“Our air is not for sale”. It was these words that earned shadow transport secretary Andrew Smith rapt applause at the 1996 Labour Party conference as he inveighed against the privatisation of air traffic control.
But Britain’s air did turn out to be for sale. Only a year after entering office in 1997, Labour announced that half of National Air Traffic Services would be privatised (despite the opposition of 76 per cent of voters). The move exemplified an era in which the market was regarded as inherently superior to the state. Between 1980 and 1996, the UK accounted for 40 per cent of the total value of all assets privatised across the OECD. Such was Gordon Brown’s aversion to public ownership that he hesitated to nationalise Northern Rock in 2007 even as a bank run threatened economic turmoil.
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