.

State ownership never got a chance to mature in this country, thanks to Thatcher. Economists who provided long-term models showing how continued state ownership of utilities would be of enormous long-term benefit to this country’s exchequer were dismissed so assets could be mercilessly stripped. Utilities were sold, double-quick time, and now, for example, directors of Essex and Suffolk water have enjoyed a 35% pay rise over the last four years. Coincidentally, their customers have seen prices rise by 37% in the same period.

The justification for accepting the awfulness of privatised monopolies, in which the blatant theft of money from the taxpayer is overlooked, in which appalling customer service is overlooked, is simply this – it was more awful than this before.

Actually, I don’t think it was more awful than this before. And even if service was awful, at least somebody in this country was being paid to provide it and putting that money back into our economy. Now the service is awful and contributes nothing to our communities. If, before, employees of state industries could be rude to customers well, at least they actually spoke to customers unlike the “non-customer-facing” behemoths of today.

It’s not as if we don’t know what will happen to the Royal Mail. Currently, it’s on the up: it employs 150,000 people, gives them a wage and a purpose for living, and pays money to the taxpayer in terms of profits that are set to grow and grow with the continuing rise in online shopping.

After its theft (some people refer to this crime as ‘privatisation)? Well, I for one can see the future, and if I’m wrong about this I will become George Osborne’s sex slave. Yup. That’s how convinced I am.

Once gifted to the friends of the Conservative Party, the future of the Royal Mail is thus:

• It will be owned by a foreign company.
• It will make big profits for shareholders.
• It will pay minimal tax.
• The workforce will have been cut by at least a third.
• The remaining staff will have terms and conditions vastly inferior to those of today, which, let us not forget, feed families and the economy while enabling the employer to turn half a billion pounds a year in profit.
• The cost of the service to you and I will have risen well above the rate of inflation, but we will be unhappy with the standard of the service.
• And the taxpayer will still be paying for the pensions of the company employees – we wouldn’t want poor innocent shareholders having to do that, would we?

We know this will happen because it’s exactly what’s happened with every other privatised public service. Our nation is poorer, our people have less jobs, bill-payers are treated with contempt. And we, Gods help us, let it happen. Shame on us. Come on, at least do something. E-mail your MP and ask him or her whether a legal challenge to this theft can be mounted. Demand of Labour some opposition, in the form of a pledge to renationalise and not only not compensate shareholders, but also fine them for their act of theft. It’s no good 70% of the population being against this theft if we don’t do a little something about it!

Finally on this subject, we must thank that well-known revolutionary Marxist, Brother Stents, for providing this absolute gem. Thanks, comrade. It says it all, really.