Big G and Little G

Paul Laity

• The British Electricity Experiment edited by John Surrey
  Earthscan, 329 pp, £40.00, July 1996, ISBN 1 85383 370 3

The new government of 1979 had no grand plans for privatisation. It was intended that a number of small, state-owned enterprises would be sold off, but even the Tory radicals did not contemplate taking the utilities – natural monopolies providing essential services – out of the public sector. An increasingly peremptory Prime Minister, however, came to see privatisation as a ‘central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism’ and ‘reclaiming territory for freedom’. By the mid-Eighties, the Government had reached the conclusion that even the utilities were better off in private hands. Electricity privatisation was introduced after the flotation of telephones, gas and water because it was, according to Thatcher, ‘the most technically and politically difficult privatisation’. The Government’s audacity in embarking on the electricity sell-off should not be underemphasised: this kind of project had not been tried in any other major industrialised country. Now the ‘British electricity experiment’ is being copied all over the developed world.