This article of mine appears in The Morning Star.
Do please try and sign the Bring Back British Rail Petition, mentioned below!


Will the BBC survive a new Conservative government? Despite David Cameron's claim that he was a "big fan" of Auntie on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday, the oldest broadcasting company in the world looks set for the toughest years of its long existence if, as expected, Cameron's manic privatisers get elected this spring.
Last year shadow arts minister Ed Vaizey, a member of Cameron's inner circle, suggested the selling off of Radio 1.
And although the Tories denied that it was official party policy, a Daily Telegraph report quoted an unnamed Tory MP who said: "Radio 1 and Radio 2 are ripe for a sell-off, perhaps even BBC1."
The sad thing is that the BBC has very few allies in new Labour either. In December the government added BBC Worldwide to the list of assets it wants to sell off, despite the BBC's opposition to such a step.
The calls for profitable parts of the BBC to be hived off is reminiscent of the way that British Rail was gradually dismantled in the 1980s.
In 1982 the profitable British Transport Hotels was sold off. British Rail's ferry operator Sealink, despite earning a profit before interest and tax of £12.8 million for the year ending December 31 1983, was flogged off to a Bermuda-based US-owned company in 1984.
And in the late 1980s British Rail Engineering was broken up and sold too. And we all know what happened after that.
Of course the BBC has many faults. There's the obscene salaries it pays its top "stars" and high-level executives. There's its biased reporting of international events - Auntie has provided massive coverage of anti-government protests in Iran, but much less on demonstrations against the illegal coup d'etat in Honduras.
There's its craven pro-Israeli stance, highlighted by its refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal for the people of Gaza last year. And its continuing enthusiasm - even after the debacle of Iraq - for inviting discredited warmongering neocons on to its current affairs programmes.
But all these things can be put right by making the BBC more democratically accountable.
Privatisation is most certainly not the answer.

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Apparently it was Duchess of Westminster Loelia Ponsonby who said: "Anybody seen on a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life."
Well, if bus fares continue to rocket in Britain, soon it will only be the rich who will be able to travel on them.
Alarmed at the poor deal that passengers are receiving from the bus companies, the Office of Fair Trading has decided to refer the bus sector, which receives around £2.5 billion a year from the public purse in subsidies, to the Competition Commission.
The OFT believes that greater competition between bus companies will lead to a better deal for passengers and taxpayers. But is that really true?
Do passengers really want to see several bus companies operating on the same route? Or do they simply want to have an affordable, reliable service?
Nearly 25 years on from the Thatcher government's destruction of the state-owned National Bus Company, it's time to acknowledge that bus privatisation - like the privatisation of the railways, water and the energy sector - has been a disaster for the general public.
The answer is not more competition, as the OFT seems to think, but to bring back the National Bus Company as part of an integrated, publicly owned, public transport system.

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On the subject of the destruction of Britain's railways, I'm pleased to announce that the newly formed pressure group Bring Back British Rail has organised an online petition to No 10 Downing Street calling for the return of a publicly owned railway.
The group, set up by rail commuter Ellie Harrison, demands:
An end to private interest in public transport.
A fully integrated, publicly owned rail network, in which the passengers are always the most important stakeholders.
Consistently low-priced fares and fast, frequent and efficient services which have the capacity to continually improve and expand in order to encourage more people to choose rail travel as a real, green alternative to their cars.
The petition, which at time of writing already has over 1,000 signatures, can be signed at petitions.number10.gov.uk/bringbackbr

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The neoliberal noughties were not a great decade for public ownership - but towards the end of the decade there were definite signs that the tide has turned.
In 2008 New Zealand renationalised its railway network. In Venezuela Hugo Chavez carried out a radical programme of nationalisation. In Argentina many assets sold off in the 1990s have been bought back into public ownership.
All over the world, public opposition to privatisation has grown. There can be few people today who don't realise that privatisation benefits only big business and the very rich, but unfortunately the hold that capital has over political parties in countries such as Britain means that public opinion is not reflected in the positions taken by our political representatives.

Let's hope that by the end of this decade, increased public anger with privatisation will finally force a change of approach, and that all the assets flogged off by governments around the world over the past 30 years or so will be back where they belong - in public ownership.

Neil Clark is co-founder of the Campaign for Public Ownership.

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