Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else

By James Meek

“The essential public good that Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and now Cameron sell is not power stations, or trains, or hospitals. It’s the public itself. it’s us.”

In a little over a generation the bones and sinews of the British economy – rail, energy, water, postal services, municipal housing – have been sold to remote, unaccountable private owners, often from overseas. In a series of brilliant portraits the award-winning novelist and journalist James Meek shows how Britain’s common wealth became private, and the impact it has had on us all: from the growing shortage of housing to spiralling energy bills.

Meek explores the human stories behind the incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. He shows how, as our national assets are sold, ordinary citizens are handed over to private tax-gatherers, and the greatest burden of taxes shifts to the poorest. In the end, it is not only public enterprises that have become private property, but we ourselves.

Urgent, powerfully written and deeply moving, this is a passionate anatomy of the state of the nation: of what we have lost and what losing it cost us – the rent we must pay to exist on this private island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781682913

James Meek

JAMES MEEK is the author of four novels, including The People’s Act of Love, which won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the SAC Book of the Year Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent won the Prince Maurice Prize. Meek worked as a reporter in Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s, and later his reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay won a number of international awards. He now lives in London.

Reviews for Private Island

[stephengoldenberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A depressing read but a book which everyone who cares about public services like health and education should read. We've had to suffer 40 years of the neo-liberal mantra of private enterprise good, state provided public services bad that it's about time we woke up to the truth of what has been happening. Meek does this by not blinding us with complex facts and statistics but allowing ordinary people, both consumers and managers of the services, to tell their stories. The ludicrousness of the situation we are now in is best summed up by the fact that successive governments can't seem to see the absurdity of taking our railways out of British state ownership so that they can be run by the Chinese and French state-owned railway companies instead. But the real tragedy is the total mess that has been made of such an essential to life as housing. And the disaster of selling off council housing (half of which has ended up in the hands of rapacious private landlords) is now to be compounded by the government selling off housing association properties!