The Morality of Privatisation
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2023
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thames Water, which serves a quarter of the UK population, is billions of pounds in debt and on the brink of insolvency. The company has received heavy criticism, and calls for it to be nationalised, following a series of sewage discharges and leaks. The energy sector, railway companies, and the Royal Mail have faced a similar outcry in recent months.
When it comes to the provision of services which are essential for our national life, the calculation is often utilitarian: which form of ownership, public or private, leads to the greater social good? Many believe that the private water, rail and energy companies are simply failing to serve the public. Meanwhile, although polling suggests most people want to keep the NHS under public ownership, many of the health outcomes of patients compare less favourably to other European countries.
The privatisation versus nationalisation debate is about more than outcomes: it highlights competing visions of the good society. For some, the private sector gives us more freedom of choice as moral agents. For others, a ‘market mentality’ has crept into more and more aspects of our social and communal life, including education, and the result has been the erosion of our own moral obligations towards each other.
Can the motivation for profit co-exist alongside a vision of the common good? What moral responsibilities should private companies have to society? And what are the moral limits of markets?
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening. They're both vital public services, polar opposites in some ways, but between them their problems are filling the newspapers and the airwaves. |
| 0:13.1 | Thames Water, the giant privatised utility that provides water for a quarter of the population, is not only under sustained fire for dumping sewage, |
| 0:21.8 | but is reportedly on the brink of financial collapse. The National Health Service, 75 years old |
| 0:27.7 | today, of course, is still largely nationalised, but is facing difficulties some regard as |
| 0:32.7 | existential. Despite soaking up nearly half government day-to-day spending, a former health secretary said this week the UK was in danger of becoming a health service with a country attached. |
| 0:43.4 | Its outcomes are poor when measured against those of other countries. |
| 0:47.6 | The latest King's Fund survey shows that rated against a score of comparable countries on things like cancer survival rates, heart |
| 0:55.4 | attacks, strokes, ambulance response times, the UK is the worst or second worst on many of them. |
| 1:02.1 | The argument over who should own public services is not just political and utilitarian, which |
| 1:07.8 | works best, but essentially a moral question about competing visions of a good |
| 1:12.7 | society. One side sees competition and profit driving efficiency and choice. The other regards |
| 1:18.8 | some services, railways, energy, education as well, perhaps, as too vital and perhaps too |
| 1:24.2 | essentially monopolistic to be left to business and the market. |
| 1:28.7 | Can profit coexist with the common good? |
| 1:31.5 | What obligations to private companies have to society? |
| 1:35.0 | Can a market be moral? |
| 1:37.0 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:38.2 | The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, |
| 1:40.8 | Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:45.4 | Carmody Gray, Assistant Professor of Catholic Theology at Durham University, |
| 1:49.2 | and the Anglican priest and opinionator, Giles Fraser. |
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