It can be difficult, given all the sound and fury of the current stalemate in Scottish politics, to take a step or two back and observe the wider shape of politics across these islands; but nonetheless, it could hardly be clearer that we are watching the end of an ideological era at UK level, and an awkward and potentially dangerous transition to something new and different.

The signs of this shift range across political debate, and settle in two main areas. One is public spending, and its uses and abuses; it’s increasingly clear, for example, that many in the world of public health believe inadequate levels of public spending, after 2010, were largely responsible for the UK’s poor response to the Covid pandemic, including our exceptionally high death toll.

And the other, more conspicuous every week, is the serial failure of almost all the major privatisation initiatives of the Thatcher-Major era, from gas, electricity and water to buses, trains and – often ignored because of the very popular form of privatisation involved – the sell-off onto the private market of almost all of Britain’s affordable rented public housing.

That Britain’s housing market is now essentially broken is obvious to millions, as vast amounts of property are hoarded as assets, and costs become unaffordable both to mortgage payers and renters. The same, though, applies to almost all of the privatisations which we were assured, back in the 1980s and 90s, would produce greater efficiency, lower prices, and much higher levels of investment, as well as ushering in a new age of mass share ownership. Today, for example, England’s hugely unpopular privatised water companies are not owned by the mythical “Sid” of the gas privatisation advert, or by any of his working-class mates, but by non-UK corporations many of which are themselves partially state-owned.

Nor are all of these companies commercially sound, even in their own terms; it now looks as though Thames Water is about to go bust, and will require – in the final insult added to injury – a massive bailout from the long-suffering taxpayer. A similar picture has emerged in energy, transport and the post office, with many privatised utilities either mired in scandal, or requiring massive taxpayer support to continue functioning at all, despite soaring prices, profits and executive pay.

And the question that arises from this litany of failure is exactly what we should learn from it, 40 years on from the beginning of the privatisation process. There are, in mitigation, one or two examples of privatisations which have delivered at least some of their predicted advantages. British Telecom, for example, now BT, was privatised on the brink of an explosion in communications technology which brought a range of serious new competitors into the business, and is now rated by consumers as one of the five best internet providers in the UK; and the privatisation of an aviation industry once dominated by national carriers has led to an unprecedented era of low prices, although at a frightening environmental cost.

What seems clear, though, is that the case for complete privatisation is very weak, in areas such as water, energy and public transport systems where there is little real competition over a realistic time-scale, along with a need for absolute reliability, and for public accountability in terms of quality, and that privatisation in these areas has often amounted to little more than a licence to print money for shareholders and senior executives, at the expense of taxpayers and ordinary consumers. There should be constant debate, of course, about exactly where the dividing line between the public and private sectors best lies; but the UK’s recent history suggests that the extreme polarisation of the debate is deeply damaging, and that the prolonged triumph of doctrinaire pro-privatisation attitudes in UK policy circles – many analysts still routinely refer to privatisation as “reform”, as if it were always a progressive move – has proved something of a disaster.

What is most alarming about the current UK debate, though, is that the increasingly obvious collapse of key aspects of the Thatcherite project is not being accompanied by serious discussion of what should replace it. Even the UK’s Labour opposition, while strongly critical of the Tory policy failures of recent decades, often cannot quite bring itself to say that we now need to move on from this failed experiment in doctrinaire neoliberalism, and to start thinking in terms of a renewed 21st-century social democracy. And internationally, while organisations such as the International Monetary Fund are beginning to distance themselves from failed neoliberal solutions, few are declaring and naming the new policy approach that needs to take its place. As Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his 1930s prison cell, in other words, “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born”, perhaps partly because of fear of the many huge power-holders who still cling to that old orthodoxy.

The second half of Gramsci’s sentence, though – “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” – is the one of which we should take note. For if we do not move swiftly to reassert the values of social democracy which have delivered so well for the countries which have embraced them, and to reframe those principles for a century in which rapid action to tackle climate change has become an imperative, then we can already see the monsters these times may spawn – close to big corporate interests, but ruthless in using state power to silence dissent, brutalise minorities, destroy our natural environment, and feed the engines of war. Either we strive mightily and explicitly for new social democratic times, or we face an age dominated by the Trumps, Putins and Orbans of our world; and those who hesitate too long over that choice may live to rue their indecision, in more ways than we care to imagine.

Thames Water crisis is latest sign that Margaret Thatcher's mass privatisations have failed – Joyce McMillan

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