Private island - James Meek

Winner of the 2015 Orwell Prize for Books

"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.