Description
"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.
How the British government packaged and sold its people to the world-winner of the Orwell Prize for Books
About the Author
James Meek is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. He is the author of six novels that have published in the UK, US, France and Germany, including The People's Act of Love, that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Ondaatje Prize and Scottish Arts Council Award. We Are Now Beginning our Descent won the 2008 Le Prince Maurice Prize and The Heart Broke In was shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Prize. In 2004 he was named the Foreign Correspondent of the year by the British Press Awards and he contributes regularly to the Guardian, New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Website: www.jamesmeek.net
Reviews
James Meek's superb book exposes the perversities, hypocrisies and failures of privatisation. Meek is a writer of fiction as well as a journalist, and it shows: he crafts beautiful and vivid passages that turn what could be a dry subject into a highly readable study. -- Owen Jones * New Statesman *
Do yourself a favour: read Private Island and find out what has really happened in Britain over the past 20 years. -- John Gray * Guardian *
[A] devastating account of the privatisation dogma of the past 25 years ... As demolition jobs go, this can hardly be bettered. -- John Kampfner * Observer *
If you have a taste for historical irony & absurdity, you'll love this book. -- Francis Wheen * Mail on Sunday *
An energetic and colourfully told polemic against privatisation. * Financial Times *
James Meek's brilliant book, bracing in its detail and sweeping in its scope, makes clear just how central privatisation is to the story of contemporary Britain: some of it will make you sad, some of it will make you furious, but you are guaranteed to be left feeling that you understand this country much better. * John Lanchester, author of Capital and Whoops! *
One of the most powerful critiques of the mess that is Britain's economy. -- Aditya Chakrabortty * Guardian *
Entertaining, vastly intelligent. * New Yorker *
This is the definitive account of how so much has gone and continue to go wrong with Britain's institutions. Don't read it all at once - it's too depressing. -- Joan Bakewell * New Statesman (Books of the Year) *
One of the country's finest writers. * GQ *
A Virtuoso [.] mixture of hard-won knowledge and literary flair. * Times Literary Supplement *
You don't have to be.excessively sentimental about the public service ethos to find the story Meek tells here genuinely shocking. -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Prospect *
Awards
Winner of Orwell Prize 2015.
Book Information
ISBN 9781784782061
Author James Meek
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 291g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 21mm
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.
How the British government packaged and sold its people to the world-winner of the Orwell Prize for Books
About the Author
James Meek is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. He is the author of six novels that have published in the UK, US, France and Germany, including The People's Act of Love, that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Ondaatje Prize and Scottish Arts Council Award. We Are Now Beginning our Descent won the 2008 Le Prince Maurice Prize and The Heart Broke In was shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Prize. In 2004 he was named the Foreign Correspondent of the year by the British Press Awards and he contributes regularly to the Guardian, New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Website: www.jamesmeek.net
Reviews
James Meek's superb book exposes the perversities, hypocrisies and failures of privatisation. Meek is a writer of fiction as well as a journalist, and it shows: he crafts beautiful and vivid passages that turn what could be a dry subject into a highly readable study. -- Owen Jones * New Statesman *
Do yourself a favour: read Private Island and find out what has really happened in Britain over the past 20 years. -- John Gray * Guardian *
[A] devastating account of the privatisation dogma of the past 25 years ... As demolition jobs go, this can hardly be bettered. -- John Kampfner * Observer *
If you have a taste for historical irony & absurdity, you'll love this book. -- Francis Wheen * Mail on Sunday *
An energetic and colourfully told polemic against privatisation. * Financial Times *
James Meek's brilliant book, bracing in its detail and sweeping in its scope, makes clear just how central privatisation is to the story of contemporary Britain: some of it will make you sad, some of it will make you furious, but you are guaranteed to be left feeling that you understand this country much better. * John Lanchester, author of Capital and Whoops! *
One of the most powerful critiques of the mess that is Britain's economy. -- Aditya Chakrabortty * Guardian *
Entertaining, vastly intelligent. * New Yorker *
This is the definitive account of how so much has gone and continue to go wrong with Britain's institutions. Don't read it all at once - it's too depressing. -- Joan Bakewell * New Statesman (Books of the Year) *
One of the country's finest writers. * GQ *
A Virtuoso [.] mixture of hard-won knowledge and literary flair. * Times Literary Supplement *
You don't have to be.excessively sentimental about the public service ethos to find the story Meek tells here genuinely shocking. -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Prospect *
Awards
Winner of Orwell Prize 2015.
Book Information
ISBN 9781784782061
Author James Meek
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 291g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 21mm
